Runway
ITP Alum Cristobal Valenzuela has been profiled in The Verge for his Thesis, Runway.
Say you’re an animator on a budget who wants to turn a video of a human actor into a 3D model. Instead of hiring expensive motion capture equipment, you could use Runway to apply a neural network called “PosetNet” to your footage, creating wireframe models of your actor that can then be exported for animation.
Or say you need to remove a coffee cup that was accidentally left in a shot on your high-budget fantasy TV drama. You could edit it out the traditional way, painting over the cup by hand, or you could run your footage through a machine learning segmentation model, which would automatically highlight different objects in each frame to make your job easier.
Examples like these are just the tip of the iceberg for Runway, which co-founder Cristóbal Valenzuela describes as radically egalitarian tool. “Machine learning is a very exclusive technology,” Valenzuela tells The Verge. “But I want to make things more inclusive; to get people from different backgrounds sitting around the table and using these models.”
Read more here.