Compositing has always been the make-or-break point of filmmaking. Pulling together images from different sources requires exceptional skill and great judgement. Artists are constantly challenged to walk the fine line between illusion and distraction.
However, the rise of AI is quickly reshaping many longstanding creative processes — and it’s also making compositing more important than ever.
AI holds tremendous artistic and operational promise for expanding creative choices and accelerating workflows in visual effects. It broadens accessibility to key storytelling tools, but also introduces pipeline fragmentation, diminishes creative control and surfaces questions around data provenance. Studios can mitigate some of these challenges by building AI-empowered workflows around compositing.
Today, AI is great for concepting and brainstorming, but it won’t output fully-editable or production-ready assets. Even for non-generative tasks, like shot retiming, AI often introduces artifacts or imperfections that must be resolved to get the content to final frame. Leaning on compositing as the backbone of AI-powered workflows, studios and artists can harness the many and still-emerging benefits of AI while maintaining creative control. This is even after countless iterations that will inevitably be necessary.
The magic will continue to happen visually in the last mile of the workflow, in tools like Nuke that preserve the precise and collaborative nature of compositing, and enable artists to polish AI-powered deliverables.
The VFX craft has been balancing artistry and technology for decades. Like with any new advancement, artists and studios need time to learn to determine what aspects can be handled by AI and those that must remain firmly in their hands. As they navigate this new normal and feel the pressure to deliver more with fewer resources, compositing will remain key to modern filmmaking and AI’s continued influence on content
creation workflows.
Mathieu Mazerolle is the director of product for new technology at Foundry (www.foundry.com).