This Midjourney Update is WILD + Pika's New AI Video Feature

it's been a really interesting week in the world of AI film making mid Journey finally released the feature that we've all been waiting for paa and 11 Labs came out with a sound effects tool but which one is better and the CTO of open AI gave us an update on when Sora is going to be hitting the market this is your AI film news of the week I want to kick things off with the big lead and that is of course the new character consistency feature inside of mid Journey character consistency see was really tricky up to this point in time but with this new feature you can easily create the same character with the same clothes again and again this is obviously huge for storytelling and working on film and advertising projects I want to show you how easy it is to create consistent characters inside of mid Journey so I'll show you how to use it on the desktop version then we'll hop over to the Discord version now I will say that this feature works better with images that were created inside of mid Journey so if you have to upload an image you will not get results that are as good as if you use a character that was created directly in mid Journey so let's go ahead and start things out here I'll go to search props and we'll just say a man so something really generic and uh let's find a man that we want to use here and we will say how about this guy wearing this ridiculous outfit so this would typically be very challenging to prompt for again and again but with the new feature it actually is pretty darn easy so what we're going to do is hit the image button here so use image and now we will use the image in our prompt so there's some really small icons here they're hard to make out but basically right now it's being used as an image reference but if you go all the way to the left there's this person icon we'll click it and basically now it is being used as a character reference so we can say a cinematic of a man in New York City and go ahead and click enter and just like that we have some shots of this man and it looks photorealistic he's in New York City and he's wearing that crazy outfit so this would have been basically impossible up to this point in time we have a shot of him from behind from the side and oh my God I have no idea what's happening here I think he has been in a horrible accident cuz his head is looking the wrong way so there's some really interesting things that you can do especially when you begin to use this tool in conjunction with some of the other features that are available inside of mid Journey so I want to show you how you can get consistent characters with different clothing options as well it's really interesting so if you go to search prompts we'll just say wide shot woman and we'll just find a wide shot of a woman where we can see all of her clothing and just everything that she's wearing maybe this woman right here you see she has this brown jacket and the blue undershirt so if we use the image and we go over here to the character reference button we can just say a woman stands in we'll say downtown Los Angeles and go ahead and click enter you can see that yes of course we have this woman in downtown Los Angeles and she's basically wearing the same thing in each shot now what if you actually wanted this woman to be wearing something different maybe you're doing some exploration and wanting to do basically a virtual photo shoot you can actually do that very easily using mid Journey all you have to do is click this use button so now we have our inputed reference image again right here and what we will do is type in a code called-- CW that stands for character weight and character weight is on a sliding scale of 0 to 100 with zero being the character can basically change their clothing their hairstyle and there can be much more variability in what the character is wearing versus a character weight of 100 which is the default the character will generally be wearing the exact same clothes again and again so I'm going to change this to a character weight of zero and we'll say a woman in a sci-fi film there we go and let's see what we get okay let's look at our results here we have the woman and in this one she's wearing like futuristic headphones and a yellow jacket in the next one she's wearing this kind of worn out coat here has an earring the next one she's wearing I think a leather jacket and and this has a completely different coat as well so you can use the character weight to change the costume of your character to do a little bit more exploration and when you find the costume that you want your character to wear again and again you can change the character weight to 100 and be able to prompt it to get the same character in your scenes between your shots you also have the ability to blend consistent characters with consistent Styles which is really important whenever you are trying to have a consistent cinematic look so here's how you do it I'm just going to go to our prompt here we'll just say a woman and we'll just find someone that we want to use here let's say that we want to use this woman here we'll go ahead and click the image button and set her to character reference so we also want to figure out a style so to find a style we'll just go to our search bar here type in a cinematic still and let's find kind of a color grade or Style that we want to use for our film I kind of like this kind of hazy sepia tone over here so I'm going to go ahead and click on this image and we will go to style so now we have a consistent character because we hit the icon here and we have a consistent style so now we can prompt in a cinematic still of a woman in New York City and the cool thing is your codes actually work in here as well so the style weight by default is 100 if you wanted to change that you could just do d-w and then up it all the way to a th000 if you wanted to inherit maximum style from this reference photo I like the default I think that's totally fine and you also can do d-r and we can say R5 to repeat this prompt five times so all of those codes still work on the website which is absolutely amazing so go ahead and click enter so here we go we can take a look at our photos here and you can see that they all have generally the same color grade the style is very similar the character is consistent and it looks really good obviously you can use tools like a cool or Insight base swap to really help with stabilizing the faces even further but for a quick character base this new character consistency tool inside of mid journey is absolutely clutch and I should note that the Alpha version of mid journey is now open to everyone who has generated over a thousand images in the platform if you can't access the alpha just yet don't worry you still have all of the same functionalities you just have to use Discord and some of the codes inside of Discord in order to unlock all of this functionality so I'm not going to leave you hanging don't worry I'm going to show you how to get consistent characters inside of Discord so I'm inside of Discord I have the Discord bot invited to a private server and I basically have this photo of this like hipster guy and I'm going to drop him into our chat channel here and basically all you have to do is right click and we will go to copy link so now that we have the image link to this character we're just going to do forward slash imag so we'll say a cinematic still of a man in a western film and now we need to add in our character reference code to do that you just do-- CF put a space and then paste your link and for character weight we can do the exact same thing D- CW space and then we'll say 100 to have his uh outfit come through and actually that'd be really impressive because western films do not typically feature people wearing this type of clothing so uh I'll be really curious to see how this turns out okay let's take a look at our result here so we have this guy and yeah all of those photos look pretty darn consistent and I love that the color grading has that just very typical 1960s color grade and film stock style over it it looks really awesome the team at P laabs also came out with the ability to add sound effects automatic to your footage inside of their tool let me show you how to use it there's a few different ways that you can use this feature I'll show you all of them basically just go to p. art and you can go down to the creation window down here and just paste in your prompt we'll say a dog barks at the park and go ahead and click that sound effects button and then click generate Okay let's listen to our result okay okay yeah I mean it sounds like a dog barking there's something a little off about it but not too bad you also have the ability to add sound effects to videos that you generate using an image as well which is really helpful so all you have to do is go to the image or video button and select your image I have this picture here of this Rog and we'll go ahead and upload him and make sure that your sound effects button is selected and click generate Okay so let's listen to our result that kind of sounds like a cursed frog so I don't think it did a very good job on that one now I should also note that you do have the ability to create sound effects on previous videos that you have generated all you have to do is go to one of those previous videos like here's the example that we used last week with the house on fire you can just click edit and when you click edit make sure you hit the sound effects button and you can type in the sound effects that you want to hear so in this instance we'll say a home on fire big fire there we go and click generate cool it generated three Clips in about 30 seconds let's go ahead and listen to them this is number one oh man that's a big explosion that one actually sounds really good I think that one did a great job and this is number three so in this instance I think paika actually did a really good job with the sound effects we can basically pick one now and click continue and we can basically scrub through and pick the exact spot where we want the sound effects to be I'll just attach it to the beginning and click attach to video and there you go not to be outdone the team at 11 Labs actually came out with their own tool for typing in a prompt and getting sound effects now it's only in limited release right now but we have access to the beta and I want to showcase it with you today so I'm inside of 11 Labs basically you just go to the sound effects menu in the top left and you just type in the sound effects that you want to hear so for 11 Labs I want to test it with that Frog video from earlier so we're going to say a frog in the park and we will generate sound effects and after about 10 seconds It produced five different Generations let's listen to a few of them here this is number one sounds like a frog sounds like a frog that's great so as you can see the sound effects inside of 11 labs in our opinion sound a little bit better at this point but I want you to tell me which sound effects you like better and that brings us to our game of the week for our game this week I am going to play you three sound effects of a monster roaring I prompted the sound effects in 11 labs pabs and I also went to Art list which is a stock music and sound effects company and downloaded a monster roaring sound effect I want you to tell me which one came from which tool okay are you ready this is number one this is number two and this is number three okay if you think you know the answer let us know in the comments of this video we will randomly select one of the winners to receive a free AI film making sweatshirt from Curious Refuge there was also a research paper this last week that came out called style gaussian there are some pretty cool examples over on the research page basically the way it works it can take an uploaded reference image and then project that style into a gaussian Splat the reason why that's cool is pretty soon just like using Runway gen 1 you'll be able to project a style into your augmented reality so imagine being in an apple Vision Pro and as you look around the entire world is just converted into an anime style or in the style of Pixar that's what this early technology is pushing for and I think it's going to have huge implications for the future of interactive entertainment this last week we also dropped a new podcast episode with Renard Jenkins who's the president of simpy Renard shared some really great insight into how AI operates at a base level and how we can work together to create better representation in AI generated imagery we also dropped a short film called another by Dave Clark the short film actually Blends live-action footage with AI generated visuals and sometimes it's kind of hard to tell what's Ai and what's live action so we're actually calling this new medium live gen we think that it really is a prototype to what the future of Cinema is going to be like Dave did an awesome job on the project and he collaborated with some really talented artists like Rob Neer horor to create the visual effects for the piece I highly recommend checking it out the CEO of Runway also really enjoyed it so uh congrats Dave that's some really great exposure we also came across this interview with the CTO of open AI talking about Sora and we have an update on the timeline it actually sounds like Sora will be coming out later this year and he actually hinted that it could be within the next few months he also said that they are looking to incorporate audio into Sora so may be very similar to the way that we have sound effects inside of P labs and Sora will not be able to reproduce public figures which is probably for the best especially considering we are in an election year and while we're talking about open AI there was a page that was leaked only for a few minutes but a few people found it online and it basically was the chat GPT 4.5 turbo release page and basically now we have hints that it will probably be released in June of 202 before we definitely cannot wait to use it and while we're talking about open AI just really quickly we should note that Sam ultman is back on the board and they have reshuffled their board after all of that crazy drama from back in November we actually came across this really interesting demo over on X where a robot had been integrated with open Ai and it actually has the ability to look around the world and interpret its surroundings so in the demo the robot is looking around and it can say that it's looking at a table with an apple on the table and this robot is somewhat humanlike so it's a really interesting use of the technology and of course we're very curious to see how this evolves in the coming months and to flip the script just a little bit we are going to go over to Elon Musk who actually announc that grock will be open source starting this week it's really interesting to see how X is positioning its AI model in relation to open Ai and how that may play out with the lawsuits that are underway and that brings us to our AI films of the week I am very excited to show you this week's film there's some of the best films that we've had in this show up to this point the first one is this film called The Mermaid by Zahir Khan and it has some of the most incredible shots that we've seen up to this point the VFX is absolutely breathtaking they clearly went in and used the motion brush tool inside of runway for a few shots and it looks great and I think this is a great example of working around some of the limitations that are inside of these tools they really have a very solid understanding of narrative storytelling and how to convey information while working around some of the challenges that can pop up whenever you work with AI tools now they said they used a mixture of Runway Leonardo sunno chat GPT After Effects Premiere and art list which is very interesting because we actually teach most of those tools inside of our program so it's cool to see that some of the best AI filmmakers are using some of these processes that we've been able to develop with our community the next film that I want to shout out is uncanny Harriet by uncanny Harry it's basically a music video that uses a sunno song and he used a combination of runway for the visuals Leonardo and the lips were synced using p Labs he also used Linds go to add in a style transfer and the result is one of the most convincing and interesting music videos that we've seen using AI up to this point and our final film of the week is called Escape by Marco it really features some great curation and it's basically an AI mood film that just is exploring an idea and it has these characters that are in the woods and there's like this pink smoke I think it's a really good music video concept and I think they did a great job picking and choosing the right shots for their film okay I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of AI film news of course you can get AI film news delivered directly to your inbox every single Monday by subscribing over at curious refuge.com we cover more news in that newsletter than what we talk about on this show so if you want the latest and greatest news be sure to subscribe and of course you can always subscribe to us here on YouTube give us a like if you enjoyed this video thank you so much for watching we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Curious Refuge

Views: 47,939

Keywords: midjourney, midjourney tutorial, midjourney ai, midjourney tips, midjourney news, midjourney v6, midjourney alpha, curious refuge, curious refuge trailer, ai filmmaking, caleb ward, sora, sora ai, openai sora, open ai sora, pika, pika labs, ai video generator, ai, pika labs sfx, elevenlabs ai, eleven labs ai, how to use elevenlabs for free, elevenlabs, open ai, open ai sora video, openai, character consistency, ai consistent characters, consistent characters, grok, chatgpt

Id: ON9VU1H2tiw

Length: 19min 16sec (1156 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024