LONDON—Electric Sheep has launched a new AI-powered platform that is designed to provide creators with the hands-on ability to iterate, edit and produce pro-level content all in one place.

Pulling from over a decade of experience in Hollywood’s production pipeline, the Electric Sheep platform is designed to simplify the current video creation process by blending siloed AI solutions and filmed media into one cohesive tool for creators to be able to quickly and easily produce high-end final content, without having to worry about budgetary constraints.

“Anyone with any filmmaking experience will tell you that iterating, editing and producing pro-level video content is challenging, but with available technology, it really shouldn’t be,” said Gary Palmer, co-founder and CEO of Electric Sheep. “GenAI is radically changing production, but the fundamentals of filmmaking, and creativity, are the same. Electric Sheep is the first platform in the space to give storytellers of all kinds everything they need to make their final product the caliber of Hollywood productions. It’s a pinch me moment and we can’t wait to see what the public creates with our tool set.”

The platform allows storytellers start with anything - a media pool, a script, a storyboard or just an idea - and then use a built-in web-based editor to access to video genAI tools. These include Runway, ChatGPT, Kling, Luma, Veo, and more.

From there, Electric Sheep becomes a playground for creators to generate scenes from scratch, create new worlds behind actors, move camera angles, or extend scenes, much like one would approach game design, the company explained.

With all the media created, Electric Sheep’s auto generated metadata - including shot content, type, and style - allows users to reduce repetitive tasks by assembling a fully-editable timeline via prompt, giving users complete control to make any further edits. Fed by simple text to timeline prompts like, “Build me a 30 second recap of my recent trip to Bali,” “I like this, but I want to use a different background here,” or “Change the color of the lady’s hair throughout,” Electric Sheep empowers storytellers to produce a final render in 80% less time than current solutions. As the only platform to offer fine grain control tools for VFX and post production that go down to the pixel level, Electric Sheep has become a standout in the space.

Electric Sheep was founded in 2023 by Gary Palmer, Richie Murray and Jake Laver.

For more information on Electric Sheep, its launch video that showcases how it works, and how to access its new platform, visit: https://electricsheep.tv/.

ProMax Systems sees demand for NDI support growing among its customers as the IP replacement for SDI and has responded with a new product to control recording of NDI streams to shared storage and even perform frame-accurate cuts, without tying up a workstation or unnecessarily burdening a facility’s network.

As a supplier of advanced shared storage solutions for those creating film and video content, ProMax has tracked the rise of interest in NDI among the creative community for the past few years.

Some customers of ProMax, which offers an integrated, turnkey shared storage solution with asset management, backup and archiving software, have begun asking, in Cooper’s words, “for proper media management within an NDI environment.”

In response, the company recently released a beta version of its new NDI Previewer software and expects to offer a market-ready version within three months, says ProMax COO Nathaniel Cooper. To put the new product into perspective, Cooper compares NDI Previewer to NewTek’s Isocorder, an application for ISO capture of IP video sources via NDI.

“With [NewTek’s] Isocorder Pro, you can through a workstation record an incoming feed to shared storage,” he says.m“That’s not a bad way to do it, but it eats up a workstation and that workstation’s resources,” Cooper explains.

There’s also a downside from a network perspective. “It creates about double the traffic. What is happening is NDI traffic is passing through the network to the workstation, which captures the data and passing it back through the network to shared storage,” says Cooper.

With NDI Previewer, it’s possible to preview NDI streams, trigger records to ProMax shared storage and even use the Chop feature to do frame-accurate cuts in a file to give editors immediate access to content without tying up the processor cycles of an expensive workstation or creating extra network traffic.

“None of that traffic is actually going through the workstation itself,” explains Cooper. “It’s a clever thing we can do now that NDI exists.” It’s even possible to run NDI Previewer on a laptop connected to a network via Wi-Fi or from home on a laptop connected via a VPN, adds Coopers.

NDI Previewer is a gateway to the other features offered by ProMax’ shared storage solution, such as automatic capture of feeds, automatic backup, automatic file replication and automatic addition of metadata tags to power future asset management and searches.

“There’s a whole media management ecosystem we’ve created,” says Cooper. “Once you start piping files into that, it’s now utilizing all of that media management capability.”

The company chief operating officer adds that ProMax has had “a very good experience” working with NewTek’s “well-organized team” and credits the strong documentation provided in NewTek’s NDI software development kit (SDK) with making NDI Previewer development relatively fast and easy.

(Editor’s note: This is the first in a continuing series of @NDICentral blogs. We welcome your comments and active discussion.)