Latest news with #Marey
Techday NZ
2 days ago
- Techday NZ
Adobe Firefly adds AI sound & video tools to boost creativity
Adobe Firefly has introduced a suite of new tools and partner models to streamline AI-driven video production and editing, emphasising flexibility, precision, and creative control for content creators. New sound effects generation The new Generate Sound Effects (beta) feature allows users to create bespoke sound effects either by entering a text prompt or using their voice. This tool is designed to enable creators to easily add custom audio elements that fit the emotional and atmospheric requirements of their videos. According to the company, Firefly listens to the timing and energy of the user's voice input to match the action in the corresponding video, providing more cinematic alignment between audio and visuals. "Sound is a powerful storytelling tool that adds emotion and depth to your videos. Generate Sound Effects (beta) makes it easy to create custom sounds, like a lion's roar or ambient nature sounds, that enhance your visuals. And like our other Firefly generative AI models, Generate Sound Effects (beta) is commercially safe, so you can create with confidence. Just type a simple text prompt to generate the sound effect you need. Want even more control? Use your voice to guide the timing and intensity of the sound. Firefly listens to the energy and rhythm of your voice to place sound effects precisely where they belong - matching the action in your video with cinematic timing," the company said. Expanded partner ecosystem Firefly has broadened its partner ecosystem to include additional generative AI models. Users now have access to Moonvalley's Marey, Google's Veo 3 (with audio), and Runway's Gen-4 Video, allowing a greater range of creative options in video style and production without requiring users to move between different applications or workflows. Additional models from Topaz Labs and Luma AI are scheduled to become available soon in Firefly Boards and Generate Video. The company stated, "Creatives enjoy experimenting with different styles, so we're continuously expanding the models we offer inside the Firefly app. Recently, we added Runway's Gen-4 Video and Google Veo3 with Audio to Firefly Boards and Veo3 with Audio in Generate Video. And there are more partner models coming soon to the Firefly app: Topaz Labs' Image and Video Upscalers and Moonvalley's Marey will be launching soon in Firefly Boards. Luma AI's Ray 2 and Pika 2.2, which are already available in Boards, will soon be added to Generate Video." Enhanced video controls Firefly has released advanced video controls that give users the ability to direct specific aspects of composition, pacing and style on a frame-by-frame basis. The app now supports flexible aspect ratio selection - vertical, horizontal, or square - streamlining the creation process for multiple formats such as mobile, widescreen, or social content. Among the new tools is Composition Reference for Video, which enables creators to upload a reference video and a description, from which Firefly generates new content that maintains the original's visual structure. This is particularly helpful for repurposing content or maintaining consistency across scenes. The Style Presets tool allows users to apply visual styles such as claymation, anime, or line art with a single click, expediting the setting of tone for pitches, briefs, or final productions. Keyframe Cropping provides an intuitive solution for managing framing transitions. Users set the initial and final frames and the intended crop, and Firefly handles the video generation to fit the format, aiming to make the entire process efficient without exiting the creative workflow. Composition Reference, Style Presets, and Keyframe Cropping are built to give you more control, more speed, and more creative freedom. And they're just the beginning. Even more enhancements are on the way to help you push your storytelling further. Text to avatar and prompt enhancement Firefly has also launched Text to Avatar (beta), which enables creators to generate avatar-led videos from scripts with a few clicks. The tool offers a library of avatars, customisable backgrounds, and a selection of accents to match the desired tone or audience. The company said, "With Text to avatar (beta), you can turn your scripts into engaging, avatar-led videos in just a few clicks. Choose from a diverse library of avatars, customise your background with a colour, image, or video, and select the accent that best fits your video. Firefly handles the rest." The tool is being used for video lessons, transforming written content for social media, and creating internal training materials with a virtual presenter. Recognising the challenges some users face in crafting prompts, the new Enhance Prompt feature in Generate Video takes user input and augments it for greater clarity and direction, reducing the time spent refining prompt language. Commercial safety and creative rights Adobe maintains that all generative AI models within Firefly are trained only on assets for which it holds the appropriate permissions. The company emphasises that user-generated content within Firefly will not be used for further model training, aiming to respect and protect creator rights. A user guide and best practice tutorials are available to help users get started quickly and to assist with optimising their creative processes within the Firefly platform.
Forbes
3 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Adobe Announces AI Partnership For Commercially Safe AI-Generated Video With Moonvalley
Adobe has joined forces with Moonvalley to offer more choice of AI models from within Adobe Firefly. ... More This morning, creative and AI software giant Adobe has revealed exclusively to me that it's announcing a new strategic partnership with Moonvalley, an AI research company working on generative videography. Both companies say they are committed to responsible generative AI innovation enabling more people to create commercially safe AI-generated video content. Moonvalley's research on AI-powered video production has a clear focus on commercial safety as well as creative control. Last week, the company launched Marey, its first fully licensed, high-definition AI video model designed for professional production. Marey has been built using fully licensed content and is coming soon to Firefly Boards, Adobe's AI-powered mood boarding and concepting surface for creative professionals. Marey will soon be accessible from within Adobe Firefly, Adobe's all-in-one app for AI-assisted content ideation, creation and production. Moonvalley will also be integrating Adobe's commercially safe Firefly Text-to-Image directly into the Moonvalley app as well as Voyager, the company's upcoming control platform. This partnership means Moonvalley to deliver commercially safe image generation, alongside a commercially safe text-to-video pipeline within the Marey AI model. Moonvalley says it will also be releasing a new Adobe Premiere Pro marketplace panel so it can seamlessly integrate the Marey model into filmmaking workflows. Firefly can create AI content that is commercially safe, protecting users from the threat of legal ... More action for copyright infringement. Trained On Commercially Safe Content This new partnership has been set up to reinforce a shared belief by both companies that powerful generative AI can be built without taking advantage of creators' work. Both companies chose to train their models with commercially safe content giving professional creators the legal confidence they need to produce enterprise-grade projects. 'We're excited to collaborate with companies like Moonvalley who share our commitment to responsible innovation and putting creators' rights at the center of generative AI development,' says Hannah Elsakr, Vice President, New GenAI Business Ventures at Adobe. 'Through this collaboration, Adobe Firefly is enabling even more people to create commercially safe video content through our collaboration with Moonvalley. Since launching the Firefly family of creative generative AI models in 2023, Adobe has led the way in building AI that's commercially safe by design — including the industry's first commercially safe video model with Firefly Video Model — so that everyone from independent creators to global brands can confidently integrate AI into their workflows without legal risk.' Adobe Firefly users will soon be able to access Moonvalley's Marey AI model for creating video ... More content using Firefly Boards. Compatibility With Adobe's Ecosystem Moonvalley's CEO and co-founder, Naeem Talukdar, adds, 'The response to Moonvalley's Marey model proved that studios and agencies need video AI they can deploy commercially. Now we're embedding that capability directly into Adobe's creative ecosystem while bringing their licensed image generation into our platform." "When you combine our licensed video generation with Adobe's commercially safe image models, you get the industry's first fully commercially safe image and video ecosystem. It's about removing the friction between powerful AI and real production workflows. Together, we're not just integrating products—we're proving that responsible AI development creates better outcomes for professional creators.' Over the past six months, Adobe has stepped up its program of integrating alternative AI models into its Firefly ecosystem giving creators more choice of AI models to work with. However, Adobe insists that all the third-party AI models it partners with must be trained with licensed material so that anyone producing creative output using Firefly can be certain they are protected from copyright infringement.
Business Insider
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Moonvalley raises $84 million from General Catalyst and others to boost AI tools for Hollywood and other creatives
Moonvalley, one of the prominent AI firms working in Hollywood, just raised $84 million in new funding to build on its AI video tools for filmmakers and other creative professionals, Business Insider learned exclusively. The round was led by an existing investor General Catalyst and, in a vote of confidence from Hollywood stalwarts, includes strategic investments from talent giant CAA and Comcast Ventures, the VC arm of Comcast. Cloud infrastructure provider CoreWeave also is participating, as are existing investors Khosla Ventures and YCombinator. The new round brings Moonvalley's total funding to $154 million. Moonvalley is among a handful of companies that are trying to make inroads into Hollywood by touting an ethical AI model. This comes as some other AI companies are being accused of stealing copyrighted work. Disney and Comcast's Universal are suing Midjourney, accusing it of copyright infringement. Moonvalley's pitch is that its AI model, Marey, is trained on licensed content as well as content it's made itself. The company was founded by veterans of Google's DeepMind and owns AI film studio Asteria Film Co., which was co-founded by filmmaker and actor Natasha Lyonne and filmmaker Bryn Mooser. Naeem Talukdar, Moonvalley's CEO and cofounder, said the new funding would help Moonvalley build on its AI video tool, Marey. Marey was just released to the public after being tested with filmmakers and studios and is sold on a subscription and licensing basis, starting at $14.99 a month. Talukdar said Marey has licensed footage from sources like independent filmmakers and YouTubers over the years, but believes it has only one-fifth of the amount that other AI video generators like OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo 3 have. While good at creating people, it also has gaps in certain areas, like animation and certain types of sports footage. "It doesn't really know how basketball works," he said. How Moonvalley works with studios Sensitivities run high in Hollywood about the potential for AI to take creative ideas and jobs. Few have gone public with their work with AI. The exceptions are Lionsgate, which did a deal with Runway to train an AI model on its library; and AMC Networks, which announced plans to use Runway's tools to generate promotional material for its shows. There continues to be skepticism about how AI models are trained. Like a lot of AI companies focused on Hollywood, Moonvalley says it works across the big movie studios but won't name any of them. It hasn't shared details about the sources of its licensed content. Talukdar said it believes in being transparent and has a plan to share that information at some point. "We've worked with probably thousands of independent filmmakers, small studios," he said. "So there's just a lot of stuff we have to underline, but we have it in our plans, now that we've actually finished Marey and published it, to start working on figuring out how to do that and hopefully build out a kind of sort of a structure that other model companies can follow as well." Talukdar said Moonvalley is working directly with studios or via independent filmmakers who are making projects for them. In some cases, Asteria acts as a creative consultant, helping the studio use the technology. In others, the studios are using Marey themselves, on everything from special effects to the production itself, usually with things like B-roll or background footage. In one case, a studio is using Marey to fine-tune a long-running TV show. "We have a few trailblazers that are looking at using it for actual key scenes in production," he said. He also said the biggest studios have approached Moonvalley about creating proprietary models, using Moonvalley's licensed video to supplement their own libraries. Moonvalley's view on AI's opportunity Talukdar acknowledged some creators' fear around AI, but said he thinks that fear will subside once people see that the AI won't replace creative ideas and filmmaking at scale. "This idea that everybody's just going to create these movies for themselves — we think that's absolutely nonsense," he said. "AI will never have taste." Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently waded into the AI conversation, saying it represents an opportunity to make movies "10% better," not just cheaper. Talukdar said in addition to improving movies, studios are excited about being able to make more films that they haven't previously greenlit because of budgetary constraints. "The net new result is going to be a.) a whole slate of productions that couldn't get done, even though they should get done," he said. "And b.) existing productions just becoming a lot better."
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
New Video-Generating AI Trained 100 Percent on Public Domain Films
Few tech products have been as broadly contentious as video-generating artificial intelligence. These complex algorithms, which cleave millions of datapoints together into seconds-long gobs of video, are notoriously trained on proprietary material, leading to widespread ethical and legal concerns. (That's before we even mention how much energy it takes to synthesize an AI video.) Tech billionaires tend to argue that this is simply the way things need to be — if you want AI, we need to feed it copyrighted books, music, and video. However, one group of AI researchers is working to prove that argument wrong. Moonvalley is a Los Angeles-based AI startup offering a "3D-aware" video synthesis model which it claims is 100 percent trained on public domain films. The startup's flagship product, Marey, debuted in a limited run back in March. It's now out and open to the public, TechCrunch reports, making use of a credit-based system, which is typical of most AI video software. The company is drawing the attention of big names in the film world, like Ed Ulbrich, a VFX artist and producer who worked on movies like "Titanic," "Benjamin Button," and "Top Gun: Maverick." Moonvalley hired Ulbrich to liaison with film studios back in June, a role he was drawn to by the company's "clean model," as he calls it. Ulbrich was previously down on generative AI, but says Moonvalley's approach helped change his mind. "I do think a key thing for me which was the game-changer and why I was just compelled is that at its core the idea of [Moonvalley's] clean model of an ethically sourced, ethically trained, a legit, proper thing," Ulbrich told Deadline in an interview. "No stolen pixels, no scraping of the internet. It's done in a great way. And it is so important that it happened." Similar projects have been launched in other mediums. In June, a team of over two dozen AI researchers trained a large language model (LLM) on openly licensed or public domain data, proving that it doesn't take millions of stolen books to build an AI chatbot. It was admittedly a ton of work, with the team combing through over eight terabytes of data — roughly equal to about 1,685,461 Bibles — once to format everything, and then again to double-check the copyright status of all the material. The result was an LLM that more or less stacked up to Meta's Llama 1 and 2 7B, which are admittedly a few years old at this point, but impressive nonetheless. While it remains to be seen if Moonvalley's data truly was publicly licensed, as they claim, it could offer a strong rebuttal to big tech's narrative of data shortages and necessary plunder. More on generative AI: "Indie Rock Band" That's Clearly Using AI Claims That "We Never Use AI"
Tom's Guide
09-07-2025
- Business
- Tom's Guide
The first truly copyright-free AI video generator has arrived — here's what we know
We've been hearing the same thing for months now that AI is coming for Hollywood. That is now a statement of fact as one company launches its first fully-licensed AI video model for professional production. Moonvalley, an AI video company, has announced the public release of its AI tool Marey. This was originally announced months ago, but is now available for filmmakers to try out. The company makes two big promises with this release. Firstly, it will produce professional-level video that can be heavily edited and controlled. And more importantly, it was entirely trained on explicitly licensed material, avoiding all of the copyright concerns of some of its competitors. This means that Moonvalley could be the first AI company to produce scenes for filmmakers, without the concerns of using other filmmakers' intellectual property in their own work. 'We built Marey because the industry told us existing AI video tools don't work for serious production,' Moonvalley CEO and co-founder Naeem Talukdar said, announcing the launch. 'Directors need precise control over every creative decision, plus legal confidence for commercial use. Today we're delivering both, and proving that the most powerful AI comes from partnership with creators, not exploitation of their work.' Moonvalley has been gunning for this position for a while, looking to stand out as the ethical alternative to AI video in the professional world. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. The AI video market is packed. Along with the big professional names like Gemini and ChatGPT's Sora, there are smaller competitors from Runway, Pika, Higgsfield, Kling and more. In other words, it isn't the only AI video generator out there. However, along with its take on copyright-free video, Moonvalley is aiming to make this new model better than its competitors. It was fully trained on native 1080p video and, by avoiding user-generated content in its training, can consistently produce higher quality footage. The company claims that Marey can produce sharper footage up to five seconds at 24 FPS with consistent quality throughout. Directors can control object movement and camera control, and can alter motion, camera styles, and make small changes throughout the footage. Users can try Marey on a monthly credits-based system. It's $14.99 for 100 credits, $34.99 for 250, and $149.99 for 1000. While Moonvalley is positioning itself as a tool for Hollywood, it is more likely to appeal to small-time filmmakers who have a story to tell but lack the budget to bring it to life. TechCrunch was shown the tool in action, detailing the level of control that users have over the film. Marey offers free camera motion, allowing you to adjust the camera trajectory with your mouse. Moonvalley plans to roll out more features over the next few months, including controls for lighting, trajectories, and character libraries. For now, this is in its early stages, but Moonvalley has clearly set its sights on beating the market when it comes to usable AI footage in film and TV.
