Go home, LTX 2-3; you're drunk!

...but you have crazy taste in music!

I finished the edit, then handed the manuscript off to a proofreader who will be finding many, many things I missed. In fact, while I was compiling I realized I'd been inconsistent with my hot peppers, and had to find the New Mexico standard spelling for the things. (It is "chile" there, not "chili.")

And celebrating with a short break. I've actually got Wan 2.2 running pretty good on a three-step ksampler with the latest lightx accelerator. The first sampler is high motion, the other two the smoother render. Then upscaled to final resolution. 

(Especially since I learned on a subreddit that when using lightx, 121 frames will quite often return a seamless loop. I did experiment with making cuts, but it is the nature of generative AI to decay over time. Think of it as the xerox effect stitched into a video. Short clips, alas, remain the best option.)

Anyhow, I wanted to try out LTX 2-3. Because LTX also does sound.

Shames me a little, because I used to design sound. I enjoyed designing sound. And neither quality nor control of sound in LTX 2-3 is high. But it does do foley, which is just annoying to cut in to a rendered video. (Without a pro toolset, that is. Doppler and worldizing and stretching to fit are just a pain with something like, say, Audacity and the free filter set.)

However, even a negative prompt won't keep it from adding music. Which is a downside, especially as, if not specified, the music falls into a narrow range of choices that become increasingly familiar over time. Specified, though, it does a lot better than the version of Ace-Step I was playing with a while back. I was able to tell it to give me some lute and recorder and it did. Of course, when I told it to give me some bright pop, my cast started singing. There's that.

Really, the Will Smith is still the stuff that's most fun about AI. Not when it gets it right, even though it can be quite startling how close it can come when it does. But the times it just goes way, way off script into a "please tell me the name of that drug" territory.

(I was in img2vid mode for the first experiments and didn't have much in the folder I could play with. So I was taking some very random stuff and seeing what I could do with it. Got the jet bike to take off quite nicely; that one worked. Another one gave me a power walk that made me laugh out loud. Before I shut down the PC, I'd found something appropriate for "render me this in the style of a 1970s British sci-fi television show" and the results were so hilariously bad in exactly the right way...! The music, in particular, was spot-on.) 

(I also had some water-acrylics-on-white-paper style "renders" I'd done to generate ideas of the various aliens in the Blue universe. I animated those, giving them some dialogue. And I tell you, I have worked with voice actors who were less on the ball in giving me the kind of voice I wanted. The Dren was perfect by take #2. The gestures the AI gave to that vocal performance, though; well, those have given me some character ideas.)