Specimen

A sci-pop track - for the video I wanted to tell a more linear story and try to keep the imagery and characters more consistent. The lyrics have a much broader and personal meaning for me, but I wanted to revisit the Scientist character from my first story arc in my Convergence album trilogy and build out some of the canon around his character. Video-wise, I've gone for 100% footage, with just straight scene cuts. It does expose more some of the limits of generative images/video, as well as upscaling. I worked hard to improve overall footage quality with A LOT of refine steps in the image gen process, as well as more targeted prompting and a larger sample set of images to get better video both in terms of consistency with input image and 3D coherence. Ultimately, it's still a bit of a lottery to get really high levels of consistency and particularly with background scenery - and moving to the nest stage of image/video quality would require a much more iterative toolset - unless I trade off either $$$ (more) or time. I'm not prepared to upgrade my Runway account to use their Frames feature, but that might be a better solution... In terms of the upscaling, I'm still not happy with the large pixel look of 1280x720 up to 4K from Runway video. I've done _some_ experimentation with Topaz models, but that probably needs a more structured testing approach to find a repeatable model and settings which give better results. I'm looking forward to Topaz' Project Starlight offering full video conversion - as it proposes to use a diffusion technique - which I suspect will be the best way to infill the large pixel blocks which we see now. If any Runway/Topaz users have suggestions, feel free to comment or DM me! I'd love to improve the overall video quality and continuity - but without slowing down the creative process. For me, it's about balancing that relentless drive to perfectionism against getting the music out with a video vibe that matches the energy of the music... #midjourney - #runwayai - #topazvideoenhanceai - #abletonlive