Gary Bettan

Videoguys' are the Video Editing and Production Experts!

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

What to Look for When Choosing a PTZ Camera https://t.co/Uv3r7GnpfM

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

Atomos Shinobi Gives Sony FX3 Shooter More Confidence Behind the Camera https://t.co/843Nm5DN2W

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

Avid Media Composer First 2026.8 Removes Major Limits for Free Editors https://t.co/1H5ARowRHB

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

@E_FLEISCHMAN The UN is an antisemetic organization. Has been for decades. Genocides? No Jews, no news. If you can't blame Israel and Jews, there is no crime. Shameful.

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

@davidson_f14299 100%
We will reap what we sow. The future for Jews in New York City is bleak. As is NYC's future under failed socialist policies.

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

Truth!

[Franma🇺🇸❤️💪🇺🇸 @davidson_f14299]

I listened to Netanyahu again this morning, and I swear, I have never felt this embarrassed for my country. Not once. I love this country. I’ve always been proud of it. But hearing him speak the truth about that New York mayor — Mandan, Mamdani, whatever the hell his name is — it hit me like a betrayal. A slap in the face.

New York City actually voted for a radical ideologist. A socialist/communist wannabe. And now he’s out there pretending he represents America? I’m embarrassed he represents anything tied to this country. How the hell did this happen? How did thousands of people look at that man and say, “Yep, that’s our guy”? It blows my mind.

And if it was the youth vote? Then I’m even more embarrassed. Because that means they weren’t taught a damn thing about history. And honestly, that tracks — Democrats have wrecked the education system for years. Kids don’t know anything about the important facts that actually matter. And now we’re living with the consequences.

I never want to feel this way about my country again. I want this straightened out. I want that man out of New York City. He shouldn’t be the mayor of anything, let alone the biggest city in America. It’s a scar. A goddamn scar on us.

Netanyahu was absolutely correct in what he said. Whether I’m pro or not for Israel is my business — but the truth he spoke should be everybody’s business. He laid it right on Mamdani, and Mamdani deserved every bit of it.

This is the same clown who wanted to arrest Netanyahu. Arrest him. The stupidity is unreal. And now he’s running New York straight into the ground. People keep saying, “Just wait till the grocery stores open.” Well guess what — now he’s taking taxpayer money to bail out his failing grocery stores.

And here’s the part nobody wants to hear.

You’re gonna get taxed even more.
Do you people see what’s happening?
Do you understand how hard you’re about to get hit?

This is what socialism does.
This is the price you pay when you vote for someone who should’ve never been anywhere near leadership. You voted for a radical ideologist, and now you’re shocked he’s reaching into your pockets again? This is the bill coming due.

You wanted “change.”
You wanted “fairness.”
You wanted “free.”

Well guess what — none of it is free.
You’re paying for every stupid idea he pushes.
You’re paying for failing grocery stores.
You’re paying for his experiments.
You’re paying for his ideology.

And the worst part?
He’s not done.
He’s just getting started.

You voted for it.
You’re gonna pay for it.
And the rest of us get dragged along for the ride.

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

@Handre Failed monetary policy of the Fed drives inflation. Another blunder raising rates now. Actually not a blunder, a political plan to impact midterms.

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

Jeffrey Katzenberg: AI Is Becoming Another Tool for Filmmakers https://t.co/OycThJXUZU

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

@Jason 100%
AI is a tool. A tool that will allow creative people to tell their story better, cheaper and faster than ever. But it will also unleash productivity and scale that will disrupt the current content creation system. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades!

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

@jeffreykWNDR 100%
AI is a toll. A tool that will allow creative people to tell their story better, cheaper and faster than ever. But it will also unleash productivity and scale that will disrupt the current content creation system. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shade

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

100%
AI is a toll. A tool that will allow creative people to tell their story better, cheaper and faster than ever. But it will also unleash productivity and scale that will disrupt the current content creation system. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades!

[Jeffrey Katzenberg @jeffreykWNDR]

The World is Changing: AI For Creativity

By Jeffrey Katzenberg

A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe.

Later that day, I received a text from an artist I've known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: "Is this the end of us?" My answer was, "Certainly not.”

I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both.

In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious.

There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I've spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn't quite right. I've sat in screening rooms where four years of people's labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there's really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love.

People do not fight this hard for things they don't care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft.

Is History Repeating Itself?

The history here is more complicated than either side may realize. In 1906, the most famous composer in America, John Philip Sousa, published an essay titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music." He warned that the phonograph would become "a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul."

Sousa's fight was not really about the machine, it was about money. The machines were playing his compositions, and the men who built them weren't paying him a cent. His campaign helped create the Copyright Act of 1909. He did not stop the technology. He changed the terms under which it could use his work.
A hundred years ago, sound came to the movies. We remember it now as a miracle, and it was. What we forget is who paid for it. Before sound, tens of thousands of musicians made their living in the orchestra pits of movie houses, scoring every film live, every night, in towns all over the world. When the soundtrack arrived, the work of one composer and one orchestra was recorded for a film that went into thousands of theaters. The union fought back with everything it had, taking out newspaper ads across the country warning against the menace of "canned music," one of them showing a mechanical man tearing the strings out of a harp while an angel wept.

They were not fools, and they were not Luddites. They were right. Those pit jobs did not come back. And yet (this is the part we have to be brave enough to admit), sound gave us the movie musical, the modern score, sfx, sound design, audio engineering, and an art form vastly larger than the one it disrupted. And it helped keep Hollywood in the forefront of world entertainment for the rest of the century and into the next. The loss was real. And yet the art form expanded.

This is a story that has been told over and over again. To resist technology is to risk irrelevance. Just look at Kodak or Blockbuster. To embrace technology is to open doors of new possibility. Just consider Apple and Netflix.

What I Learned From Walt Disney

In the mid-1980s, I was tapped to lead Disney's animation division at a moment when the studio was at an inflection point. Animation wasn't just another business unit. It was the soul of the company, a medium revered because of Walt's genius and his passion. But the production system was cumbersome and unforgiving. A single movie was 125,000 individual hand-drawn and painted cels, photographed one frame at a time. Every revision carried a cost measured in months. These degrees of difficulty shaped the kinds of stories we could tell.

We found our way forward in an unexpected place: Walt himself. The Disney archives held astonishing recordings of Walt explaining his creative process. His own writings. His notes and storyboards. Work product captured at every stage of his process. This was truly a gift. Listening, reading, sitting with the work itself, we heard him talk about character, about emotion, about how an audience feels when a character truly comes alive. He talked about making bold choices and refining a scene until it genuinely moved people. We didn't hear a word about pencils or paintbrushes. In fact, Walt was famous for being a technologist, forever hunting for state-of-the-art tools, often inventing them himself to achieve the images he saw in his head. But he never defined animation by the tools. He defined it by whether the audience believed the character. His principles were timeless. The tools were not.

That realization changed everything. We co-developed the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) with a young Northern California company called Pixar, replacing hand-painted cels with CGI. In The Little Mermaid, the final scene shimmered with a dimensionality and light that the old process simply couldn't achieve. In Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom sequence moved with a cinematic sweep that placed the audience inside the emotion of the moment. In Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders felt vast and alive, and the Magic Carpet became an intricate, compelling character all its own. In The Lion King, the stampede carried a scale and intensity that raised the emotional stakes beyond anything we'd done before. Technology didn't diminish the craft, it expanded the canvas. It gave artists more room to create.

A decade later, the canvas expanded again. When Disney released Pixar's Toy Story, it wasn't simply a technical milestone. It was proof that a fully computer-animated film could carry real emotional weight, that it could make audiences laugh, cry, and believe. At DreamWorks, we made the difficult decision to sunset hand-drawn animation and become a fully computer-animated studio. It was the right thing to do, but it was not without pain. It cost talented people their place in an industry where they had worked their whole lives. Some made the leap to the new tools and did the finest work of their careers. Some never did.

Tools are never the point. The instruments change with every generation. What endures is taste and imagination. The magical ability to make an audience feel. One of the greatest storytellers of our generation, George Lucas, succinctly captured the eternal essence of this issue: “It’s not the how, it’s the why.”

A Distinction With a Difference

I asked one of the leading AI models a question that has been challenging me for months. What is the difference between reasoning and creating? Its answer changed how I think about almost everything happening in this industry. It said . . .

Reasoning and creating are two distinct cognitive modes, though they also work together. Reasoning is fundamentally evaluative and analytical. It operates on what already exists: facts, premises, evidence. It moves toward a conclusion that was in a sense already implied by the input. Reasoning is constrained by logic and truth. Its goal is to arrive somewhere correct, not to invent somewhere new.

Creating is fundamentally generative. It produces something that didn't exist before. And crucially, there's no single right answer waiting to be found. A blank page has infinite valid responses. Creation involves choices that can't be fully justified by logic alone. Taste, intuition and vision fill the gap where deduction runs out.

Reasoning is what Silicon Valley has been perfecting. Creating is what Hollywood has been practicing for more than a century. AI today operates almost entirely on the reasoning side of the line. It can deduce, evaluate, optimize, and pattern-match brilliantly. And while it can create, there is a real distinction to being creative. What it doesn’t yet have is those things that make us human: empathy, devotion, serendipity, the kind of creativity that comes from a person trying to say something only they could say. When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done. By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new.

One day, AI may close this gap. Three years ago, the leaders building AI would have called what they are achieving today, improbable, if not impossible. Impossible is no longer improbable.

Today, the line between reasoning and creating is real. Even the leading technologists acknowledge we are not there yet. There is no scientific path to crossing this divide that anyone in the field can articulate today. Understanding that gap is where we will find common ground.

A Path Forward

In 2016, I closed one chapter in Hollywood with the sale of DreamWorks and opened another in Northern California, co-founding WndrCo. We’ve backed more than 50 founders building the next generation of technology and watched how breakthroughs in Silicon Valley emerge, first as experiments, then as platforms, and finally as infrastructure that reshapes entire industries. It's worth remembering that the last great revolution in animation also came from the north. Pixar was a Northern California company, forged not in the conventions of the Hollywood studio system, but in the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. I've spent years on both sides of this bridge. For sure, I don’t have all the answers (take Quibi, for one!). But, from my past and present vantage points of my long career, here is what I see . . .

Brilliant people in Northern California building this technology have made something extraordinary. They have earned the right for the rest of us to be, if not believers, at least optimistic that what comes next will be remarkable. But they have not made an artist. The tools are powerful, but they are not what makes a story matter. That knowledge lives 350 miles to the south, inside people whose life's work has informed the very models you are building. The right path forward includes them by design, with credit, with consent, and with compensation. Build this with the storytellers. Not on top of them. Taste is not something that can be synthesized, it is uniquely human.

At the same time, Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away. The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything. The north needs something from it that they cannot build and cannot buy: creativity. The kind that takes a blank page and conjures a single right answer where there was none and has held audiences for a century. Without it, the most powerful reasoning engine ever invented will still be missing the only thing that makes a story worth telling.

The artists who learn to wield these new instruments will do things the engineers never dreamed of. They always have. Edison invented the motion picture but made terrible movies. It took Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and so many others to make movies emotional. Now, the canvas is about to expand yet again. We should decide now that we intend to paint on it.

There are so many valuable lessons in history. This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms. Sousa did not stop the phonograph; he helped write the law that made sure composers got paid. And two years ago, when the writers and the actors walked out, they were fighting for the very things Sousa was fighting for in 1906. Consent, compensation, the basic recognition that human creative work has a price that must be paid. The terms of that fight are still being negotiated, but the principle is older than any of us.

The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap. First, we must all agree that there should be terms. Then we can have the crucial debate about what fairness requires.

What I Learned From Steve Jobs

Years ago, Steve Jobs said, "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." He was describing a device. But he could just as easily have been describing this tale of two cities.

What I See Coming Soon

As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer. Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling. In the 1980s, animation was dismissed as a niche corner of the business. Today it is one of the most beloved and profitable forms of storytelling in the world. In live action, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson embraced new visual tools not as shortcuts, but as instruments, and expanded cinema in the process. Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process.

Assuredly, I don’t have all the answers, but I am confident that the creative opportunities will expand yet again. How we come through this is a choice. The north has the new tools. The south has the creative soul. The best future will draw on the best of both worlds.

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

@BillAckman Paid for by the same people. Follow the money!

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

Panasonic Image Adjust Pro Makes Multi-Camera Color Matching Easier https://t.co/91QjMywe5F

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

@yairlapid No Jews, no news.
No genocide, just rampant antisemitism.
Par for the course for the UN.

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

Glyph Storage Solutions for Filmmakers, Video Editors & Content Creators https://t.co/7gNoyv4ZT9

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

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[Victor Davis Hanson @VDHanson]

Trump Bans the Fake News. So Obama Thunders Down from Olympus

The White House Press corps and the liberal media have gone ballistic over President Trump’s recent banning of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press room.

Apparently Trump had finally had it with their decade-long trail of “fake news” (e.g., CNN on the Steele dossier: the intelligence community had “corroborated all the details.”; MS(NBC): “All the supporting details in Steele's reports are checking out, even the really outrageous ones.”; and Politico (“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”).

Or maybe it was Trump’s weariness that CNN and MS never learned from their serial untruth.

The former for years put on their news shows the admitted liar (“least most untruthful”) James Clapper; The latter likewise hired the twice-admitted-liar John Brennan (on his demonstrable spying on Senate computers, Brennan thundered under oath: “Nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn't do that.”)

So after witnessing the fake news’s spreading lies about the “walls are closing in on Trump” Mueller Investigation, ginning up the “mostly peaceful” 2020 riots, running with the Jussie Smollett farce, demonizing the Covington Kids, iconizing the assailant Trayvon Martin, and promulgating the “Hands up, Don’t Shoot” Ferguson fable, and on and on—I suppose Trump finally had enough.

In reaction and as expected, a sanctimonious Barack Obama now has jetted out from one of his three mansions and into the expulsion controversy.

And also as his wont, Obama almost immediately on spec opened himself up to the usual charges of rank hypocrisy and empty, performance-art virtue-signaling.

So Obama thundered, “I’m trying to think what would have happened if I had said, ‘You know what, Fox News? You’re out of here.’ It’s unimaginable.”

Actually, it’s not “unimaginable”, if Obama would just look into the mirror.

So wait a minute.

In 2009 the Obama Treasury Department tried to ban a Fox reporter from a press pool interview.

Earlier during the 2008 campaign, Obama kicked out New York Post and Washington Times reporters from his campaign plane.

But Obama was most notorious not for just excluding politically incorrect reporters but for surveilling and spying on them.

Even liberal watchdog foundations blasted Obama in 2012-13 for grabbing the private records of some twenty phone lines used at home and on the job by Associated Press reporters.

Most notoriously, it was finally revealed in 2013 that Obama’s State Department secretly had bird-dogged Fox Reporter James Rosen relentlessly— tracking his movements, obtaining a search warrant to examined two days’ worth of his private emails, and getting access to his private phone records.

If Obama is still “trying to think what would have happened” when he surveilled and spied on a Fox reporter relentlessly, he can stop—since nothing as usual happened to the always exempt Obama.

And Obama did not just at times eject reporters and surveille them.

He also threatened to prosecute eight reporters and their sources (more than any administration before or since, including Richard Nixon’s). But he backed down when the AP and Rosen scandals surfaced and cooled down his Inspector Javert alter ego.

The hammer/stiletto difference between a loud Trump and a smooth Obama?

Trump blows up publicly, rails, and earns furor from “shocked”, sober and judicious journalists” who covet their White House billets—while he also earns the damnation of the liberal legacy media for his antics.

But far more egregiously Obama used the powers of the administrative state, secretly and quietly, to surveille, follow, and spy on reporters and their sources, while threatening to prosecute and jail others—and he disguised his vindictiveness by his lofty tone and polished demeanor.

As he anticipated, Obama’s victims and the media itself largely kept still, afraid to concede that their messianic “constitutional lawyer” possessed an Orwellian mean streak and was a far greater danger to the First Amendment.

Or as the Left taught us, the fundamental threat to our Constitution is when “democracy dies in darkness.”

Postscript:

Obama also could not resist his “clingers” like demonization of Trump supporters, in the fashion of Hillary’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables”, and Biden’s “garbage”, “chumps”, “semi-fascists”, and “dregs”.

So he also blasted not just Trump for the expulsions, but returned to his accustomed stereotype putdown of Neanderthal-like Trump supporters who are supposedly under-developed (e.g., “what that means is that we’ve have not developed the kind of understanding of what democracy requires”):

“If you have a certain cohort, let's call it 30 to 35 percent of the country right now, which thinks that's okay, well, what that means is we have not developed the kind of understanding of what democracy requires, and we've got to shore that back up.”

I wonder how Obama would do that shoring up of a third of America? Surveilling, tracking, and spying on them?

Note finally, that even Hillary’s deplorables were only half of Trump’s half of the nation, “You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”) whereas Obama writes off a third of the entire country!

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

Thank you for posting.
There is no genocide.
Hamas, Hezbullah, Houthies and Iran are Isalmic terrorists that worship death, that HATE all Jews, Christians and the west.
Our media and our universities have bought into this and we are actively spreading and teaching their propoganda.
Shame on them for spreading these lies.
Shame on us for listening to it.

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

Brooke Goldstein sat on a CNN panel and did the one thing that table almost never allows. She spoke as someone who actually went.

Two years in and out of Jenin, Ramallah, Tulkarem, and Nablus. Interviews with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, not through a press release and not through a translator who works for the story. They told her to her face that they want war. That is not a talking point she invented in a green room. That is what they said.

The rest of the table looked the way people look when the script gets interrupted. They have never been in Samaria or Judea. They have never watched the propaganda machine operate on the ground and then come home to hear it repeated as news. They sit on a sofa in a studio and decide what Israel is allowed to do, while the people who have been there keep getting treated as the problem for noticing that this is an ideology that teaches children to love death and then parks those children in front of the launcher.

She said the quiet part without raising her voice. It is not only Hamas. It is what the schools print. It is what the commanders admit. It is why there can be food in the Strip and still be starvation, because Hamas treats the warehouse the same way it treats the tent.

CNN will air the clip, then go back to calling itself journalism, and still act wounded the next time someone says the network is selling a product instead of a report.

@GoldsteinBrooke already did the work they refuse to do. They just did not like hearing it at their own table.

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

Thank you for posting.
There is no genocide.
Hamas, Hezbullah, Houthies and Iran are Isalmic terrorists that worship death, that HATE all Jews, Christians and the west.
Our media and our universities have bought into this and we are actively spreading and teaching their propoganda.
Shame on them for spreading these lies.
Shame on us for listening to it.

[Gary Bettan @videoguys]

How Telestream Transforms Sports Production & Streaming with Wirecast https://t.co/4FKamF1Ofk