Paul Debevec

Netflix Fellow, Content Production Research
Governor, TV Academy Sci Tech Peer Group
Adjunct Research Professor, USC ICT
VFX Branch, Academy of Motion Pictures

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

Whenever I see a decorative mirror ball, I think about the old-school OpenGL GL_SPHERE_MAP texgen option, and light probes for realistic lighting of synthetic renderings for merging with photos.

Long before cube maps were an option, sphere maps allowed a form of shiny surface rendering, but only from a limited viewpoint — you couldn’t walk all the way around a shiny object.

For light probes, you could take multiple photos with different exposure times to capture a true many-orders-of-magnitude high dynamic range composite image for realistic image based lighting of everything from direct sunlight to subtle shadowed region indirect lighting.

[Paul Debevec @debfx]

Congratulations to this year's Engineering, Science, and Technology Emmy Award winners! Awards to be bestowed in Los Angeles October 14th :-)

Full winners list at:

https://t.co/sEbtDKFMgF

@TelevisionAcad @TheEmmys

[Paul Debevec @debfx]

@BenMildenhall Amazing! In 2022 @JingweiMa2 compared the original Facade/Campanile Movie renderings to various radiance field techniques made from modern drone footage https://t.co/HxgExdULeh Might be interesting to see how Atlas would do with the original 16 1997-era photos and camera path

[Paul Debevec @debfx]

Excited to be speaking at @mundosdigitales in A Coruna, Spain next week on "Image-Based Lighting: Past, Present and Future" https://t.co/2El4JQKeeS

[Ning Yu @realNingYu]

📢 @eyelinestudios and @netflix latest research, 🌟Go-with-the-Track🌟, has been accepted to #SIGGRAPH2026.
We propose a video generation framework that jointly conditions on multiple reference images and reference-anchored point tracks, enabling a range of content creation applications within a unified model:
• Motion-preserving video restylization using multiple reference images;
• Mesh- or keypoint-driven compositing and stylization;
• Camera motion control for both static and dynamic scenes using multiple reference images captured from different view-points and time steps.

✊Congrats to the team: @Koichi_N_, @yash2kant, Zhizheng Liu, @RyanBurgert, @Yuancheng_Xu0, @kuanhenglin, Emmett Steven, @JulienPhilip2, @maleewahaha, Andrea Vedaldi, @debfx, @realNingYu

📰 Paper: https://t.co/gNAoejgK6Z
🌐 Project: https://t.co/QKawPRiofO
⌨️ Code: https://t.co/pxbpqOUbzQ

*** This work is part of the ongoing research and development at @eyelinestudios and @netflix, and we look forward to seeing its techniques and workflows adopted in future productions.

[Paul Debevec @debfx]

Happy to present "Lighting in Motion" at #CVPR, trained to predict the HDRI map for image-based lighting from anywhere in an LDR image or video. Used for CGI or to drive @eyelinestudios's Light Dome LED stage with lighting from generated backgrounds. https://t.co/EJQG6SoVH6

[Paul Debevec @debfx]

Happy to join @jon_barron in congratulating @BenMildenhall and @_pratul_ for their ACM Grace Hopper Award recognizing Neural Radiance Fields -- NeRF's -- which in 2020 dramatically advanced the process of modeling and rendering 3D scenes from photographs.

[Jon Barron @jon_barron]

Congrats @BenMildenhall and @_pratul_! ACM gives Grace Hopper Awards to under-35-year-olds for *one specific thing*, here it's NeRF.

Past winners include Donald Knuth (for "The Art of Computer Programming"), Steve Wozniak (for Apple), and @martin_casado (for SDN). Good company!

[Paul Debevec @debfx]

Thanks @mikeseymour and @FXGuide for a fun podcast on HDRI lighting and the future of visual effects 🌞💡🎥 https://t.co/kzOlsgmBr8 #hdri #visualeffects #scitech

[Paul Debevec @debfx]

The future of greenscreen? Our @VFXSociety fireside chat with Niko from @CorridorDigital on "Getting to the Matte of It: CorridorKey and the Future of Keying" https://t.co/7WmM0MWBzt via @YouTube supported by @eyelinestudios

[Paul Debevec @debfx]

Excited to be interviewing Niko Pueringer from @CorridorDigital about their CorridorKey greenscreen model tomorrow for the @VFXSociety ... sign up for the 3pm PDT webinar here: https://t.co/jnDMdHZ39y

[Paul Debevec @debfx]

Incredibly honored to receive an Academy Award for the VFX technique of High Dynamic Range Image-Based Lighting at @TheAcademy's Sci-Tech Awards this week - thanks to all who made this possible! Video and speech: https://t.co/RiS3MaBfNM

[Paul Debevec @debfx]

The @TheAcademy Sci-Tech Awards are tomorrow night, and @CGinLA covers some of the honorees including HDR Image-Based Lighting ! https://t.co/CsU6GC9Ash

[Ning Yu @realNingYu]

📢 Happening in 1h! @Yuancheng_Xu0 and @debfx will be presenting 📷Virtually Being📷@SIGGRAPHAsia 2025 ����️today (Thur, Dec 18) 11:01-11:12am HKST at📍Meeting Room S423+S424, Level 4 of #HongKong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

👋 To continue our research momentum, @eyelinestudios Labs is hiring research interns. We publish and open-source, aiming to raise the bar together on next-gen AI filmmaking tools.
Spring'26: https://t.co/SZhYZEeFCo
Summer'26: https://t.co/TgIGtEEd2y

#hiring #internship #AI #AIResearch #MachineLearning #AIGC #GenAI #VideoGeneration

[Ziwei Liu @liuziwei7]

🥳 #VChain has received the 🏆Outstanding Paper Award🏆 at #ICCV2025 KnowledgeMR Workshop @ICCVConference @KnowledgeMR_ws

🙌Kudos to all the amazing co-authors @ziqi_huang_ @realNingYu @ChenGordon19 @qhnmoon @debfx

- Page: https://t.co/kwdqG4xyj2
- Code: https://t.co/PQaJoarFXa

[SIGGRAPH Asia ➡️ Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia @SIGGRAPHAsia]

Meet Paul Debevec (@debfx) - #SIGGRAPHAsia2025 Featured Sessions speaker and Chief Research Officer at @eyelinestudios powered by @Netflix, this Dec in HK. From image-based lighting to #virtualproduction, his work reshaped CG realism. 🎟 https://t.co/dNEUQNhYFQ

#VFX #Rendering

[USC ICT @USC_ICT]

Excellent article in @FilmmakerMag on ICT's #LightStage and @debfx research - https://t.co/6muPozUmNZ btw - why not come and visit the #NextGen #LightStage? - we're building it now...https://t.co/w7KMhnKrVb

[Tianye Li @_TianyeLi]

Join us at #CVPR2025 workshop on Photo-realistic 3D Head Avatars, featuring invited talks by leading experts as well as new benchmark challenges!
@debfx @shalinidemello @psyth91 @YaoFeng1995 Stefanos Zafeiriou @HaoLi81

🔗: https://t.co/CYJYtkNpq8

[JHU Computer Science @JHUCompSci]

“Lux Post Facto: Learning Portrait Performance Relighting With Conditional Video Diffusion and a Hybrid Dataset” by @myq_1997, @vishalm_patel, @wenqi_xian, @JulienPhilip2, @maleewahaha, @realNingYu, @debfx demos a portrait video relighting
method: https://t.co/uDC4rNIgYO (6/14)

[Scanline VFX - Powered by Netflix @Scanline_VFX]

Kudos to the research team at our sister company @eyelinestudios. Their latest research paper, 🌊Go-with-the-Flow 🌊, will be presented at #CVPR2025!

Based on their research, we believe this could allow artists in the future to leverage these new techniques to direct the motion in generated videos, empowering creative control in a wide range of video applications: cut-and-drag animation, transferring movement between videos, first frame editing, camera control via depth warping, and text-to-video 3D scene creation.

Kudos to the amazing team: @RyanBurgert, @Yuancheng_Xu0, @wenqi_xian, Oliver Pilarski, Pascal Clausen, Mingming He, @maleewahaha, @yitong_deng, Lingxiao Li, Mohsen Mousavi, @ryoo_michael, @debfx, @realNingYu, from @eyelinestudios, @Scanline_VFX, @netflix, Stony Brook University, University of Maryland, and @Stanford.

***This is part of the ongoing research and development at @eyelinestudios and we hope to see adoption in these techniques and workflows soon.

Paper: https://t.co/fkJd4XiyuC
Web: https://t.co/I5KZAOykcQ
Code: https://t.co/Uwd1ojI7pA
Models: https://t.co/MPYPlngYFT

#MachineLearning #video #VideoGeneration #DiffusionModels #VideoDiffusionModels #OpenSource

[Paul Debevec @debfx]

Excited to show Sodium Vapor Matting - the ingenious compositing technique that let @iammrvandy dance with animated penguins, recently recreated with @CorridorDigital https://t.co/bQrS4RWUiS - this Sat at @AcademyMuseum before a screening of Mary Poppins. https://t.co/jsOM0nXDlD