Are you telling me one man built this entire youtube channel from scraps in a CAVE?

I don’t need photoshop, I expand myself with McDonalds

Aren't you afraid people will just watch the video in reverse and find your cave ?

Quick technique for the expansion to be perfectly smooth : use an expression on the scale property of the layers and type in "[100,100]*Math.pow(3,-value)" where you replace "value" by a link to a slider control effect, varying from 0 to 100.

The weird thing about this, and I've tried it, is that after _200_ expansions, you will end up outside a Chuck E Cheese in San Bernardino. Every time. The same Chuck E Cheese. And it's actually there, I found it on the map, at least, last time I checked.

Now we know where Joe's secret hideout is... In a cave, in a mountain, at the bottom of the sea, in the middle of the universe, in a rock, in a desert, in a road, in a pebble, in a bay on the side of a cliff, in a lagoon

I remember seeing this "infinite" zoom effect in Contact (Zemeckis, 1997, film's opening sequence) and in Limitless (2011). I think it was also used in other films, but hey, at those times and without the incredible tools we have now, it was already stunning!

Now Joe is 1/1000 the size of his mom.

14:30 What flat-earthers think will happen if you gave them the best Nikon camera.

I like the "stuttering" effect because it lets you keep track of how big each expansion is (or how many there are). It is very trippy though, I'm glad it wasn't much longer than it was.

Towards the end, I was reminded of a Mandelbrot Fractal. Glad that you are doing something JUST FOR FUN!! ❤

The expansion stuttering could be solved by pre composing the composition and time remapping the pre-comp. Would love to have a crack at it when I get the time to! Also, I don't think the AI imaging started with Dall-E, there was an earlier online tool where you could paint an image with basic colors, like using MS Paint, and then it would generate your painting into a "realistic" image. I remember you could do animals, landscape and for some reason.. purses. This was a couple years before Dall-E was revealed, and was most probably one of the earlier cases of AI imaging. Loved the video, Joe!

To be honest, the app "zoom out" looks like a pre-generated effect, with your photo placed in the middle. There is barely any overlap or continuation of the original photo - it immediately went cyberpunk for no reason at all.

Dude. I see and understand the smoothness factor you weren't 100% happy with, but syncing it with that music beat made the world's best lemonaid out of the lemons you were given. Nicely done!

Fun! I’m an editor and dabbling more and more in Photoshop and After Effects. I was chatting with a colleague the other day about an endless zoom out video shared by NATO that was breaking my brain. I wonder if the finger pinch zoom out helps avoid that stutter-step problem your friend had. Lastly - have you ever done a video about early “photoshop”? Like photo manipulation done in the time of early photography? Like those famous photos of Grant and Lincoln at civil war battlefields (but it’s actually their heads were cut out and placed on a person in the shot) or cards displaying “mediums” performing their talents (like ectoplasm coming from nostrils - although maybe that’s a very different video). Good stuff, keep it up Joe!

I appreciate this video. As much as this term upsets some people I know, this is one of those "how the sausage is made" videos and I'm glad these get posted. 5:41 Even the lighting is decent.. 6:32 Is that a fridge to the right, or some sort of post-apocalyptic "life-pod"? 7:02 It's looking more and more like some sort of WWIII era self-sustaining bunker.

🤯 what do you mean that's not an actual photo of a wooly mammoth !?!?! 😂😂😂😂

Good lord I’ve never made it to a video 37 seconds after it came out the oven. I’m gonna need the oven gloves.

The ideal case: you end up recreating the 'Royksopp - Eple' music video

The reason the “Wawawa” effect is happening is because you’re going from zooming out to the edges of an image to zooming out of an image zoomed directly in the center with a constant speed. It’s a similar effect as how moving down a corridor looks slower if you focus on the middle and block out the walls close to you, so as you zoom out the edges of the image get unblocked and the zoom feels faster and faster until the cut to the next image where you’re zoomed in again. The way to fix it would be to start the zoom fast for each image, and then ease it out into a slow zoom. I think that would make it feel more like a continuous motion, but I am gonna have to test it myself at some point to make sure. Very cool experiment and I still love the end result!

Right after the zoom, just when he says "Is my face all swirly now", stare at something in the room other than the screen and it will swell up bigger and bigger. Joe has effected your brain.

There is a huge debate in universities right now about how to handle AI because it’s too easy for students not to learn the information being presented in classes and use AI to cheat on assignments instead. My professor was agonizing over the fact that she may need to start doing oral exams with students 1 on 1 in order to combat AI.

This is an excellent visual example of what is going to happen as AI content becomes more ubiquitous, and new models are trained off that content. AI content feeding AI content....an AI content entropy.

That's a common mistake in games/real-time graphics too. To make the zoom look smooth you don't want to use a linear or cubic curve like a lot of animation packages provide, you need an exponential curve. Zooming out by a factor of 3 like you are doing would mean 3^-x where x goes from 0 to 1 for each segment. Fun fact, 3^100 is about 5x10^47 which is... huge! Like the difference in size between subatomic stuff and the size of the observable universe huge. It's baffling how a smooth, understandable zoom like that compounds so quickly isn't it?

Man this legitimately messed with my eyes. I looked down at my dinner right after and it freaked me out a bit.

9:25 - Some of those Hand hallucinations are fantastic. 🤣 You owe your friend more than a few beers for composing that zoom sequence. That was awesome.

15:05 is an insane transition, it looks like the entire thing was a miniature world ontop of a few loose rocks

14:31 - woah, dude! That was genuinely beautiful. Great track pick too.

The interesting thing to me was that actual expansion seemed to stop very quickly, replaced by backing off. In other words, instead of zooming out it moved away from the subject in z space. Especially in the one you did in Photoshop, I kept waiting to see the curvature of the Earth, followed by the entire planet, then the rest of the solar system, etc. But nothing like that happened - instead it just showed more landscapes entering the picture at basically the same scale.

Far out man i was not expecting that swirly face thing haha... i was like dude did you know i was not 100% sober right now? Haha

This seems like a replicator from Star Trek but for images instead of food. Saving time and having all the ingredients to make anything you ask it to make.

After watching this, everything looked like it was expanding, lol. Nice work!

Scaling tip! In After Effects you can parent all your objects to a Null object, and scale only that. Think of it like a train pulling all the railcars that are attached to it, but you only need to animate the train. Essentially you create your null object, it will be auto centered. Parent your first photo to the Null. Now add your second photo on top, set the blend mode to Difference. Scale your Null down to where you see the photos align. Now parent Photo 2 to the Null. Import Photo 3, repeat the process. You’ll have to animate opacity of the overlaying layer from 0 to the 100 during the zoom to make the transition be smooth. Also set your layers back from difference to normal between each new layer setup. Null objects are the best!

For AI to put you in a cave, as if you lived in a cave or under a rock was beautiful. It knows us humans too well

Joe you really do live in the middle of nowhere :D I like that at one point the blue sky changed to ocean and the expansion continued without interuption. Editing videos is a pain in the ass, I have nowhere the experience as you or your friend, but it makes me appriate videos more because of that

09:23 - IF A COMPANY MADE a silicone '2 handed wrist - hand shaker' (bottom right of the 4 pics)... I'd PROBABLY buy it for a laugh! 🤔🤣🤣🤣 😎🇬🇧

That phone app thinks your studio is in Night City.

Joe's office is his man cave. So putting him in a cave makes sense. That last expansion was cool! I was expecting it to end up showing the entire Earth.

Hi Joe! I really liked this video! It's a very nice change from your usual way of presenting your videos and that felt both new and interesting! I still like the usual way just as much, so this is absolutely not a bash on it! :) The change was good in the way punctuation in a big chunk of writing is good!

Nice. I love the last few frames where it turns into a corrugated Sheetmetal.

I'm into photography and the Generative Fill tool on Photoshop is very useful. While I find the generation of an image via prompt (ala Midjourney or Firefly standalone) to be underwhelming and a novelty, the ability to take my own photos and improve them with the tool is a game changer. Usually it's just dealing with a distracting element or removing tourists from a landscape photo of a rock arch in Utah. But there's also fixing the edges and crops. but like I said, there's nothing fulfilling about generating an image from a text prompt. Sure, I can generate a flawless portrait, but the experience of finding someone to be my model and having an actual human interaction during the shoot process is deeply fulfilling. AI is going to flood the world with disposable, endless images and music and text. Because of that, work created by actual humans will gain scarcity and there's always value in scarcity.

You did a reasonably good job of covering why firefly is different from the other generative AI platforms, however there’s one thing you didn’t mention, and it’s sort of important. After complaints, Adobe did provide payment for contributors to Adobe stock. It’s unclear if that Money will be repeated, or if it’s just a one time payment. Also, after complaints, Adobe also included the ability to have your art removed from their training material if you want. However… If you remove your works from the training system, you can no longer sell your work on Adobe stock. What this means is that it’s kind of like a sort of extortion. If you want to make money off of one of the most popular stock services in the world, you have to allow AI to scrape your images and create competing work. For a lot of people, that’s going to be a very difficult decision. do you leave your work somewhere where it is the easiest to find, but risk helping this service make you obsolete? Or do you take your work off of the service, making it significantly more difficult for people to find your work? What’s more, I’m fairly certain that once the lawsuits about artist’s work being used in generative AI systems has been resolved, I would imagine that every stock photography site of any size will follow Adobe’s lead. While this is in theory a more ethical way to train a generative AI, the way that Adobe is doing it effectively forces artists to submit their work to make themselves obsolete. A better policy would be to allow artists to opt out but still sell their work. I would even consider limitations on either number of works, repetition of similar works, or some other reasonable limit to be fine so long as the artist could choose to not be included in the training, but still be able to sell on the platform. As of my writing this comment, I’m unaware that Adobe has made such a change. Additionally, it is still unclear if Adobe is going to pay artists more than once. At minimum, if they are going to require works to be used in training, there should be an ongoing payment for either every month or every year that an artist’s work is being used to train firefly.

"Is my face all swirly now? 👁️👄👁️" 🤣🤣🤣 Yes, yes it is.

A few things will help with your zoom effect. First is consistency with your GenerativeAI expansion. Instead of manually scaling and re-centering with your crop tool, click on the bottom handle of the crop frame and drag downward while holding shift+option, keeping your old image centered in the frame. That still leaves the issue of scaling inconsistency, but it's better than manual. To fix the scaling issue, you'll have to choose a different method of generative AI since you can't crop at a pre-determined percentage of the original image. 1, select the layer ("make layer" first if it isn't already) and transform the layer to 33.35% (NOT 33.33). 2, ctrl/command click on the layer thumbnail to select the image, then invert the selection. 3, use generative fill and select your desired option. 4, merge your layers into one layer. 5, Save your new image. 6, repeat steps 1-6 (I recommend using a Photoshop Action for this instead of sitting there clicking the same buttons 100 times). The next thing that will help the effect is fixing the effect in After effects. Don't use z-space, but use scaling instead. You can parent all 100 layers to a null object and animate the scale of the null, which would apply the same speed of scale to every image. (look up "earth zoom" or "map zoom" tutorials to achieve this exact effect). With that many layers, though, you'd likely run into image buffer issues pretty quick. Alternatively, you could apply a simple two-keyframe scale animation to one layer, select the keyframes, right click, and choose "exponential zoom." Then copy/paste the keyframes to the rest of the layers. To simplify this, stack all layers on top of one another at the beginning of the comp, paste the keyframes to all of them at the same time, then use the "sequence layers" feature to spread them out over time.

Always learn something intriguing when I watch Mr. Joe Scott. Keep up the great work/content! Great channel!

I should have listened when told not to drop that Orange Sunchine in the early 70"s. But seriously, Joe is the only one that can keep me attentive when he slides into a commercial.

Honestly, the stutter was great, possibly bc of the chosen music and timing of the beat with the stutter, but I think that was way better than it would’ve been if it was just smooth.

not me with a massive smile on my face as the zoom out played. Awesome video Joe! Love it.

Im so tired of hearing advanced algorithms being called A.I. by big tech to market them. How about a video explaining the difference?

I like how it turned into barn tin for a minute lol

As I recall, the new ToS for PS and the ACS include allowing them to harvest your creative process and anything you make in the suite to train their Ai... so if you paint, it'll use your process to train Ai to do it the way you do it. Then, it pushes that out to it's other users. Meaning that your creative process and any assets you create are being taken, added to their Ai's dataset, and then reused when called upon by other users' prompts. Good or bad, it's something users should be aware of.

This was a VERY interesting experiment. And it was basically zooming out. So cool.

The stagger/stutter actually works well when synced up to music! imo.

As a life-long adobe addict and tech enthusiast, this video is like catnip And yes modern AI tools are terrifying

There's a way easier method to pull this off in After Effects without getting into 3D space. Stack all your images, create a null control layer (start with the scale at something like 10,000) and parent the first image to it, scale down (on the null layer) until the first image fits within the second image (you may need to shift the position of this second image to line them up) and once they're lined up parent the second image to the null layer. Repeat on and on. And when you run out of scale margin (you will be scaling from 10,000% down to 1%) just create another null layer to control the first.

That's Maximilian, the scariest robot of my childhood! I never realised it stands there, menacingly.^^

Use this comment if you in fact, did not know.

The infinite expand i feel is what you'd see in your last living moments. Or during the most heroic lsd or murshroom trip

Totally awesome! Now it might have been even cooler to have resolved on the original image, making an infinite loop.

You zoomed so far out you could see the brane layers! Awesomeness. Oh, yeah, you can do this in Midjourney with perhaps smoother results...

Damn it, I wish UKposts had a backward play option, the Zoom IN would have been epic!

should've too a top down photo to see if it would expand into space and larger instead of a rolling landscape

Everytime I've seen this expanding image effect, it had this wobble between transitions. In any case, your friend did a great job with this weird AI journey.

The efects are properly WOW. Love that - zooming out into virtual (invented) reality - homm - oxymoron

Goddaaamn! This was trippy. Very, very trippy.

This was a cool experiment. Thanks for sharing.🧑‍🔬

Fun video. It's nice to see a bit of how you do your work. That AI graphics stuff is pretty amazing.

That was a very interesting idea and video, cheers to you and Mark for putting it together for us

Mad respect for the efforts!

To smooth the expansion, make sure that your seed images are exactly the same size and perfectly centred. Expand your first image by 200%. Start your zoom out, with your overlay next image expanded at 200% ready to CUT (not fade) in over the old when the old hits 100%. That way you might reduce the jittering you experienced in your first attempt.

Hi Joe, do you have the raw zoom steps from Photoshop you made available for download somewhere? The zoom is trivial to make perfectly smooth in After Effects with a simple expression. I would like to give that a shot.

I love how you used AI to design your super secret evil genius lair.

AI audio - did 1960s artist Tiny Tim singing "Fairies Wear Boots" by Black Sabboth with ukalalees. LAFFS BIG LAFFS!

The problem is our supply-side economic model is going to turn A.I against us all. The centralisation of wealth and power will be extreme.

Thanks Joe, very interesting and some very good information on things to peruse.

That stutter effect actually goes hard with the beat

The stutter is absolutely fire. Great combo with the music 👌

I like the "wobble" effect very much in the video. I think I like the unintended effect better than a smooth zoom-out.

I'd live to see an intro to one of your videos where you create a dozen or so expansions, and then work backward, doing a slow zoom into the original source image from the last expansion, then seamlessly swap out the second to last expansion and zoom into its source image. And then again for the 3rd expansion so it looks like a slow zoom from an endless landscape to end with you at your studio, and then the video actually begins.

Tip to make this expansion - use infinite scaling on the first one and just parent images to each other with an equal time ofset. Should take 15 minutes or, for a complete beginner, with a bit of googling, maybe around under 30-40 minutes in Adobe After Effects. Keywords for googling: After Effects parenting, keyframe assistant, layer sequencing, infinite scale expression

Wow, that zoom out is awesome!

You do not need a copyright holder's permission to look at a copyrighted work. You need their permission to create and distribute copies of it.

To get rid of the stutter, you could cut the last frames of the expansion of each stitch and then use RIFE interpolation to smooth out the transition. you would get some artifacts, but most likely would work.

Photoshop: Joe lives in either Kansas or Iceland. The app: Joe lives in Tron.

You can't say "I'm not a photophobia expert" and then drop the bombshell that you've been making your own thumbnails this whole time. Much smaller youtubers have dedicated thumbnail artists. That's insane! Excellent work.

19:17 "Is it just training off of itself at this point?" Whenever it gives you three options to choose from, I suspect the choice is fed back for further training And so might be the usage (versus lack thereof) of the generated stock images

I am a huge Adobe nerd, after effects being my favourite! I love your channel, such a treat to have an episode about Adobe hell yeh

It's like traveling backwards away from you... and then you end up pulling out of it all like some kind of Men In Black "the size of the world is relative" locker aliens scenario... and then it was like some kind of many worlds thing. Actually came out pretty cool.

At one point the beat of the music matched up with the studder which did work for that short period. Cool trip bro!

I can’t honestly say that any of this stuff shows any signs of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. The photo edges are expanded using an algorithm that essentially copies what is already in the image. Later, larger, expansions are simply matching the image content as closely as possible to another image in a stock library of images. Given that the majority of images in photo libraries are landscapes of one sort or another, it is to be expected that all images will eventually expand into a landscape. So what we have is a complex algorithm and a huge library of images but certainly no intelligence necessary to produce these results.

17:40 This is like when characters in a TV show suddenly ask "where's that music coming from?"

"is my face all swirly now?" jumpscared me, because, yes, yes you were swirly

Photoshop definitely has one of the most impressive real-life applications of neural nets so far. Really cool stuff, and I dare say jaw-dropping for a LOT of people on first introduction.

As an artist who has used all traditional media, especially airbrush for over 3 decades, including Photoshop since the early 90's, I have no intention of using Ai features and have avoided even checking them out. I work on my pieces down to the pixel with brush and pen tools as though I'm using what I call analog techniques which is how I differentiate traditional methods from the digital. To me it's just a cheat, as for me "Artists that can, make art while those that cannot, use Ai".

I really, really enjoy this video style of "let's go on a journey of discovery with Joe"!

The sound effect for waiting for the app to create the zoom-out, sounds like a VHS-tape rewinder... complete with the rewound tape being ejected xD

Happy Monday! Also “All videos for thumbnails”? 1:50

I have heard that Firefly MAY not have been trained as ethically as they claimed. User beware! I choose not to use these products as an artist not just because of the ethics of the training (AND THE ENERGY COSTS?), but also the broader picture of propping up companies/industries that are trying to exploit artists and devalue our labor. I dont use Photoshop and am increasingly choosy about where I post my art.

I feel like if you hadnt told us that you wish it had turned out different, we might've just thought you did it on purpose to sync it to the beat of the music and to give us a brief moment to actually see each scene

I mean, if Tony Stark can build the Iron Man suit while captive in a cave, then I could totally see you building this channel up in a cave with virtually unlimited technology haha.