Volume 127: summer 2012

NOW PLAYINGN C S A L A B B R I N G S S C I E N C E T O T H E M O V I E S W I T H A D V A N C E D

D A T A V I S U A L I Z A T I O N S PAGE 8

FINDING A VOICEScottish software company

helps Roger Ebert get his voice back

PAGE 5

OUT OF THIN AIRA Ph.D. student makes

adding objects to images easy and photorealistic

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AT THE MOVIESArt Theater undergoes

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An Illini Media PublicationCopyright 2012

33 CONTENTS

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5

Samantha KieselEditor-in-chief

before after

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

In   2006  ,   Roger   Ebert  

spoke   his   last   words.  

But   with   the   help   of  

text-to-speech   software,  

he’s   now   getting   them  

back.  This  is  the  story  of  

how   Ebert’s   voice   was

LOST  &

FOUNDBY THOMAS THOREN | STAFF WRITER

PHOTOS BY THOMPSON MCCLELLAN PHOTOGRAPHY

55

Starting in 2009 with the help of Cere-Proc, a company based out of Edin-burgh, Scotland, Ebert’s digital voice has c ontinuously moved closer to sounding like the broadcaster’s natural voice that so many cinephiles once heard pick apart movies.

“I was intrigued by the possibility of a computer-generated voice that sounded something like mine,” Ebert said in an email. “CereProc is a leader in such tech-nology.”

Matthew Aylett, chief technical of! cer for CereProc, said the ! rst step in recreating anyone’s voice in a synthetic form is to obtain clean audio of the person’s speech. Despite Ebert’s spending countless hours in front of a television camera or behind a microphone in programs like “Ebert & Roeper,” only a small fraction of this audio was available and usable.

“You’d be amazed. Someone who’s been broadcast all their lives, you think there’d be hours and hours of audio, but actually a lot of it is thrown away,” Aylett said. “You only have the ! nal mixed ver-sion. So, for example, you might have a video of a TV show, but you don’t have his speech separate from all the other audio. And of course if you have laughter or au-dience noise and whatever, then it’s very hard to use the audio.”

Ebert said most of the audio came from DVD commentary tracks, television ap-pearances and various speeches. Many of these audio tracks were conversational in tone, which presented a challenge to Cere-Proc because they would not be appropri-ate for other speaking situations.

“The TV commentaries weren’t ideal, and certainly one of the big technical hur-dles was just being able to knock that data into shape,” Aylett said.

CereProc then transcribed the usable

audio and began building Ebert’s new synthetic voice. The company divided the audio into small segments, which could be combined to form his words. These pho-nemes came from many different sources, so CereProc had to tailor the clips so they would ! t together well enough to form co-herent words and sentences.

“Because the audio was recorded differ-ently — in different times, different places — we had to try and normalize the audio from each one of these commentaries so that it was similar,” Aylett said, referring

to Ebert’s DVD commentaries of classic ! lms. “So there’s a process where you look at the audio from say, ‘Casablanca,’ and then the audio from ‘Citizen Kane,’ and then you modify the audio so it matches more closely.”

In CereProc’s latest version, sent to Eb-ert in the ! nal week of March 2012, para-metric synthesis was used to ! x issues with stability and intelligibility. Paramet-ric synthesis creates a statistical model of the different small sound bites cut from the speaker’s audio and generates a com-pletely new waveform, Aylett said. This is in contrast to using small sound bites to make new sentences.

“Very often when you’re speaking con-versationally, if someone doesn’t quite

understand you, you can emphasize and change your voice to make it a bit easier to understand,” Aylett said. “But when you’re using a synthetic system, it’s quite frustrating if (the audio) is not really quite intelligible to start with.”

Despite the fame garnered by CereProcthanks to its high-pro! le client, recreating synthetic voices for speci! c people is not the company’s main function. It special-izes in general speech assistance, such as producing voices for Android phone soft-

ware, PCs and the OS X operating system for Apple computers. Aylett said CereProc separates itself from many of its competi-tors by specializing in producing “voices with character.”

“We really try and focus on producing synthesis, which conveys more than just the words,” Aylett said.

As CereProc has worked on Ebert’s voice, the company has had to adjust its involvement on the project based on the amount of usable audio available.

“We’d send the voice, and we’d get com-ments back, and we’d make some changes, and so on,” Aylett said. “So it’s varied a lot on how much effort has gone into it at dif-ferent times.”

Roger Ebert spoke his last words in the summer of 2006, losing the ability to speak after ! ghting thyroid cancer for four years . But now, six years after much of his lower jaw was removed, advances in text-to-speech

software have allowed the famed ! lm critic to continue broadcasting his thoughts using a computer-generated voice.

See EBERT, Page 7

“(Ebert) doesn’t just want to communicate — he wants to be able to use (his new voice) with the same sort of mastery that he used his own original voice. It was quite tricky.”— Matthew Aylett, CereProc chief technical offi cer

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Despite occasionally having to wait for additional data, Aylett said Ebert has made the project easier for the company’s team.

“He’s been great to work with,” Aylett said. “He’s very positive and interested in the technology and has been very good at coming back with suggestions and com-ments about the voice to help us get it right for him.”

CereProc is tasked with the additional challenge of trying to recreate Ebert’s broadcast voice.

“He doesn’t just want to communicate — he wants to be able to use (his new voice)

with the same sort of mastery that he used his own original voice,” Aylett said. “So it was interesting trying to shape the voice for his needs as well. It was quite tricky.”

This project is unprecedented because none of the audio was recorded with the in-tention of its being used to recreate a voice.

“It’s a ! rst in terms of producing a voice like this … from audio which wasn’t re-corded for the purpose,” Aylett said. “No one’s done that before.”

CereProc advises its clients to create pre-recorded voice banks with large samples of basic words and sounds necessary for their speech, Ebert said.

He did not have time to prepare such a library, so CereProc explored innovative ways to recreate his voice.

“The use of this technology to clone people’s voices is still very much on the cutting edge,” Aylett said. “What I’d like to see in the future is to have an automat-ic system where anyone can record their voice for a bit, and then it would produce a synthesizer which sounds like them. We will get there actually, at some point. Quite soon.”

Even though synthetic voices are quick-ly advancing toward this reality, Aylett said they will never be able to completely match a natural voice.

He said a natural speaker’s timing and on-the-" y adjustments are not easily rec-reated when a synthetic voice user must type a response into a keyboard.

Along with this, intonation is dif! cult to reproduce with digital voices, though one feature of Ebert’s synthetic voice gives him some control over this.

Ebert’s synthetic voice has come a long way over the past few years, but it still has room for improvement.

“I am not yet using it on a daily basis,” Ebert said. “They’re still in up to their elbows on it, and I’m impressed by their dedication.”

He said he still primarily uses Alex, a preinstalled voice on the latest of Apple products, because it is the best voice cur-rently available.

Still, his involvement with the project has helped showcase the possibilities of voice synthesis to the world.

“In terms of making people aware that this technology exists and it can be re! ned and made better for people, I think it is some-thing which is important for people to know about,” Aylett said. “It was great to have someone as well known as Roger to sort of, in effect, test and highlight this approach, because it makes … the overall awareness of the ability to do this much greater.”

77

FROM PAGE 5

EBERT

he University of Illinois is home to a number of hidden gems on the forefront of scienti! c discovery. The Advanced Visu-alization Laboratory, or AVL, part of the National Center for Supercomputing Appli-cations, is one of those gems.

This month, the AVL will be featured in the Ebertfest Film Festival for their work in the feature ! lm, “Tree of Life.” AVL Director Donna Cox and senior research artist Robert Patterson will host the presentation “Tree of Life: Making Movies using Scienti! c Data” on April 28 at the Illini Union. The presenta-tion title alone sums up what makes the AVL so special. Even though they normally spe-cialize in visualizations for planetariums, museums or IMAX documentaries (“Tree of Life” is their ! rst feature ! lm), the visu-alizations they make aren’t just pretty pic-tures: They are elaborate simulations based on scienti! c data.

Such was the case with “Dynamic Earth,” a full-length ! lm made for plane-tarium domes. The AVL partnered with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., to digitally recreate Hur-ricane Katrina based on data the Boulder researchers had collected. The ! lm trans-ports the viewer into the hurricane, travel-ing in toward the eye. The audience sees arrows mapping air " ow and temperature changes throughout the hurricane, chart-ing the hurricane’s evolution throughout a 36-hour period as it moves toward New Orleans.

In their IMAX movie “Hubble 3D,” AVL partnered with Johns Hopkins’ Space Tele-scope Science Institute, creating the amaz-ing experience of journeying through Ori-

on’s Nebula, dodging stars while " ying toward Orion’s star nursery. Once there, among the gases, audiences can watch how stellar winds dictate the way new stars and even entire solar systems are formed.

“AVL is highly unique in that our approach is to bring science to the people through cinematic representation of scien-ti! c data,” Cox said.

But the AVL is still faced with the task of taking all this data and transforming it into the striking visualizations we see.

The ! rst step is getting the scienti! c data. The data the lab primarily deals with are particle positions, photographs and volumes. Particle positions are basically 3-D data points plotted in 3-D space, used in situations simi-lar to plotting star positions in outer space.

Photographic data is a bit trickier. Here they use real photos but take information from the photos and use it in different ways. In some cases, they sculpt a photo into a three-dimensional environment, like with Orion’s Nebula in “Hubble 3D,” or use the photos as a guide to create a new environ-ment. In other cases, images can be broken down into smaller parts and actually pasted in 3-D space. Stuart Levy, a member of the AVL team, described it as “a mix of imagery, scienti! c guesswork and artistry.” The last data type is volumes, which are mathemati-cal structures consisting of 3-D grids of infor-mation. One of these grids is called a vector ! eld, which contains imaginary 1-unit arrows represented by x,y,z values. Usually there’s another grid that can represent other types of data, such as position, density, temperature and speed. In the Hurricane Katrina visual-ization, vector ! elds and volumes were used to create the arrows that represent air " ow,

direction and temperature change. “We create our pretty CG (computer-gen-

erated) arrows by essentially dropping a bunch of massless balls into the vector ! eld, which pushes each ball in one direction or another, and then we trace the path of the ball,” said AVL team member AJ Christensen. “The ‘path through the vector ! eld’ is the CG arrow.”

Once the data is in hand, the boundaries of the data need to be explored. In some cases, resolution boundaries dictate how close you can get to the data. With the Katrina visual-ization, they dictate how close the ! lm can get to the volumes without running into them. In the space scenes, they affect how close ! lm-makers can zoom in on stars and other objects without losing quality. This is also important when it comes time to determine the camera paths needed when combining the different layers of data and images.

The next step is creating the actual visualizations. The team normally uses the software Autodesk Maya, but AVL

also relies on software specially created here at the University. Then comes the final task of rendering the visualizations. The way this is done depends on the visu-alizations’ intended output; IMAX movies are rendered differently than planetarium dome films. It requires “interdisciplin-ary teamwork to create these stunning visualizations,” Cox said. “We couldn’t do it without being at the University of Illinois.”

In the end, these visualizations make it further than just blockbuster hits. They provide an educational outlet through the films and documentaries they’re featured in, and they are also a great tool for scien-tists themselves. Not only do they allow scientists to see their data in action, like in “Dynamic Earth,” but they provide a great medium for scientists to share their data among each other. But regardless of whether they are meant for work or play, the visualizations created at AVL are bril-liant all the same, bringing some much-needed science to cinema.

T

99

BY AMANDA STEELMAN | STAFF WRITERIMAGE BY ADVANCED VISUALIZATION LABORATORY

Advanced Visualization Laboratory brings data to life for moviegoers

TOP: Hurricane Katrina, or rather, the Advanced Visu-alization Laboratory’s simulation of the deadly tempest, gains strength in this still from the IMAX production “Dynamic Earth.” The different-colored arrows repre-sent the changes in air fl ow, direction and temperature as the hurricane edges toward land.

8

ABOVE: The Advanced Visualization Laboratory team, from left to right: Alex Betts, Jeff Carpenter, Stuart Levy, Donna Cox, Bob Patterson and AJ Christensen .(Photo Courtesy Robin Scholz , Illinois Alumni Association)

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Kevin Karsch pulls up two photos on his Macbook. The ! rst shows an unremarkable living room with light spilling through partially shaded windows.

A plush Pokemon doll stares down from a bookshelf. In the foreground, an empty beer bottle stands on a coffee table.

With a few short keystroke, Karsch switch-es to the other photo. It’s a nearly identi-cal shot of the room. There’s just one added detail: a 7-foot-tall marble statue of an angel.

The angel isn’t real. It’s a 3-D model, and the statue’s digital insertion took all of 10 minutes.

Karsch, a University Ph.D. student in com-puter science, has been working on an image-rendering program that can make picture-per-fect manipulations that, when revealed, can be as unnerving as they are breathtaking. He’s been working on this rendering tech since 2009, and it has garnered some serious inves-tor attention. And already he’s turned to the next step: video.

“The idea of inserting objects into digital content has been around for some time. But for our technology, the goal of it is to make things much more ef! cient and much easier for the user,” Karsch said.

The underlying novelties of the system are

its speed and how it handles light, Karsch explained. In the pictures above, the angel isn’t gaining its photorealism from anything inher-ent in the 3-D model of the statute itself.

Rather, it’s the way light coming through the windows " ows over the uneven surfaces of the statue’s robe, the way the shadow’s gradient lightens and darkens the angel’s face, and the way all the lighting conforms to the angle of the light coming through the window.

The rendering program works by ! rst pro-cessing the 2-D picture into something that can be represented as three-dimensional space. To

m a s t e r o f

BEFORE AFTER

See MANIPULATION, Page 12

m a s t e r o fm a s t e r o fm a s t e r o fm a s t e r o fm a s t e r o fm a s t e r o fm a s t e r o fm a s t e r o fm a s t e r o fm a s t e r o fm a s t e r o fm a s t e r o fm a s t e r o f

Kevin Karsch just might be a magician. The application he programmed lets even the most inexperienced rookie summon and insert objects into photos out of thin air. He is

a University Ph.D. student in computer science, but he might as well be called a...

BY DANNY WICENTOWSKI | STAFF WRITERPHOTOS COURTESY OF KEVIN KARSCH

11

accomplish this, the user draws lines over van-ishing points, parallel lines and light sources within a 2-D image.

The payoff for all this tagging and line-dragging is that the algorithm can recognize the depth and three-dimensional layout of the room.

So when Karsch places the angel statue in the picture, the program can model the effect of the light hitting the statue and even the effect of the light re! ected by the statue’s color.

The statue looks impressive, to be sure, but for Karsch, the real leap forward is how rela-tively simple it was to produce. With a little instruction, even a rank amateur could pro-duce the image in little more than 10 minutes.

“Photoshopping costs a lot of money to have the program, and it could take years to learn,” Karcsh said, comparing the results of his ren-dering software to that of the popular Adobe software.

The next step for Karsch and his colleagues is to use their algorithm to make the same kind of manipulations for video, and he explained that the program would allow artists to easily insert objects and effects into a scene without ever needing them to be physically present.

Even legendary scenes like the historical foot-age mash-ups found in “Forrest Gump” could be easily replicated.

“That scene probably took one or more art-ists several hours, if not days, to produce,” Karsch said. “Hopefully, with our technol-ogy, that can be done in just a few minutes or maybe an hour.”

But with great ease and availability comes the question of its popular use, and Karsch thinks there may come a point where liter-ally anybody can use this kind of technology.

Karsch is unsure of what this could mean for the general idea of validity or realism in photography, but " lm critic Roger Ebert doesn’t think the spread of accessible image manipulation software means much at this point.

In fact, it’s old news:“Years ago, backgrounds were matte

paintings. Now they’re CGI. Film has always employed trickery,” Ebert wrote in an email, adding: “I think today’s audiences are so sav-vy and cynical they assume they’re looking at CGI — even if they’re not.”

Rather, Karsch’s software is just one more link in a chain stretching back more than a hundred years to the days of the Lumière brothers and George Méliès (who recently experienced a revival as a supporting char-

acter in Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”).The irony is that the quest for this realism

is accomplished by increasingly sophisticat-ed tools of illusion, explained James Hay, a professor of media and cinema studies at the University.

“You could say that the history of media productivity, of " lm and TV, has been toward greater and greater realism,” Hay said. “Tech-nologies of visualization are increasingly about overcoming a perception that the ear-lier technology is unrealistic in some ways.”

Karsch thinks the balance between technol-ogy and human agency is decreasing.

Most animation needs some kind of motion-capture to ground the animation in believ-able movement. But the with the technological tools of illusion growing more sophisticated, the balance is moving toward a day when no image we see could be construed as “real.”

Whether we’ve already reached that day is an interesting question, but Hay suggested that we all keep in mind René Magritte’s famous painting “The Treachery of Images,” which shows a detailed picture of a pipe with the words “This is not a pipe” written underneath.

Magritte’s point with the iconic pipe was that an image can never be the real thing. But for innovators like Karsch, perhaps letting people believe the pipe is the real accomplishment.

1212

FROM PAGE 11

MANIPULATION

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1. The user fi rst inputs a picture or movie to Karsch’s system. 2. The system automatically estimates a rough outline of the room. 3. The user corrects any errors in the system, also indicating the room’s light sources. 4. The system then automatically computes a full 3-D scene. 5. The user is then free to insert objects or animations into the scene. 6. The objects are fi nally placed in the original image, appearing naturally lit and casting shadows on other elements in the image.

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HOW IT WORKS | Breaking down Karsch’s image-manipulation system

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A favorite way for Champaign-Urbana resi-dents to harken back to a bygone era is mak-ing drastic changes in the very near future.

According to owner Sanford Hess, most of the projection technology in The Art Theater, located at 126 W. Church St. in Champaign, is the same that was used in the 1950s. For each ! lm showed at the theater, Hess needs the huge rolls of ! lm on which the movie is recorded.

While these rolls are several feet across and 50 to 60 pounds each, a closer look at a section of the ! lm reveals that they are very simi-lar to those that older cameras might use — ! lmmakers still need to develop movie ! lm from negatives in a lab, and the result is dark, transparent and only 35 millimeters wide.

Why still show ! lms with this older tech-nology? For Hess, the quality of digital pro-jection can never compare to traditional ! lm.

“If we showed a DVD at regular resolution, you would actually see the pixels,” Hess said. While the industry standard has reached more than 2,000 pixels for theater projection, that still can’t beat traditional ! lm’s in! nite resolution and true colors.

Nevertheless, theaters are moving awayfrom ! lm projection across the nation. This plays into some of the advantages of digi-tal projection, ranging from its being “idiot-proof” by looking and working like an iPod playlist to costing less for studios and the-

aters alike in regards to the actual prints. But on top of that, ! lm studios are requiring the theaters to make the change. Major studios have announced that they will require digi-tal projection by January, and smaller studios will do the same over the next couple of years.

This is partially because of costs, but stu-dios also like digital projection because it gives them a tighter control over the ! lms even after distribution. Instead of receiving a large reel of ! lm for each movie, theaters receive a hard drive and a separate " ash drive to decrypt the ! les. Not only is the hard drive locked for a certain distribution date, but the " ash drive sends a signal to the distributor to make sure the ! lm has not been shown more than the theater’s contract allows.

The Art Theater is lucky. While the new standards might be good for ! lmmakers and distributors, the $60,000 price tag for theaters just to meet the most basic of equipment stan-dards means that many small theaters similar to the Art are going out of business.

After assessing that his theater would actu-ally need closer to $100,000 to make the nec-essary changes, Hess decided to form the Art Theater Cooperative to fund the switch and run the theater afterward rather than see it close. By selling shares at $65 each, the the-ater has raised more than $65,000.

Even with the changes, the theater will keep the old technology to continue show-ing archived ! lms at 35mm for that classic moviegoing experience.

MEGAN REILLY | STAFF WRITER

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