Believe it or not, a Christmas tree won't stay upright on its own. Instead, you need a stable Christmas tree stand that can accommodate the type and size of tree you have. We researched dozens of the best Christmas tree stands to help you find the right one for your needs, whether you have a real tree, an artificial tree, a small tree, or a behemoth. The stands in our guide have a track record of durability, performance, and easy setup. We also outline the size and type of tree each stand is meant for. Check out our guide to the best Christmas tree skirts once you've chosen the right stand for your tree. The best Christmas tree stands in 2022 Best Christmas tree stand overall: Krinner Tree Genie Christmas Tree Stand, available at Amazon, $82.79 The German-engineered Krinner Tree Genie Christmas Tree Stand is easy to set up in a couple of minutes and keeps trees up to 12 f...
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Disney's New AI Can Make Your Favorite Actor Look Older or Younger
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Visual effects experts at Disney say they've developed AI technology that can visually age and de-age actors faster, less expensively and more accurately than any current methods. In a research paper published Wednesday, the team described Face Re-aging Network, or FRAN, as "the first practical, fully automatic, and production-ready method for re-aging faces."
The industry standard for artificially aging performers -- using 2D painting -- "requires frame-by-frame manual work that can take days to accomplish," the researchers added.
And existing methods to automate the process "typically suffer from facial identity loss, poor resolution, and unstable results across subsequent video frames."
The success of movie franchises has made aging and de-aging effects highly in demand: A significantly younger Harrison Ford appears in the new trailer for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
But the effort is not easy -- or always successful: Making Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci look youthful in 2019's The Irishman was exorbitantly expensive, Engadget reported. And the attempt to de-age Jeff Bridges more than a quarter-century for 2010's Tron: Legacy was described as "hilarious."
The chief problem has been that collecting enough images of people getting older to successfully train an AI has been "nearly impossible to accomplish," the researchers wrote.
So they used StyleGAN2, a program that creates artificial faces, to produce thousands of examples of people aged from 18 to 85. With that data, they were able to develop algorithms about how appearances typically alter over time -- where wrinkles appear, for example, and how jaws begin to sag.
Artificial faces aged using Disney's neural network FRAN.
Disney Resa
The simple and intuitive technology "provides artists with localized control and creative freedom to direct and fine-tune the re-aging effect," the team said.
They believe the results are good enough that a film or TV show production team could use FRAN to present an aged or de-aged performer with a variety of expressions, using multiple lighting conditions and viewpoints.
A synthetic face generated by FRAN is aged and de-aged by Disney researchers.
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