James George

I’m pleased to share that I’ve been promoted to Director of Engineering at Adobe, after two years serving as Principal Scientist/Architect. I am honored to now lead the team building the next-generation realtime video rendering and playback engine for Adobe Premiere. The inner workings of high-performance video engines are deeply abstract. Engineering them is a dark art that takes a very special expertise. We must carefully evolve the intricate technology while keeping pace with rapid developments in AI and hardware capabilities. I’m grateful for the chance to work with the capable, dedicated and very fun collection of experts on my team. We have crazy high standards and an ambitious roadmap to bring our customers’ experience to the next level. Below I used Firefly to imagine what a video playback engine would look like if implemented using analog computing and projected light technology. While I can’t actually see our engine, I envision it looking something like this if it were to exist physically.

Digital snapshots from Beijing hutongs, 2008. 3D conversion via Marble (World Labs). I found a trove of photos I shot between 2007–2009, when I was pushing off graduation by taking months-long trips to China for a chaotic internship at Google’s Shanghai office. It was right as the Party was tightening the screws on Search and YouTube, which led to the gig ending and me with no plans. I convinced myself I was learning more on the streets than in college. I learned Mandarin by drifting through Shanghai on a bicycle, crashing with Chinese friends I met through language exchange.  One trip, I spent several nights shooting time-lapse in the Beijing hutongs: the quiet alleyways inside the city’s oldest ring. Back then, the mood between the U.S. and China felt optimistic. Things were opening up in the lead-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics and Expo 2010. The streets were transforming with new construction everywhere, erasing history and displacing families in the name of progress toward western appeal. Now I’m watching an adversarial arms race over graphics cards and foundational models unfold. It seems these AI models are capable of bringing my memories to life as fully inhabitable worlds. But the fragmented, hollow scenes only remind me that there is little hope that the warmth I shared with friends in China will return to our nations’ politics anytime soon.

Thrilled and grateful to present at the @movingimagenyc LAB event, Ten Years in Immersive Documentary. A perfect opportunity to honor the amazing work of the volumetric filmmaking community and our own work at Scatter. Thanks to everyone who came out! Lots of love to my co-presenters @yasminelayat @chrismilk @thecinematic and especially @gaboarora for organizing!

I’m loving the ease and flexibility of Gaussian splats. Starting simple with this workflow to create super high resolution (16,200 x 10,800) prints. The best part is the manual clean up process which is so sculptural and hands on. Splats are a fantastic digital material that bring the photorealistic density of meshes with the flexibility of point clouds

Red River Corals, Idaho. Growing up I spent summers at my grandparents homestead in rural Idaho. The family ran an outfitting business to equip hunting parties with lodging, horses and mules for expeditions into the surrounding wilderness. My sister worked there every summer with our cousins tending to the horses and cleaning cabins. As I grew, I gravitated more toward video games and digital art. I admired my sister and dad for their rough cowboy lifestyle, but I couldn’t keep up. I was the timid little brother who had one too many falls off a horse. Over the years, I thought I had been afraid of the danger of wilderness. Wolves, grizzlies and moose were always looming in the distance at the edge of the prairie. But it was never a chance encounter with wild animals that caused harm. Reflecting, I now understand that it was the rustic aggression required to live in nature that I couldn’t take. Decades later I’m reconnecting with the family history through my preferred methods of documentary photography, 3D reconstitution, and immersive media to begin telling a generational story. Depicted: 8 Gaussian Splats rendered for metallic print mounted on acrylic, dimensions 24in x 16in

In 2025 I’m making a commitment to resume personal creative work. I’m inspired to make small, fun, playful experiments in the cracks of the hours I have available to myself. This year has been a huge transition. Selling Scatter to Evercoast. Learning a new role as Principal Scientist at Adobe. Growing into my role as a parent. Time for my own creative expression has had to take a backseat. 10 years ago my creative work transformed into a company that completely consumed my attention. My instinct is to make big, ambitious projects that are medium bending, genre breaking, critically acclaimed, etc. But this requires a type of risk taking that is not available to me right now. I’m at a new point in life where I want to find a voice and satisfaction in small projects. I believe I’ll get back to making boundary breaking creative work someday. To be prepared for that opportunity, I’m sharpening my instincts by resuming a regular practice. I hope to have fun and reconnect with a community along the way.

I am thrilled to share that I have joined @adobe as Principal Scientist to lead architecture of Premiere Pro and After Effects real time video processing engine. I’m excited to begin my next chapter as a steward of the very creative tool that started my journey many years ago. This is a photo from 2001 at age 16 in Idaho making videos using Premiere 6.0. I had saved up a whole year earning minimum wage washing dishes to buy a Sony MiniDV Handycam to make skate videos with my friends. Software like Premiere, Photoshop and Bryce 3D opened my eyes to the power of creative applications. I found my artistic voice in those tools. I loved making digital art so much that I was inspired to make my own creative tools. That passion led me to create the first volumetric video software RGBD Toolkit back in 2011, and later in 2014 founding @scatterco and inventing #Depthkit. Depthkit is still the most widely used tool for creating volumetric video. I’m proud to have pioneered an entirely new category of creative experience in volumetric filmmaking. My team and I were granted patents, won an Emmy, and were nominated for two more. We landed huge customers like HBO, Accenture and the US Department of Energy. Most importantly, we built and nurtured a vibrant community of tens of thousands of creators who also produced award-winning interactive experiences that blurred the lines between video games and film. Depthkit was recently acquired by @Evercoast , where I have joined as an advisor. Depthkit and its community are in fantastic hands. I’m grateful for CEO @bininunez trust and am extremely bullish on Evercoast’s vision leading the volumetric industry in breaking through with Generative 3D. Now it’s time for me to go back to my roots in digital video at Adobe. Generative AI for video and audio is changing how artists tell stories. The creative community is on the cusp of ushering in the next revolution in creative software tools. Adobe is perfectly positioned to deliver the rugged workflows and advanced research to harness the power of generative video and create meaningful narrative experiences.

📣 Huge news: @depthkit has been acquired by @evercoast ! Just in time for the growing demand for spatial and volumetric video, the new partnership is bringing incredible combined technology to our community of creators. Read the full announcement link in bio. For years, Scatter and Evercoast have been leading the industry just a few blocks away from each other in Brooklyn, New York. I’ve always admired Evercoast CEO Ben Nunez product vision and relentless commitment to quality. It’s an honor to join forces with the best in the business. The new combined company makes the largest customer base in volumetric video. That community’s support is guiding us toward the exciting future of Generative AI modeling and advanced neural rendering. As I close this last chapter with gratitude, I cannot wait to show you what’s in store.

Happy the birthday to my love and best friend @lisbyk ! Your humor, kindness, sense of presence, incisive intellect, effortless beauty, and bold ambition are endlessly inspiring. You are surrounded by friends and family who love you without limit.

2023 personal photo/video round up from a whirlwind year running @scatterco building @depthkit 🌪️. Here are my stand out moments in 2023. 1+2 Host @cleoabram , and guest star Marques Brownlee (aka @mkbhd ) and me onset at @zerospace for the "Huge if True" episode "We Tested Sci-Fi Movie Tech". H/t @gorociao for the intro! 3 Relative Arts / EMME Studio Lookbook (@korinaemmerich @relativeartsnyc ) - Depthkit Studio has never looked better. 4 Volumetric livestreaming with me and @sophsta_vr on the virtual stage for the 3rd Annual @webxrawards 5 Montage by @vrcapturesa of the Depthkit Studio participant projects and experiments taken at @electric_south African XR Realities Lab sponsored by @meta and with in-kind support from @depthkit 6 @eartheater augmented reality hologram cover, captured with Depthkit for @crackmagazine April issue 7 Poster for VR film "Songs for a Passerby" directed by @studionergens that won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice Immersive Film Festival. 8 Cameo of yours truly mega-desking with Depthkit during an ABC news segment about the visual effects films used in the Oscars Nominees 9+10 Snaps of the product interface enhancements released to Depthkit Studio this year. Over 2023 we 10x'd both setup and post-production speed, while almost doubling quality. The biggest thank you to @mrcoryallen , @timscaffidi and all customers for sharing the persistence in vision for all that accessible volumetric video capture can enable.

2023 went by in a snap 🫰🏻💥- top 10 moments: 🏔️ Hiking in the Adirondacks with Chloe-Maxine and Lisbeth 🥳 Chloe-Maxine's first birthday 👏 Chloe-Maxine's first steps into toddler mode 🍳 Relaxing brunch at Tom's Diner for Lisbeth's Birthday (yes, the one from Seinfeld) 😂 Nana and Pops visit New York and Chloe-Maxine is overwhelmed with joy 👩‍👩‍👧 Three generations with both of Chloe-Maxine's incredible inspiring Grandmothers. 💍 Sneaking out for a night on the town for our anniversary. 🏖️ A few lazy beach days in Litchfield, SC 🇪🇸 Gaudi architecture tour in Spain ❤️‍🩹 Harrowing night spent in the emergency room way up in Utica New York

We are in the midst of a revolution in volumetric capture and rendering techniques that go beyond the limitations photogrammetry and textured meshes. Gaussian Splats and Neural Radiance Fields demonstrate how image-based rendering can represent view-dependent phenomena like translucency in glass, hair and specular reflections. While there is much to work to do to efficiently produce, edit and distribute, and efficiently render these new formats, the bar has been raised for what is possible to capture and represent in volumetric 3D. #volumetricfilmmaking #volumetriccapture #neuralradiancefields #gaussiansplatting #machinelearning #aiml #xr #ar #vr