Perforce charges $500 for training training videos.. and it's AI narrated

https://training.perforce.com/learn/courses/535/p4-helix-core-user-basic

by TZubiri • 4 days ago

53 86 4 days ago

training.perforce.com

TZubiri2• 4 days ago

I was like 10 minutes deep into the free version when I noticed that a couple of weird things could be attributed to the 'narrator' being a ChatGPT like speech synth.

1- The voice is not consistent across different videos. 2- Once in a while it does that thing where it sounds like a demon and changes the voice profile to a completely different person for a little while. 3- There's weird... pauses... that in some cases make sense, but in some cases it's just completely non-sensical "this is a very useful... feature" or "looking at your issue that you are... raising to them", it sounds like someone reading a Charles Bukowski poem. This happens the most often, once you see it it's like those optical illusion things where you can't unsee it.

One cannot spend too much time evaluating products, and I feel that I have seen all that I needed to see, how good can a product of a company that does this be? And to charge 500$ for the complete course?

I don't quite get it. Like is it really easier to generate a video with fake AI narration than just narrating it yourself? I think it would even be harder, only to make your reputation and brand 1000% worse? And the act of showcasing a free version of the course to 'get a taste of it', when in reality I'm guessing most would see the red flags and back away, thanks I guess.

I just don't get it.

exe342• 4 days ago

If it's all ai generated, it's only fair if I use STT to convert it and have an LLM summarise it back to what might have been the original bullet points used to make the training video. Or just send me the prompt.

fluoridation2• 3 days ago

It's TTS. That doesn't mean the text wasn't written by a human.

Hnrobert42• 3 days ago

Having made training videos, doing a voice recording is a huge pain in the ass. So easy to flub and have to edit or re-record. Hard to maintain even pace. I haven't tried AI generated voices, but doing it manually is difficult.

nubg• 4 days ago

The problem being? If the content is good enough and the narration fine (it took you a while to even notice), why does it matter?

Like is it really easier to generate a video with fake AI narration than just narrating it yourself?

Yes?

Also, they can iterate quicker (don't have to rerecord if content changes).

MiroslavPokorny• 4 days ago

Maybe its me, but having a human narrate the text is one part of a guarantee that shows an actual team of a few experts took the time to prepare the text and review the finished product.

jstanley• 4 days ago

I too judge books by their covers.

B-Con• 4 days ago

A human reader for a popular product is generally a paid actor who reads the script nearly verbatim, not a domain expert, so it has no bearing on the technical quality of the script.

iamsaitam• 4 days ago

Commitment. The chances it's sloppy content are much higher when the presentation costs very little.

paganel• 4 days ago

The problem is that I personally have a visceral hate against AI-voices.

wkjagt2• 4 days ago

Same for me. And it's not even rational. Even if I know the information is good, I'm just so put off by it that I am unable to follow.

dolebirchwood• 4 days ago

I've subscribed to paid courses in the past, and sometimes the speaker's voice would be so off-putting that it would really drag down the quality of the experience (looking at you, Steve Kinney). I'd have paid extra to have an option to replace with an AI voice.

dspillett• 4 days ago

If the content is good enough and the narration fine (it took you a while to even notice), why does it matter?

I tend to assume that the production has been cheaper but they aren't passing any of the saving on to me. They are pushing the human out of the loop for the bottom line, and there is no benefit to anyone but the company.

ML/AI is a bonus for society in many things like medical scanning, helping the blind interact with the world, etc, but nobody is using AI voiceovers like this example for anything other than helping the company's bottom line by avoiding paying people.

The great displacement isn't just coming, it is here and happening all around us. I for one am doing what (very little) I can to avoid helping it along and that includes refusing AI generated content wherever practical. I'll accept it from a small local business that possibly has little other choice ATM, because of they pay for someone to do the job they'll probably use generative AI anyway, but not from a larger company.

tjpnz• 4 days ago

It's a strong signal that the person or organization "creating" said video views the person consuming it with open contempt.

TZubiri2• 3 days ago

I would argue it's fraudulent. There's loads of text to speech synthesizers that work just fine but sound robotic. The huge technological advancement of tihs technology is that it 'sounds human', even if it isn't.

LLMs are great, but we should stop bundling fake image generation and fake voice generation with it and calling it AI.

If you truly believe that there's no problem, and that it's fine, then use a TTS technology that didn't spend a gigajillion dollars on trying to sound like it's not what it actually is.

It's like selling soy pellets with synthetic meat flavour and making it look like meat and selling it in butcher shops and not clarifying that it's not actually meat.

On the one hand, I personally believe that meat is better, yes, but on the other hand, that's not what I am going to discuss and it's a disservice to argue about how meat is better, all you need to know is that if you try to pull this off, you will be indistinguishable from unethical fraudsters. Not saying you or Perforce are one at this point, we are all dazzled and confused by the technology, but down the line, when regulations settle in, there will be no gray area, do not do this shit if you care about your reputation. Only do this shit if you want to make quick bucks during during the boom and before the bust.

ChrisMarshallNY6• 4 days ago

If you are using Perforce as an enterprise system, $500 is peanuts. Perforce can get pricey.

We used to be a Perforce shop, in my last job.

However, I continue to be amazed that Perforce survived Git. I assume its ability to handle large binaries has been what saved it.

I seem to remember an HN posting, some time ago, about a new system, aimed at creatives, and that handles big binaries. It looked fairly good, but not sure how it’s doing.

nylonstrung• 4 days ago

You're probably thinking of Lore by Epic Games which was announced recently and seems to be well-received so far and natively supported by Unreal Engine

ChrisMarshallNY6• 4 days ago

Yup. That’s it.

I remember when one of the engines (either Unreal or Unity), shipped with Perforce included.

forrestthewoods• 4 days ago

However, I continue to be amazed that Perforce survived Git.

Virtually 100% of non-indie devs use Perforce.

Is Perforce good? Ehhh not really. It’s been stagnant for 15 years.

Is Git capable of meeting game dev needs? It’s not enough close. No Git LFS does not count.

Personally I think even Git is mediocre at best. But it’s all modern devs know. So there’s been very little progress towards version control that doesn’t suck. Very sad.

Hopefully Epic’s Lore is good. Low odds. But not zero! And hey at least they’re trying.

LtWorf6• 4 days ago

No no. I know SVN and mercurial as well. Git is better. And normally when someone pushes a huge file it means they compiled something on their machine and are placing it on git, which is something that raises all the alarm bells for me.

ChrisMarshallNY6• 4 days ago

Virtually 100% of non-indie GAME devs use Perforce.

FTFY. Git is likely the system used by almost every non game pro shop out there. Paranoid ones self-host.

Linus changed the world twice, and Git may have more impact, overall, than Linux (arguably).

Not bad, for a 10-day yak-shave project.

lazypenguin• 4 days ago

Agreed, in my experience VCS still an unsolved problem for gaming. Git/SVN/Perforce are picked not because they’re the best but because there’s really nothing else. My team uses git for code and SVN for assets and it sort of sucks. I’m keeping an eye on lore and while it has great potential it’s still immature and under resourced (seems like side project at Epic from what insights I can gather)

dijit7• 4 days ago

not sure why this is flagged, the accidental omission of “game” devs can’t be it. it’s extremely true that game devs either use perforce, or they’re trying to use SVN because their company is cheap… perforce is strictly superior to SVN and miles better than GitLFS- and they’ve been sitting on that fact for over a decade.

I think they must have some kind of patent protection because their software is buggy too.. i have no idea how this company can survive with what is, honestly, an unfinished product and a directionless, soulless and bloated organisation attached to it…

… but it is the industry standard in game dev and automotive …

what a lucky position to be in.

invader2• 3 days ago

Virtually 100% of non-indie devs use Perforce.

Not really. There are better products out there.

When I worked at Triple-A studio, we used Alienbrain, which is specifically tailored for huge binary versioning with previews and stuff. We had terabytes of assets, and Alienbrain handled it well, including seamless integration into pipelines - something a stock git or Perforce would never achieve.

momocowcow• 4 days ago

Im amazed git survived at all. Such a mess of complexity and exotic jargon to abstract away something that should be inherently simple. After 20 years I can use it with ease thanks to llms.

superb_dev• 4 days ago

I genuinely think you have to be trying to not pick up git after 20 years. Have a little more faith in yourself, it's not super complicated

Hendrikto• 4 days ago

That just means you did not really try for 20 years.

pxmpxm• 3 days ago

I love that comments like these incept million tech bro look-at-my-clout responses for having learned some subset of the magic incantations to make git barely usable... As if you get an award for mental heuristics to put up with a poorly architected product with leaky abstraction all over.

If you mentions reflogs, i'm yelling bingo.

Bonus points: You have 3 new commits and in one there is a change in file.stupid, how many git bs things does it take to revert file.stupid to previous version while keeping the rest of the change set.

ndriscoll4• 3 days ago

It is inherently simple? It's a couple tools to manipulate a graph of snapshots. You can make commits, checkout commits, make/move references to commits, diff commits, and apply diffs to commits. If you wrap your head around that you've pretty much mastered it.

khurs• 4 days ago

I seem to remember an HN posting, some time ago...

Was 31 days ago... and it's Epic backed rather than a sole indie dev so likely to mature.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48571081

jordand• 4 days ago

Yeah there's no good alternative Version Control right now that can handle large binaries. And for Lore from Epic Games, while it's still 2-3 years away from being suitable for Game productions to replace Perforce, there's genuine interest and excitement about using/testing it (in some cases, studios are spending tens of thousands on P4 licenses they don't really want). Lore is already used at scale in UEFN across a huge user base so the core tech behind it is solid and trusted.

sam_lowry_• 3 days ago

git lfs?

a-dub• 4 days ago

If you are using Perforce as an enterprise system, $500 is peanuts. Perforce can get pricey.

i think it was $600/seat back when i paid attention (20+ years ago). don't remember if it was perpetual or annual.

However, I continue to be amazed that Perforce survived Git. I assume its ability to handle large binaries has been what saved it.

yeah i think it lives on in games probably mostly through inertia. last i looked the company itself had shifted away from p4 classic to some git wrapper stuff.

i've never actually seen it but my understanding is that google's custom internal system (piper) basically is a reimplemented scalable p4+g4 wrapper.

i always thought the workspace mapping and workspace template model in p4 was pretty elegant, especially for things like embedded platforms where you could opt in and out various subtrees which made very large device trees/bsps more manageable.

also they were the first widely deployed vcs system that attempted to be efficient (server side indices for local tree state and communication with the server in deltas rather than forcing complete rescans for every operation that often involved talking to the server as each file was scanned)

aitchnyu• 3 days ago

Feels like a captive audience. My tiny company paid a buggy Github competitor even in 2019 and they hiked prices like crazy. They did have a brand new project that deployed multiple projects to our own VPS with zero downtime.

blagie• 3 days ago

However, I continue to be amazed that Perforce survived Git. I assume its ability to handle large binaries has been what saved it.

Curiously enough, the git data model is ideal for handling large binaries. The place it crashes-and-burns is the user space.

sigsergv• 2 days ago

Also very important feature of p4 - very flexible permissions system. You cannot achieve nothing similar with git.

vasco• 4 days ago

And a coffee place near me charges €10 for a strawberry matcha drink, but we don't have to purchase either.

lifestyleguru• 4 days ago

You keep hearing and saying that you don't have to go there, then suddenly there is nowhere else to go because all places are like this.

uf00lme• 4 days ago

This tends to be the kind of thing you can get thrown in for free when negotiating. It's highly unlikely to be a deal breaker for anyone buying Perforce, if anything they may have done this to stop annoying cheap customers buying from them.

tosh• 3 days ago

here is a free version of the first 4 chapters

https://training.perforce.com/learn/courses/536/p4-helix-cor...

Perforce charges $500 for training training videos.. and it's AI narrated

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