Wednesday 29 July 2020

Behind the Scenes: Raised by Wolves

IBC

In Ridley Scott’s new sci-fi TV series, two androids arrive on an alien planet with a cargo of human embryos to start a new colony. Rather than go heavy on the high-concept visuals, Scott’s approach was almost the opposite: to document the character’s survival as if filming a lost tribe in the Amazon.  
“Ethnological” is how DP Ross Emery ACS describes it. “It’s almost like shooting a doc about a tribe never before encountered by western civilisation in Brazil or Papua New Guinea. How would you capture their day to day activity?” 
Raised By Wolves is one of the star acts scheduled to premiere on new streaming service HBO Max. Scott helmed the first two of the ten episodes (his first direction for TV) and exec produced Aaron Guzikowski’s script through his company Scott Free. 
“This is not a continuation of the world building done with Alien in Prometheus and Covenant but I still feel this is in the same universe as those worlds,” says Emery, who was second unit photographer on The Matrix and Alien: Covenant, and cinematographer on The Wolverine. “Ridley is particularly interested in using androids as an analogue for the human race and questioning what happens if we elevate the humans who created the androids to the status of god.” 
The notion of androids attaining consciousness is territory Scott has visited before, most poignantly in Blade Runner but also in the Alien series (from the duplicitous secret agent Ash in the original Alien to the hyper evolved but no less duplicitous David 8 in Alien: Covenant)
Scott’s regular cinematographer Dariusz Wolski lensed episode one with Emery sharing photography of the others with Erik Messerschmidt, ASC (Mindhunter). “No one has ever seen anything like this before,” Emery promises. 
“Ridley is the starting point,” Emery says. “He does a lot of concept designs and a lot of his own storyboards. You take that and learn the rules of the world he’s building.  For instance, this is a futuristic world where technology is unrecognisable to people from 2019.” 
Actors often compose their own back story for characters but Scott tasked wardrobe, props and production design to think about the origin of anything that would appear on screen. 
“If there was any technology that was noticeably familiar from our world then he would tell us to dial back,” Emery says. “We used a lot of artificial light sources, LEDs and organic plasmas, but made sure they had a backstory. How would that light have been brought to the planet? 
“It’s about not making any misstep. Stanley Kubrick ensured that on Barry Lyndon all the interiors were candlelit so that you can’t feel any light that’s artificial to the period. 
“We’re capturing the day to day life of characters who have been washed up on a desert island. They have only managed to take limited resources with them on the space craft so the world is a cross between extremely advanced and the stone age.”
Even the planet’s name, Keplar-22b, is the same as an actual exoplanet 600 light-years from Earth which NASA has identified as the most habitable yet discovered. 
“When you are selling a quite preposterous premise - which all sci-fi can be – then the more you can ground the vision the more believable it will be to the audience,” Emery says. 
He continues: “Everybody thinks sci-fi and then chooses the most hi-res 8K resolution and large format sensor they can find. We had a lot of discussion about that and decided we don’t want to be a crazy ‘out there’ world. You want it to feel that it has a human touch.”  
That led to the selection of ARRI Alexa as the main camera shooting 3.5K ARRIRAW through Panavision Super Speeds and Primos in a fairly conventional manner. 
“We had some Steadicam but we didn’t want a lot of crazy camera movement. Ridley felt a low-tech capture was more effective for the story.” 
The dramatized documentary approach, using zooms, also worked for the majority cast of child actors.  “You want them not to notice the camera and to deliver a natural performance,” Emery says. 
VR rig With some scenes requiring more than a dozen characters with dialogue, Emery had the editing process on his mind too. “Manufacturing intricate camera moves can end up boxing the editor in in terms of how they want to tell the story,” he says. 
However, flashback sequences told from the android’s point of view, were shot with a VR rig of seven 4K GoPro cameras in 360-degrees. 
“It’s a way of capturing their world view without appearing like that of the Terminator,” he explains. “The VR rig gave an aspherical view of the set, like an ultra-wide 1mm lens. Once you move it through a space you are changing perspective all the time and you have the ability to see the actor’s ears and feet and what is directly above them. It took a lot of unlearning traditional camera rules.”  
The VR sequences were used in post to zoom in, pan or tilt into any part of the image to convey the android’s attempt to rationalise what has happened in the past. 
Subtle shooting Raised by Wolves was shot in studios at Cape Town and on location in a remote desert location north of the city.  To reduce the VFX count, therefore the budget, they favoured a 100m x 30m painted backdrop, over bluescreen. 
“That meant we could use mist and smoke effects, which is something you can’t do so well on bluescreen,” Emery says. 
As the story develops, the camera framing alters subtly too to reflect the android’s growing awareness of their existence. 
“They are not necessarily becoming human but as the AI experiences more it begins to process the emotional reactions from the humans. There’s one essential question: are android’s capable of emotion? The answer is that they can process the stimulai the same way as humans and come up with a reaction to it which, in its simplest terms, is that of an emotion.” 
To chart this development, the camera shifts progressively closer to the performances of Amanda Collin and Abubakar Salim as Mother and Father. 
“We see them first on long wide lenses but progressively we shoot them more like a human being, or a character in an emotional state,” Emery says. 
Working with Ridley Scott is a dream come true for the Australian whose recalls being taken to see Blade Runner as a 16-year old by his father (the cinematographer Ossie Emery ACS). 
“That film got me wanting to become a cinematographer,” he says. “Getting to work on Alien: Covenant and to shoot the alien with all its teeth and gel was such a buzz. 
“In my job I get to watch an awful lot of films and it’s remarkable how the power of an image stays with you. I think that’s a particular talent that photographers and cinematographers have, a powerful visual memory. Even if you’re out shopping for milk and you notice the way the sunlight comes through the window, or how a car’s headlights turn around a corner, you’ll file it away and sometime somewhere you can recall it for use in a scene.” 

John Brawley interview: URSA Mini Pro and ALEXA join forces on The Great


RedShark News

The Great is not your usual stuffy period drama. It depicts the rise of Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) in the Russian court of Emperor Peter (Nicholas Hoult) and doesn’t censor the vanity, the profanity, the violence and the grotesque.
The 10x 60’ satirical drama originated on Hulu and arrives on Channel 4 this summer.
Created by Tony McNamara, who wrote the aburdist Oscar-winning wart and all royal feature The Favourite), The Great is proudly anti-history, anti-BBC Drama department.
“Visually, we don’t want an audience to expect Pride and Prejudice when they’re going to get something between the Princess Bride [ap1] and Blackadder,” says cinematographer John Brawley (Queen of the South). “One way to do that is through camera which meant leaning away from those epic crane shots and beautiful staging of the genre where everything is packaged and presented to the camera. We didn’t want it to look pretty. It is meant to feel contemporary and naturalistic.
He adds, “The hardest challenge in a way was trying to get a lot of the set dressers and wardrobe to go against their instincts and training to create something super meticulous and accurate when we wanted the opposite of that. In episode 5 for instance, Peter is jogging and he is basically wearing a hoody or tracksuit which is clearly not conventional.”
Show colorist Paul Staples, who works at London’s Encore Post, says, “Tony’s direction was not to make it look over graded or processed. He wanted naturalism over pictorialism and not ‘chocolate boxy’ or Disney fantasy in any way. That’s quite tricky, we as colourists always look for the beauty, but the brief dictated I stop just short of fantastical!"

Unconventional coverage
The Great is principally shot on the Alexa SXT Plus, a decision Brawley inherited from the pilot shot nearly a year earlier by Anette Haellmigk.
He took three SXT models combined with Cooke S5 primes and with Zeiss Super Speeds for occasional shots that needed a lighter weight lens. He shot ARRI RAW on SXT at 3.2K framed for 2:1.
Brawley also worked in a significant number of shots filmed on the Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro G2. He recorded BMD RAW in RAW’s Q0 compression scheme, again with 2:1 aspect ratio for handheld coverage.
“I’ll do a pass of some unconventional coverage which is often me walking with a small camera like the G2 and using it to get close up and intimate with the actors,” Brawley explains. “Because they are very aware when the camera is on them, pushing into their face, they feel it’s like being in a live audience and they start tailoring their performances to that style of shooting.”

A Pocket Cinema Camera 4K was also used for shots in tight corners. “Because of way the beds were constructed on set - they were sort of part of the walls - we couldn’t move them away, often when we needed to shoot sex scenes in the show, so we needed a really, really small camera.”
Matching footage and HDR
Matching the footage in post required Staples and Brawley to create a LUT for the Alexa and another for the URSA which were passed both through a normalising or base LUT.
“The idea is that we can make a specific LUT for a specific camera but when you shoot them in the same circumstances which we did on this show they will look pretty similar in the edit and it doesn’t leap out at you as dramatically different,” Brawley says.
Staples worked from the RAW files in a colour managed project in Resolve for the grade. “During the pre-shoot stage, John and I had created LUTs that accurately matched the look he wanted and how the colour management would handle the different formats,” he says. “When it came to grade, I used a pared back HDR version show LUT and for the URSA I had a correction node with primary balance, saturation, Hue V Hue etc and I would just put that onto the clip and it would get me very close. You do still have to grade it, obviously, as there is a slight difference but both cameras graded in really well, again, made smoother by diligent preparation and testing in the pre shoot stage. Resolve handled it beautifully.”
Matters were complicated by being an HDR deliverable - Brawley’s first.
 “Even the best DIT set-ups still don’t have HDR monitors. We toyed with having an HDR suite with a scope and other tools near set and we looked at using some consumer grade HDR TVs but, in the end, once we’d done all the initial camera tests, I noticed that the big difference for me was the way I exposed the image.”
He elaborates, “Conventional exposure theory would suggest that with a camera like the Alexa that is ISO 800 it will reproduce a mid-grey as a mid-grey but if you set up for that in HDR then you are going to find objects in the frame over exposed. Candle flames, for example, tend to lose their color and can clip out very quickly and look unnatural. So, what I came up with as a solution, specifically because there are candles in every shot, was to expose from the top down.
“My starting point was not to over expose the candles in the HDR grade and let everything fall in underneath that. Since candles are usually the brightest object in the scene and I wanted to retain detail in them I began by setting the exposure so that the candles weren’t clipping with everything else being lit up to those levels.”
“I’d like to say it was hard for me to match but it really wasn’t,” says Staples. “Often with the windows you want them to clip anyway. You want to see a bit of detail but you’d let it go because it’s just a studio wall outside.”
Brawley agrees, “I fell in love with HDR. It is very hard to back to SDR grading if you’ve been looking at an HDR image. You get sucked in by the dynamic range but it’s the subtleties of the colour and extra transparency to the image that comes from more beautiful rendering of tones and midtones that gets you. It feels like there is so much more room to work in and you ‘re seeing more nuance in the image.”
One issue Staples had to keep his eye on was marrying Catherine/Fanning’s skin tones in an episode in which she develops a skin rash.
“This wasn’t a rash that appeared and stayed constant, it develops over the course of the episode, peaks and then fades and is part of the storytelling. The way the light hit her skin made the color particularly difficult to match so I made quite a lot of bezier shapes and intricate keying to pull out and adjust what was there. 
“It’s a fine line because you will always get the note ‘I can’t see it’ – and very quickly you can then get it to look overdone or as if someone’s painted it on and so it can easily look like a mistake.”


Monday 27 July 2020

Dawn of the super aggregator

IBC
The TV business is on the verge of being taken over by super aggregators with pay-tv in pole positioned to lead and SVODs holding the balance of power.
Tier 1 pay-TV operators and market leading SVODs are set to join forces in a delicate contractual battle to super-serve the consumer with super-massive libraries of streaming content and linear channels in a consolidated TV experience.
“Aggregation is on every major pay-tv operator’s agenda and that is a fundamental change from 12-18 months ago,” says Guy Bisson, research director at Ampere Analysis. “There is almost universal recognition of the need and importance of integrating streaming services as part of the pay-tv offer.”
When Netflix first came to town, SVODs were considered the enemy of pay-tv. Later there was a realisation that streaming services were complementary rather than cannibalistic to their business.
“More recently, that idea has been undercut as SVODs have begun to take market share as the primary means of consuming multichannel multi-source video,” says Bisson. “That trend has accelerated under Covid-19.”
In one sense super aggregation is not new. The history of pay-tv has been one of securing affiliate relationships with content providers and channels for carriage fees or revenue share.
“Super aggregation is an evolution of the distribution technology and of the consumer’s attitude to the way they consume content,” Bisson says. “The difference now is that operators have competition as aggregators from all sorts of places that they have never had before.”
Video platform provider Kaltura makes a distinction between super aggregators and universal syndicators. The former are pay-tv operators wanting to play the aggregator (not too dissimilar from their previous role) and universal syndicators are content providers (or broadcasters like ITV or BBC with international distribution) wanting to push their content everywhere including into super aggregator bundles.
The SVOD side of the bargainTop of the list of universal syndicators are Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ which Digital TV Research estimates will comprise 67% of global SVOD subs, outside of China, by 2025.
There are also device-led content aggregators like Apple and advertising supported aggregators like Roku. Into the mix come more studio-led SVODs like HBO+ and new ViacomCBS streamer due in 2021 and labelled a ‘house of brands’ and a ‘super service’ by CEO Bob Bakish.
“SVODs recognise the benefit of collaboration with pay-tv providers,” underlines Bisson. “The importance is clear for studio-led direct to consumer launches.”
HBO+, for instance, concluded a deal for carriage on Comcast just a day before launch. The recently announced bundling of Disney+ for subscribers to Sky’s SkyQ boxes is seen as a win all round.
Aggregation followed by disaggregation is also a cyclical trend within the TV business but the recent spiralling of OTT services is reckoned to have tipped the point where consumers can’t take any more.
“The last decade was the decade of the app but video services have grown to such an extent that consumer choice and confusion has grown,” agrees Gideon Gilboa, EVP product, solutions & marketing at Kaltura. “The phenomenon of super aggregators will be to re-engineer those different OTT services into new types of TV bundles.”
While aggregators exist in the form of the media streamers provided by Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire and Google Chromecast, they effectively operate as app platforms rather than providing integrated viewing experiences.
“Consumers would rather have an attractive price point and the convenience of someone aggregating for them,” Gilboa says.
Viewing of online video during lockdown has surged, and subscribers are paying for an average of four streaming services, up from three before Covid-19, but consumers are reacting against the inconvenience and cost of having to deal with a multitude of paywalls to get to the content they want.
“People have more time on their hands, and they’re trying new things,” says Kevin Westcott, vice chairman of Deloitte which counts more than 300 individual subscription-video platforms in the US. “But at the same time, we are seeing a significant amount of churn.”
The rate of churn for SVODs reached 35% (up 25% annually) in 2019, according to research firm Parks Associates. This is because the explosion of OTT services is adding complexity, confusion and “subscription fatigue” for consumers.
“Audiences are tired of navigating between multiple services to find what they are looking for,” says Alex Wilkinson, Head of Sales and Marketing, Accedo. “The current approach is not only time consuming, but it’s also difficult for the user to compare content across different providers. It is clear that when aggregation is executed well, it can and does provide the customer with a wider choice of content within a single experience.”
All of this is thought to be driving consumers to look for a service that can manage all their billing and all their content under one roof. If that sounds like the old pay-TV, there’s a crucial difference.
“The concept of lock-in has gone away,” says Gideon Gilboa, EVP Product, Solutions & Marketing at Kaltura. “It has happened in data, voice, broadband and now in content. Consumers now have the expectation and the habit to change services.”
The pay-tv propositionIf pay-tv has come to terms with working with SVODs rather than purely against them, the leading operators also find themselves in a strong position to take on the mantle of super aggregator.
“Operators have vast subscriber bases, consumer trust and will have a key role in this ecosystem,” Wilkinson says. “By providing easy access to a selection of video services and by providing a superior cross-service user experience, we’ll see operators gradually regaining some of their previous role in this industry.”
Telcos have a particular edge in being able to bundle content with broadband, even mobile, and smart home services into multi-play packages. Mobile operators with 5G networks are likely to take this edge even further by competing head to head with fixed line providers plumbed with DOCSIS.3.
“Operators are well placed to become super aggregators,” says Adam Davies, senior manager product marketing at Synamedia. “They have the audiences, the relationships and the route to market, and let’s not downplay the fact that they have some very high value content as well. Importantly, no-one can deliver live, linear TV like the service provider with the massive scale of broadcast.
“The service provider is able to blend live linear services with the best of the SVOD services,” he adds. “They can offer enhancements, for example around catch-up and cloud DVR, and they can offer a single, federated search across multiple services, bringing convenience and simplicity to consumers.”
In addition, points out Jamie Mackinlay, SVP global sales and marketing at Amino, operators do not need to negotiate new content rights.
“The rights are negotiated by the streaming services themselves and the content is easily available to paying subscribers. The operator has now expanded their content library without the heavy lifting of protracted negotiations.”
By offering up more content there are more opportunities for engagement leading to greater data sets, which in turn helps executives make better decisions about investments in content and technology. It’s a virtuous cycle but the strategy is not as simple as it sounds.
“The reason is that streaming services are not particularly willing to share their data,” says Bisson. “Without data, it is very difficult for anyone to properly construct a compelling and comprehensive aggregation strategy. For example, you need access to metadata including navigational and behavioural information to serve better recommendations.”
Finding the balance between economics and control of the end customer is the big debate raging in the industry, according to Paul Pastor, chief business officer of Firstlight Media and co-founder of aggregation service TVPASS.
“Warner’s content is not on Roku or Amazon,” he says. “It is a proxy fight which will be repeated across the industry. SVODs don’t want to give pay-tv operators huge revenue share and operators don’t want to be disintermediated by having consumers go direct to content. It’s along those extremes that the battle is being fought.”
Pastor believes the heavyweight trio of Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ hold a huge advantage. The depth and weight of their content portfolios will continue to drive eyeballs, driving data, which feeds the machine.
“The problem with the super aggregator model for other SVODs is that the search and discovery algorithms will show consumers the content which is most distributed and most watched. If two thirds of the market outside China is controlled by Netflix, Amazon and Disney, any search on a super aggregator platform will be skewed in their favour.”
No-one has cracked the super aggregator model yet, says Bisson. The cycle of super aggregation is still in early infancy.
“The challenge for the aggregator is to maintain their own identity while offering the widest choice of products,” Davies continues. “This may sound like a pipe dream, but we see it in other industries – supermarkets have some of the strongest brands globally yet many of the products they stock aren’t their own.
“Consumers aren’t just used to aggregation, they demand it.”

Saturday 25 July 2020

What Is the Interoperable Master Format? A Closer Look at IMF

copywritten for Avid

Content demand for online platforms and digital viewing devices is ever-increasing, leaving teams to face complicated delivery processes, increased costs, and long production timelines. The Interoperable Master Format (IMF) addresses these challenges by offering a standard package that simplifies the creation of multiple tailored versions of the same content for different audiences.
IMF has existed for several years, and more editing tools are making it easier to export footage to meet IMF delivery specs. Yet, there’s still considerable confusion about it within the industry. This guide will provide a high-level overview of how IMF works and the unique industry challenges that make it a necessity.

Defining the Interoperable Master Format

IMF is a file-based framework held up by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) as standard 2067-2. It’s designed to simplify the file exchange process by creating a single master file for distribution. That means distribution of content between businesses, however, not for delivery directly to the consumer.
IMF is actually an evolution of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP), which has been the standard for distributing theatrical content since 2012. Over the last few years, IMF has been adapted to suit the particular challenges of broadcast and online distribution. Specifically, it’s made it easier to manage and process multiple versions of a film or promo to fit, say, airline edits, special editions, alternate languages, or territorial compliance.
IMF gives teams a solid workflow that helps them stay consistent—even across different countries—as they tackle QC, mastering, and versioning for productions.

How IMF Works

Instead of a single master file that holds a particular version of a program, an IMF package contains all the essence (audio and video) and the metadata (including subtitles and captions) associated with a piece of content. These are treated as individual assets.
When combined in various ways, these assets create different versions of the content in a composition, such as the Chinese theatrical cut or an airline edit. The Composition Playlist (CPL) defines the playback timeline for the composition. Prime Focus Technologies uses a great analogy: if the assets are the ingredients, then the CPL is the recipe.
An IMF can contain unlimited CPLs. Each represents a unique combination of the files contained in the package, such as different cuts of a program. The CPL isn’t designed to contain media itself—instead, it references external track files that contain the actual essence. This structure makes it possible to manage multiple compositions and process them without duplicating common essence files.
Since IMF can help create many different distribution formats from the same composition, it needs a set of technical instructions to keep it all in order. Enter the Output Profile List (OPL). The OPL specifies the processing and transcoding instructions for the CPL, incorporating additional modifications like sizing, audio, and channel mixing to produce the finished product.

Why IMF Makes a Difference

IMF simplifies distribution workflows and lowers both costs and time to market. After all, it’s easier to manage and keep track of assets when there aren’t hundreds of standalone versions of a title.
For Netflix—one of the principal architects of IMF—a key benefit is reducing several of its most frustrating content tracking issues, namely those related to “versionitis” or the complexities of supplying multiple versions to global markets.
For example, Netflix explained that it frequently runs into problems when trying to sync dubbed audio and subtitles. To preserve the original creative intent, Netflix requests content in its original format, which includes the native aspect ratio and frame rate. Before IMF, Netflix might receive a 24 fps theatrical version of the video for a feature film—only to discover afterward that the dubbed audio and subtitles didn’t match, since they may have been created from the 29.97 fps version or even another version that was recut for international distribution. This is exactly the kind of asset management frustration IMF is meant to address, and ultimately it makes handling acquired content for compliance and outgoing programming for sales a lot more straightforward.
From the facility’s point of view, IMF circumvents the need to put together individual edits and ship them to each market. Rather than shipping a specific media file to Italy, for example, a facility just has to validate the editing list and send that to the territory. There, the appropriate version will be rendered from the master media files.
Not only will the data transfer be significantly less, but this cuts down on the processes involved, the duplication of effort within the team, and the number of files that have to be created due to varying file formats.
There are other benefits to incorporating IMF delivery into a facility’s pipeline. IMF offers improved video quality, since the distributor gets direct access to high-quality IMF masters. It’s also a way to reduce the opportunity for human error: since metadata is kept intact with physical assets, it’s able to be tracked and synced to at all times. IMF also offers a streamlined approach to making incremental changes like new logos and content revisions.

A Look at IMF Going Forward

IMF for broadcast and online was ratified by SMPTE in 2018, and it’s still maturing as a standard.
It went through revisions in June 2020 based on users’ feedback as they came across early teething problems. For example, the revisions address conflicts among various provisions, improve consistency for end users, and introduce additional features to the IMF system.
Bruce Devlin, SMPTE standards vice president, said the revisions “reflect increasing adoption of the standard and learned wisdom through operational practice across the theatrical and broadcast communities.”

Tuesday 21 July 2020

'The Great' Gets Punk With The Period, and It Rocks


NoFilm School

Audiences expecting traditional period drama with exquisitely detailed costumes, grand camera moves, and formal dialogue are in for a shock with The Great. 
The production values of the genre have been up-ended to deliver what showrunner and creator Tony McNamara (The Favourite) calls “punk history.”
“This is anti-history,” says cinematographer John Brawley (Queen of the South). “We are not historically accurate at all. Punk history is something we wanted to wear on our sleeve.”
The Hulu original starring Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult is a satire on the rise of Catherine the Great in the Russian court of Emperor Peter that doesn’t censor the vanity, the profanity, the violence and the grotesque. It revels in it, poking fun at the immature and depraved rulers at the turn of the 18th Century in a way that could apply equally to today’s political leaders.
“Visually, we don’t want an audience to expect Pride and Prejudice when they’re going to get something between the Princess Bride and Blackadder,” Brawley says. “One way to do that is through camera which meant leaning away from those epic crane shots and beautiful staging of the genre where everything is packaged and presented to the camera. We didn’t want it to look pretty. It is meant to feel contemporary and naturalistic.”
This conceit translated into production design. The palace sets (built at London’s 3 Mills Studios) are deliberately dishevelled and dirty with food left everywhere and people fornicating in corridors in the background.
“It has the feel of a run-down frat house,” Brawley describes. “We weren’t going to make any of the usual signatures of period shows. Where you’d have lots of smoke and atmosphere’s in a room, we started using less and less smoke. Where you might have sedate track and dolly camera moves, we went more and more handheld.”
Unconventional coverage
The Great is principally shot on the Alexa SXT Plus, a decision Brawley inherited from the pilot shot nearly a year earlier by Anette Haellmigk.
He took three SXT models combined with Cooke S5 primes and with Zeiss Super Speeds for occasional shots that needed a lighter weight lens. He shot ARRI RAW on SXT at 3.2K framed for 2:1.
Brawley also worked in a significant number of shots filmed on the Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro G2. He recorded BMD RAW in RAW’s Q0 compression scheme, again with 2:1 aspect ratio for handheld coverage he describes as a “condiment” or “seasoning” to the main blocking and staging.
“I’ll do a pass of some unconventional coverage which is often me walking with a small camera like the G2 and using it to get close up and intimate with the actors,” Brawley explains.
“It’s a technique I’ve been bringing to a few shows and started as a quick way to grab insert shots, such as a letter being opened or a gun being pulled out. Then I started doing coverage with it and following the actors. I noticed that, after a while, the actors started asking for those passes.
“It’s particularly useful when there’s a dramatic and introspective moment of a character thinking about something. When you want be to see the wheels turning it gives you access to a character’s internal thoughts.
“It’s also very rapid. I’ll usually do 2-3 takes in a row and because it’s at the end of the scene and the actors have expended a lot of energy with the conventional coverage, sometimes they are a bit more relaxed and often you get very natural, spontaneous moments.
“With 2-3 takes I can get 13-14 shots that I would never have the time in a normal TV schedule to get. Every now and then I might shoot a whole scene with that style of coverage. It can be very seductive.”
The style is not unique to the G2 of course but Brawley says he likes that the camera shoots Raw and finds that he can rig it with a smaller footprint than an Alexa Mini. Its built-in monitor means he can pivot for improvisational operation.
“For example, [on Fox medical drama The Resident] I could hold the camera above my head point straight down and still while holding the monitor I could pivot 180-degrees and be looking straight up at the surgeon. That shot would be really hard to do and take a lot of time to engineer normally but if I improvise it doesn’t cost anytime and it feels spontaneous.
“Also, if you want to shoot inserts or details to punctuate the coverage – when you want to draw the audience’s attention to something–shooting this way you are not forcing an edit. It’s a very efficient way to shoot that kind of coverage.”
Matching footage and HDR
Matching the footage in post required Staples and Brawley to create a LUT for the Alexa and another for the Ursa which were passed both through a normalising or base LUT.
“The idea is that we can make a specific LUT for a specific camera but when you shoot them in the same circumstances which we did on this show they will look pretty similar in the edit and it doesn’t leap out at you as dramatically different,” Brawley says.
Matters were complicated by being an HDR deliverable - Brawley’s first.
“I was terrified when I realised that there are no HDR monitors that you can take to set and don’t $30,000,” he says. “Even the best DIT set-ups still don’t have HDR monitors. We toyed with having an HDR suite with a scope and other tools near set and we looked at using some consumer grade HDR TVs but, in the end, once we’d done all the initial camera tests, I noticed that the big difference for me was the way I exposed the image.”
He elaborates, “Conventional exposure theory would suggest that with a camera like the Alexa that is ISO 800 it will reproduce a mid-grey as a mid-grey but if you set up for that in HDR then you are going to find objects in the frame over exposed. Candle flames, for example, tend to lose their color and can clip out very quickly and look unnatural. So, what I came up with as a solution, specifically because there are candles in every shot, was to expose from the top down.
“My starting point was not to over expose the candles in the HDR grade and let everything fall in underneath that. Since candles are usually the brightest object in the scene and I wanted to retain detail in them I began by setting the exposure so that the candles weren’t clipping with everything else being lit up to those levels.”
“That was my primitive, lay person, no HDR monitor, on-set logic. Which I think worked out pretty well!”
The only issue was that in the Dolby Vision HDR pass the greater latitude of the ARRI over the G2 began to show in the highlights particularly against the set’s tall windows.
“I’d like to say it was hard for me to match but it really wasn’t,” says show colorist Paul Staples of London’s Encore Post. “Often with the windows you want them to clip anyway. You want to see a bit of detail but you’d let it go because it’s just a studio wall outside.”
He adds, “When you work in P3 the gamut is hugely different to rec.709. You see all the nuances of candle light, skin tone and costume which brings it all together in a really natural way. You can ping your highlights but actually if you bring it into a more painterly contrast ratio you can get this really natural looking image with much more depth than we’re used to in .709.”
Simple on-set workflow
The Australian DP relocated to the US in 2017 to shoot Queen of the South has since shot Fox pilot Gone Baby Gone for director Phillip Noyce; the Syfy/UCP series Hunters for producer Gale Anne Hurd and Matchbox Pictures; and The Beautiful Lie, a contemporary retelling of Anna Karenina for ABC.
“I’m not a DP who likes a DIT tent on set where it’s always a hostile environment to get good monitoring and to be consistent,” he says. “I prefer a simplified workflow not an extra circus you have to drag around with you.
“I would much rather do as you did in the film days with a lot of testing in preproduction to understand what the camera could and couldn’t do and you just expose and shoot with that in mind without needing to tweak or grade it on set. That way, you can spend time with the actors and director on the floor. I’d rather do another take than go into a dark tent and look at a waveform of some shot that might change in the edit anyway.
“I’ve always had this philosophical idea to treat the DI like film and to leave the grading until you are sitting with someone like Paul who knows what they are doing.”


Social broadcasting: the future of TV

IBC
Live streaming community-building platforms are taking on television and Twitch is at the forefront.
There is no question that global quarantine has supersized the live streaming industry. There’s also no doubt about the winner. Amazon-owned Twitch is crushing all comers, including Facebook and Google, and now it’s bursting out of esports and gunning for TV. 
While Facebook Gaming’s monthly views leapt 238% in April this year, according to data compiled by streaming software company StreamElements with analytics partner Arsenal.gg, its monthly total of 291 million hours was beaten by YouTube Gaming, which recorded 491 streaming hours in April. 
Both are swamped by the near 1.5 billion hours watched in the same month on Twitch, as overall viewing to the platform has soared over 100% year on year.  
Lockdown notwithstanding, Twitch’s hold is extraordinary. Acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $1bn, Twitch now controls 76% of the live-streaming market. The platform boasts 17.5 million unique daily visitors, an average viewership of over 1.5m at any time and over 4 million ‘creators’ streaming each month. 
A rival platform from Microsoft called Mixer, lured star streamers with mega-bucks contracts but will close next month having failed to generate sufficient traction. 
“Twitch remains unique in Western markets for a number of reasons,” says Piers Harding-Rolls, research director, games at Ampere Analysis. “These include the Twitch Prime feature, which gives Amazon Prime subscribers one free channel subscription a month. This has seen subscriber numbers increase significantly which has helped streamers generally, and this feature also acts as a great on ramp for further viewer monetisation. Twitch is also leading the way in game-related viewer benefits such as access to free games or in-game content.”    
Twitch has been a pioneer in many ways for both streamers and viewers particularly in areas such as monetisation and social features but what should make the platform of vital interest to traditional media is that it is showing significant growth outside of gaming.   
“Any cultural shift at Twitch is notable, since the future of Twitch will more or less be the future of streaming,” declared Yahoo Finance.  
Cultivating non-gaming content The broadcast of four Premier League matches starting this month is just the latest mainstream content to be streamed on the site as a part of a multi-pronged strategy to expand beyond its core audience. 
In the past, Twitch has streamed Saturday Night Live and Knight Rider, as it toyed with audience appetite for older broadcast content culled from the Prime library.  
The company introduced a series of specific categories - badged Art, Hobbies & Crafts, Food & Drink, Science & Technology - for streamers wanting to broadcast non-gaming entertainment. 
Last autumn, the company refreshed the site’s design and launched an advertising campaign ‘You’re Already One of Us’, to position Twitch as an all-purpose live-streaming platform. 
A live science fiction series, Artificial, won the platform its first Emmy, for outstanding innovation in interactive media. Under lockdown, the Music & Performing Arts category has seen its number of hours watched quadruple as acts joined the site to mitigate the impact of lost touring revenue due to the pandemic. As a result, the platform has been targeted by music rights lawyers, which threatens to hinder its growth in this area, according to Harding-Rolls. 
In October, it began experimenting with ‘Watch Parties’ a feature allowing its most prized ‘creators’ to stream Amazon Prime Video series like Jack Ryan to their viewers. The host is able to commentate on the video in real-time from a live webcam feed, as well as offer a live-chat in which viewers air their own opinions. 
“Because Twitch’s desire is to build communities around interactive experiences, we were already on track to launch these types of things ahead of Covid-19,” said Erin Wayne, Twitch’s director of community and creator marketing. “[Covid] just happened to coincide with all of the things that we were doing.” The feature is now available to all U.S. Prime members and is on track to go live worldwide later this year. 
All of this activity is being facilitated by initiatives, such as a Twitch Studio app, designed to make it easier for non-gamers and novice streamers to host broadcasts on the site. 
“With mainstream social media platforms focusing on mobile, Twitch has become the go-to alternative for those requiring more specialised tools and PC, or other gaming device, integration,” says James Manning Smith analyst at Futuresource Consulting.  
Elgato’s Stream Deck, for example, is a simplified production switcher which helps one-person broadcasters live stream by mixing scenes, launching media and adjusting audio. 
Amazon has also leveraged deals it has made with other sports leagues for carriage on Prime by sharing those rights with Twitch. The 2020 NFL season commences in October including 11 games on Twitch that will be streamed free to Prime members in a renewal of a deal that began in 2018-19. The viewing experience includes interactive features like X-Ray and Next Gen Stats powered by AWS and user-selectable alternative audio options and commentary from Twitch users. 
Live-streamed sports commentary allows viewers to interact with the commentator and represents a shift away from traditional game broadcasts. “It’s a tell about the future of TV,” said Anthony Danzi, the company’s SVP of sales at an advertising conference last September.  
“Football appears a natural fit for social video,” notes Harding-Rolls. “Also, as we have seen where virtual sports have replaced live sports during lockdown, this experiment exposes new audiences to fresh experiences.” 
It is not just popular culture but breaking news for which Twitch is gaining a reputation. A side effect of the heated debates during Brexit last autumn was a growing fanbase for the UK Parliament channel streamed on the site. Again, the site’s real-time chat interaction was cited as a reason. Viewers could pepper their contributions with emotes (Twitch’s terms for emoji’s) of Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and the Speaker.  
During the Black Lives Matter protests earlier this month, the site was prominent as a hub for airing sit-ins and marches. According to The New York Times, some protesters and citizen journalists created Twitch channels just to broadcast the protests, while gamers who were already on the site switched to showing the demonstrations instead of video games. Other Twitch users simultaneously pulled together up to 10 protest live streams from places including Nashville and Washington, D.C., into a single feed, so that people could see the action in multiple cities at a glance. 
The report said activists chose Twitch because they were familiar with the site from video games and wanted to leverage an existing tech-savvy audience. Twitch also has some technical tools for live broadcasting that other platforms lack, they said, such as a robust moderation system to avoid spam in chats. 
Social broadcasting  However, it is Just Chatting that has led Twitch’s growth over the past year. Launched in 2018, this is the Twitch category for conversations between streamers and viewers with no requirement for it to focus on gaming. 
Last October, Just Chatting beat both League of Legends and Fortnite to become the most popular category on Twitch, according to Esports Observer. Stream Elements calculates Just Chatting has outpaced Twitch’s core growth rate four-fold since 2018.   
Live interaction between creators and fans is the key to Twitch’s community building and is part of the social broadcasting phenomenon which for some is the future face of live TV. 
Unlike Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok which have popularised the creation and sharing of snackable content, Twitch, has provided a platform for long format content.  
“It is Twitch’s focus on engagement during long-form broadcasts which helped in creating a unique offering despite video sharing being a crowded market,” says Manning Smith. 
The platform’s success in mixing gaming with sports and entertainment has brought competitors to the market. The most notable of these is Disney-owned Caffeine which broadcast the X Games in 2019 and has deals with the rappers Offset and Lil Xan. “We want to bring the world together around friends and live broadcasts,” proclaimed its CEO Ben Keighran, CEO. 
Launching next month in the U.S is Videogame Entertainment and News Network (VENN), a live streaming lifestyle channel which counts Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin as an investor. VENN’s content will not only be delivered linearly across cable but also to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Twitch. 
Other online platforms have also highlighted their potential as a live events space, with Fortnite recently hosting a Travis Scott in-game concert and a Marshmello concert in 2019. 
“While gaming remains central to Twitch’s offering, and a cornerstone of social broadcasting dedicated platforms, the trend away from gaming content is set to continue, with a variety of media companies and celebrities turning to social broadcasting as a new outlet,” says Manning Smith. 
Much like YouTube, Twitch makes money from advertisements, which it integrates into its streams; it also makes money from subscriptions. Twitch also earns a cut of the site’s in-app currency called ‘Bits’; viewers buy Bits to fund live shout-outs to streamers they like. 
“Twitch has also generated an audience demographic considered hard to reach through traditional media outlets, with time spent gaming often coming at the cost of linear TV,” says Manning Smith. “Advertisers, brands, and content owners have considered Twitch a means to reach this demographic.” 
The Twitch audience is indeed highly desirable for advertisers with 81.5% of viewers being male and 55% being between the ages of 18-34, according to marketers Izea. 
In 2018 Twitch was valued around U$4 billion, according to one analyst. Its worth now will be a lot higher. 
Amazon’s role The role of the largest retailer on the planet shouldn’t be ignored. “Twitch is a rounding error,” Michael Pachter, a research analyst for Wedbush Securities, is reported in the New York Times, speculating that it is most likely about U$250 million a quarter.  
“First and foremost Twitch is a value proposition for Amazon Prime subscribers,” summises Harding-Rolls. “In addition, Twitch is pursuing other growth strategies to become a more significant revenue stream in its own right. These include diversifying outside of gaming content, increased streaming support for mobile games, increasing interactivity of streams, integrating more heavily with ecommerce (particularly around gaming) and using it as a user acquisition tool for Amazon’s own gaming ambitions.” 
Recent reports suggest Amazon is looking to add more live TV to Prime Video. Protocol cites posted job adverts as indicating that Amazon is looking to “redefine how customers watch 24/7 linear broadcast TV content” by “designing the end-to-end customer experience for how customers discover and watch Linear TV content.” 
Could it be that Amazon is poised to port the Twitch interface with its integrated chatroom to Prime Video? 
“Amazon has integrated Twitch into its wider Prime service, through offering Twitch Prime subscription offering a free Twitch subscription each month, free games, in game items, and access to other Prime membership benefits,” says Manning Smith. “It’s likely that Twitch Prime is only the beginning of Amazon’s further expansion.” 
It’s also worth noting that Amazon has a data lake on millions of individual users which Twitch has apparently yet to take advantage of. 
“We’re owned by Amazon, so that gives us access to a whole lot of data,” Danzi said last year. “We philosophically still haven’t decided how we want to use that.”  

Thursday 16 July 2020

Arsenal FX and Sohonet: Working remotely, working seamlessly

copywritten for Sohonet
High-end post-production studio Arsenal FX Color provides full-spectrum services to the television industry, supported by a world-class staff of artists, technicians, and producers.
Nothing was going to derail its state-of-the-art colour and editorial workflows for tier one clients including Disney, Sony Pictures, NBCU and HBO. Not even a global pandemic.
With the foresight that can only come from scrupulous preparation and unwavering client focus, the LA-based facility has been routinely offering remote review and creative sessions for several years.
“Whether you are in LA, Vancouver or London it is often inconvenient and time-consuming for producers, directors of photography and other key creatives to attend sessions at a single fixed location,” says Josh Baca, Conform Artist, Technologist and Partner at Arsenal. “It’s been one of the pillars of our service since we set up the business in 2012 to make available a variety of methods for screening whether that’s at client offices, a production house or to their homes.”
However, when the facility found its existing remote collaboration product to be underpowered in several areas, Arsenal jumped at the chance to see Sohonet’s real-time, remote review tool, ClearView Flex in action.
“We engaged Sohonet to demonstrate if it was a better product than the one we were currently using,” says Baca. “Categorically, it was. We immediately made the switch to ClearView Flex, and fortuitously had it installed just before the Covid-19 shutdown.”
A principal motivation for Arsenal was the higher degree of security offered by Sohonet. Specifically, the Trusted Partner Network endorsement for ClearView Flex by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA).
“We do a lot of work with Apple, HBO, Disney and other top tier studios that demand a very high level of security. Our prior box was secure but didn’t have a security certification rubber-stamped by every Studio.”
Another game-changing factor was the superior ClearView Flex experience. Baca explains, “The ease of use of is significantly better than anything we have had before. With ClearView Flex, clients can simply receive sessions on their iPad, phone or laptop or whatever device they want to use opening up a world of convenience.”
Before lockdown, many of Arsenal clients would meet in a central location such as the production office or post-production house for remote collaboration. Arsenal would simply set up a remote screening at the location with the colourist to facilitate the session. When quarantine and social distancing measures came into force and everyone was forced to isolate this was no longer an option.
Arsenal swiftly assembled colour kits for critical review including a Sony 24-inch OLED monitor calibrated by the facility’s colour scientists and an Apple TV. The ClearView Flex App for Apple TV is free, and the interface requires no training.
 “We sent this kit out to the client enabling them to view a colour calibrated image with no delay and fantastic picture fidelity,” says Baca. “The ability to use an iPad or laptop to connect everyone remotely to the same stream using ClearView Flex was invaluable.”
Using a combination of Sohonet’s fibre network and consumer ISPs, the facility can stream from its centralized location and from its remote-artists’ locations.
“ClearView Flex enables our clients to view streams over broadband to the home including 4G LTE. Unlike our previous product, which had a very stringent set of minimum bandwidth requirements and IT hurdles to pass, Sohonet takes care of all that and allowed us to quickly deploy without any difficulty.”
As a result, Arsenal has managed to fulfil a busy schedule throughout lockdown by finishing and delivering TV drama and comedies on deadline without comprising quality.
These shows include Lovecraft Country for HBO, NBC medical drama New Amsterdam, Netflix sitcom One Day at a Time and Sony Pictures’ legal drama For Life.  
“With our previous product the lag was hugely frustrating to the process,” says Baca. “It took time to shuttle and communicate. We were running up against 2 to 4 seconds of delay and guessing what each person is talking about.“With ClearView Flex the latency is fantastic. It’s basically instantaneous. You can stop the stream and ask for a check on a specific frame and all parties know exactly the spot being talked aboutbecause it’s instant.” 
The team are also performing VFX editorial and reviews, title sessions and other finishing workflows all over ClearView Flex.
“Anything a client would normally come into our studio for, even remote QC, we are able to accommodate over ClearView Flex,” says Baca. “The whole work from home experience has opened client’s eyes to the fact that remote can be significantly more efficient and productive. When everyone has such tight schedules and when traffic can easily eat up an hour or two getting to and from a session, the benefits of being able to get the same result without leaving your office or home, are obvious.”