AV Magazine
As the media and entertainment industry gradually unlocks from months of quarantine it is doing so into a world which has been permanently changed. Above and beyond the social distancing and sanitary measures which will be routine for an indeterminate period, the film and TV business faces an uncertain future which stretches from the foundations of production to the economics of consumption.
https://www.avinteractive.com/features/av-live/continuity-invention-crisis-27-08-2020/
Post production and VFX companies were not required to close during the lockdown. Aside from principal photography, all of the post aspects of programme creation were able to continue, albeit generally slower than normal, but with a degree of success which will see many of the processes remain in place long after lockdown.“Everyone says that necessity is the mother of invention, but Covid-19 has taught us that necessity is actually the mother of adoption,” says Shaun Wilton, director, Anna Valley. “Cloud software, remote workflows, extended reality, live streaming – none of these are new technologies, they’ve all been available for quite some time and were slowly rolling out across the industry, but the pandemic has massively accelerated their adoption.”
There has probably never been more need for content than during lockdown. We’ve all been watching more content than ever before but, conversely, the stuff we like to watch the most – sports and soaps – has had production ground to a halt, so in our lust for content we’ve been forced to find other things to watch. Most of that content has been streamed rather than broadcast, and a lot of it has relied on technology that was previously not considered suitable for global audiences.
“Whereas fifteen years ago live content was broadcast, from a studio, via an OB truck, over satellite, in 2020 producers and audiences have adapted to content streamed over an internet connection, from a studio-in-a-box, set up in someone’s living room. And sometimes you can’t tell the difference,” says Wilton.
Editing
The bread and butter of post production is thankfully the easiest to deliver in a remote scenario. Media can be worked on in proxy (lower resolution) form accessed from the cloud over the public internet.
London facilities Rapid Pictures and Radiant Post Production, for example, were able to link storage on premises into a data centre over fast 10GigE fibre. They used the data centre, run by storage vendor ERA, as a hub to spin up 20 remote workstations at the homes of clients and those of its editors so that projects including inserts for Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch could continue to air.
“We managed to run the offline edits without the need to send out any equipment to clients’ homes,” explains Ben Plumb, managing director at Rapid/Radiant. “We can send them a link to Teradici client software (a PC-over-IP display protocol that enables access, browse, playback and sharing of media) and supply log-in details which gets them to a Media Composer offline on our network.”
Media-specific video conferencing technology such as Evercast lets you mimic the edit bay experience, with both parties seeing the same screen and output.
Grading
It isn’t difficult to grade remotely either but the Achilles heel of colour correction is the need for precisely calibrated monitoring. This matters less in the build-up stages of the grade, where directors, executive producers and DPs increasingly prefer to view sequences on a laptop or iPhone while they are busy working elsewhere out of sheer convenience. Errors can creep in at final review and approval stage especially if High Dynamic Range is required.
“Small inconsistencies or changes can have knock-on effects,” advises Fergus McCall, head of colour, The Mill NY. “That said, it could depend on the final destination for the content. If the production is bound for an online service like YouTube or Vimeo, for a corporate or commercial client, then it could be appropriate to review on that exact platform – as the intended audience would see it.”
What it is categorically not possible to do, he insists, is to make final decisions on a long form feature or high-end drama projects. “For these, a tablet isn’t going to cut it.”
A route around this is provided by Sohonet’s ClearView Flex which permits shared viewing of remote screens with virtually no lag. This can be combined with Moxion for viewing HDR rushes on-set but only in offline mode unless all parties have the same expensive and exactly tuned monitors. This gap could be closed as more affordable high-quality OLED TVs supporting Dolby Vision HDR come to market.
Audio mixing
Voiceovers, ADR and final mixes can also be done remotely. In fact, some mixers have been working at their home studios for years as clients rarely attend sessions until the final tweaks.
“Under Covid-19, sign-off can all be done remotely over the phone, via Source Now, Skype, Source Live or the Farm’s web-based collaboration tool, Fred Live,” says Nick Fry, head of audio at The Farm. “For some content this works really well but for dramas and high-end docs it’s not always a great fit. We’ve used various platforms to facilitate remote working in our audio workflows. To get the media on to our local systems we used Media Shuttle. This let us connect to Farm servers and download media. For the mix, no extra tech was needed.”
Under Covid-conditions the biggest issue is that broadband speeds to the home are just not quick enough, particularly for uploading media. “It just isn’t viable to stream a live ProTools session either through Avid’s own cloud offering or via the Farm’s network through Virtual Private Network – certainly not the large sessions we have,” says Fry.
Soundwhale is a remote audio collaboration app that lets engineers match sound to picture, and lets actors with no audio experience record their lines, with no new hardware or additional specialised software required.
A simple stereo mix can be done effectively with high quality desktop speakers at home, but as you move up through scales of surround sound mixing, through 5.1 or 7.1, and into specialist areas such as delivery for Dolby Atmos or 3D soundspaces for cinematic quality audio, the more you’d want a facility with multiple speaker monitoring set up for precise, positional mixing.
Toward cloud
If nothing else, the crisis has proven the prudence of having a business continuity policy centred on routing media to remote locations. The end game is to transition the functions of storage and compute power that currently reside at dedicated facilities into the cloud.
“We envisage finishing post remaining an on-premise service with offline being remote where it offers an advantage to clients,” says Jai Cave, technical operations director at Envy, one of Soho’s largest post groups. “We see demand increasing for a shared approach to remote offlines, where clients spend part of the week in the facility, then part of the week at home, giving them personal flexibility whilst still prioritising creative in-person communication.”
A similar strategy is in play at documentary specialist Roundtable. Its servers and workstation hardware will remain on-prem and accessible remotely.
“It gives us the best of both worlds in having a facility for clients as needed and the flexibility to work anywhere,” says Jack Jones, technical director and colourist.
Roundtable has invested in Intel Nucs, a mini-PC attached to the facility’s network that allows an editor working remotely to access data held at the facility. “It means media on our machines can be accessed by clients in full resolution, in multiscreen and with true keyboard interaction,” Jones says. “We might have ten offlines running on physical hardware and run more on an ad hoc basis in the cloud without the client being aware of any difference in user experience.”
Other facilities have already made the full switch to cloud. Untold Studios launched as the world’s first completely cloud-based creative hub in 2018, running all desktops for editorial, VFX and finishing in AWS with fast connectivity from its premises to the cloud over a private Sohonet pipe.
“We’re never going to get into a situation where we have to turn work away because we don’t have capacity,” says head of technology, Sam Reid. “Our studio is not constrained by the physical location of our data, so we don’t have to have artists in the studio working on content – they can be anywhere in the world. That was as true before the pandemic as it is now.”
Mindset change
Beyond short-term social distancing, the pandemic will permanently shift workflows away from centralised organisations to the flexible aggregation of resources and talent located anywhere in the globe.
“The experience has opened the eyes of clients to what is feasible,” says Plumb. “Some had been a bit reluctant to try remote before but now they’ve seen it in action, it will give everyone greater flexibility to work from home or a home office in future. It won’t be appropriate for every project, but remote will definitely be part of our offering going forward.”
Nonetheless it is the realtime interaction between director or DP with colourist, audio mixer or picture editor that is hardest to replicate, making bricks and mortar facilities essential to the creative process for some time to come.
“There is no substitute for being in the same room to get the creative juices flowing,” says TV and feature film editor, Steve Mirkovich. “Those off-the-cuff comments, nuances and brainstorming – the spontaneity – that gets lost remotely.”
Virtual sets & integrated production
The limitations that the pandemic presents has also provided opportunities to address global sustainability.
“Social distancing has forced us to adopt cloud workflows so media is uploaded directly to the cloud from set, edited remotely and reviewed by multiple stakeholders without anyone needing to leave their homes,” says Wilton. “Similarly, with travel restrictions making it almost impossible to shoot in foreign locations, more productions are turning to mixed and extended reality to recreate environments that they can’t physically visit, further reducing our industry’s carbon footprint.”
Hanne Page, segment marketing manager, events at Barco agrees: “With Covid, the full benefits of distributed production and remote collaboration have been confirmed. One specific evolution that has been trending are hybrid event productions, where the advanced techniques of remote and distributed broadcasting have been further adopted and flexibly injected into live event productions.”
Integrated production systems like NewTek’s can be driven with a skeleton crew, or even a single crew member. Automation is becoming a big driver in this space as it takes the pressure off these reduced crews.
“We are seeing a wider range of locations being used, instead of a traditional gallery or studio location, in order to reduce travel – all of this of course requires a decent degree of connectivity between sites,” says Liam Hayter, NewTek’s senior solutions architect.
With the adoption of unified communications (UC) and video conferencing (VC), in tandem with remote presenters and crews, there’s also been a big uptake in the use of virtual sets and environments to recreate the studio’s look and feel.
“As people are working in UC/VC environments day in day out, it becomes difficult to engage audiences and deliver entertainment or messaging if everything constantly looks and feels the same – it is visual fatigue which virtual environments can really help break,” says Hayter.
Virtual production technologies combine camera tracking and content rendered in realtime, creating mixed reality environments which permit a presenter, as well as the audience, to see and interact with the content around them.
“The disguise xR workflow is perfect for avoiding non-essential contact, mitigating the risks posed by traditional approaches to filming immersive visuals which would involve high-level, realtime in-camera shoots, green screen and other VFX,” says Tom Rockhill, CSO at disguise.
One project completed under lockdown that went viral was a live performance by Katy Perry of her single Daisies on the season finale of American Idol. The “seamless” extension of the real-world LED screens to the virtual environments could only be done by switching between camera perspectives and the LED content using the disguise workflow, he claims.
“The goal of mixed reality is to create more compelling broadcasting and a more engaged audience and presents a watershed moment in new technologies that will throw a lifeline to many industries in the current crisis.”
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