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As working-from-home (WFH) and flexible working become the
new norm, video production teams across countless industries have had to think
on their feet, get creative, and adopt new approaches to triumph over
ever-emerging obstacles.
“We’ve made incremental changes to almost everybody’s
workflow,” Eric Lund, senior manager, post technology at Warner Media
Studios explained to IPV. “We’ve made everything better and better, and
we’ve discovered new things.”
When the pandemic began, Warner Media’s digital services
production team seized the opportunity to flex their adaptability. For
instance, they were approached about editing a Zoom-based talk show — a
challenging project in and of itself, but the team needed to have it on-air in
only about five days.
After the production team shot it remotely on their Zoom
systems, they sent it over to Warner Media Studios. They cut the show and did
the sound design in New York, color corrected and finished it remotely in Atlanta,
and then sent it to a finishing editor, who prepped it all for air and got it
out under the deadline.
The team also completed digital premieres for three
television shows and two movies, as well as a launch for HBO Max. The HBO Max
launch included a full-day event and a 25-minute internal video, involving
around 40 interviews.
“We ramped up very quickly, and we were able to get
essentially everyone back to work. We just said, all right — here is the new
reality, let’s do it!” said Jacob Anderson, Manager, Asset Management, Warner
Media Studios.
COPA90’s Smart Cloud Move
Sports broadcasters have always drawn heavily upon archive
footage — it’s helpful for reels, highlights, and more. But current
circumstances have made archive footage all the more important, as teams
repurpose it to make new, engaging content for fans. However, many sports
broadcasters struggle to organize and provide their remote-working team with
easy, speedy access to archive footage.
According to Barry Flanigan, Chief Product Officer of soccer
fan site COPA90, it’s vital now more than ever to have the right tools to
utilize and deploy the archive more effectively. “That will very definitely
continue beyond this crisis. That’s something that we’ve always planned to do
with our cloud infrastructure.”
As long ago as 2018, ahead of the FIFA World Cup in Russia,
the team decided to move the majority of their content workflows into the
cloud. This made sense — most of COPA90’s ‘human interest’ sports content is
evergreen, continuing to resonate even when it’s a few years old.
When lockdown measures hit, this prep-work put the team in a
prime position. Much of their footage was already in the cloud, tagged with
metadata, enabling easy access. This made it easier for the team to repackage
archive content at a time when shooting fresh content wasn’t really possible.
Flanigan says, “I think we made a smart decision early on to
move to the cloud, which is now paying dividends at a time like this.”
WFH Expansion
Perhaps no one knows more about the necessity to prepare for
the future of video than traditional broadcasters. To compete with OTT
platforms, broadcasters must adapt, stay flexible, and seek new avenues for
success. This means increasing and diversifying their long-term outputs.
“These times have allowed us to really step up in a lot of
ways and see areas where we’ve become stagnant and areas where we didn’t even
know we wanted to expand,” says Michelle Conroy, production manager at NYC
facility Crew Cuts.
There’s no doubt that the shift to WFH culture has
revolutionized the broadcasting industry. “Before the pandemic I think the
industry would have gone through quite a lot of pain in trying to convince
people to edit from home,” says Brian Leonard, Head of Engineering, IMG.
However, Leonard notes that thanks to this transition, the door has flung open to welcome new possibilities, such as broadcasters expanding their editing capabilities beyond what was possible in their previous physical spaces: “In theory, where before we had 50 suites on-site, with people working from home, we could go up to 60.”
And very notably, during these times, the broadcasting
industry has also seen a shift in the types of content audiences are willing to
engage with. Recorded Zoom conversations and cell phone videos have become
widely accepted forms of content.
According to Leonard, this trend has also enabled more
inclusion and diversity: “We’re talking to single moms who wouldn’t have been
able to come into the studio. We’re bringing in a more diverse clientele.”
Of course, for broadcasters looking to capitalize on all of
the lucrative trends and possibilities, it’s crucial to build an infrastructure
that will stand the test of time.
As Sesame Street editor Memo says, “Our business
is lucky that it happened in 2020, when there’s enough of a remote
infrastructure that we could actually make it work.”
The common denominator in all these examples is working with
a media asset management system, specifically the Curator software from IPV.
Among its attributes is the ability for productions to
extend access to media files remotely via the cloud, to automate proxy creation
and save on bandwidth, the ability to track assets and to use rich metadata to
search content. These aren’t unique to IPV but the case studies of its clients
are: “In these ‘unprecedented times’ and beyond, there’s no question that MAM will
play a critical role in video production’s long-term future.”
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