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It was good to be back at IBC, which had a real sense of business being done and genuine excitement for the future of our industry. No-one will have missed the big theme trending on the showfloor and conference which was the move to Cloud. All of the major public cloud vendors – GCP, AWS and Azure were at the Amsterdam RAI in force – as were the CTOs of all the major Studios. High on their agenda is the wholesale move of creation to distribution workflows to Cloud as outlined in the MovieLabs’ 2030 Vision.
We were proud to have played a small but significant role in demonstrating, with AWS,camera to cloud workflows, where we also had a chance to learn how our cloud-based platform Origami plugs into the future of media content creation to meet MovieLabs’ Vision.
Built on the philosophy that creativity should fuel technology, Origami is one of a growing suite of technologies designed to reduce the technical constraints for feature film and TV drama so creatives can focus on what’s important.
If it wasn’t clear already then IBC2022 underlined the seismic changes that have accelerated over the last couple of years: We are moving forward fast as an industry into Cloud as the logical evolutionary step.
Let’s consider
where the industry has come from:
The traditional method for making film and TV, spanning nearly a century, was for film negative to be processed in a lab and for sound and picture to be assembled, laboriously (remember Steenbecks?), and synced in editorial.
Twenty years ago, the digital intermediate process greatly enhanced this by allowing greater manipulation of footage across editorial and VFX before conform, grade and final master but post production remained a rigidly linear workflow. It could be no other way. The technology had reached its limits.
Not any more. The transition of the entire postproduction chain to the Cloud is in full sway and represents a paradigm shift from Post 2.0.
You can call it nonlinear if you like but a more accurate term for Post 3.0 is collaborative. Once media is in the Cloud everyone can access it simultaneously and work on different aspects of post in parallel. This not only speeds production by smoothing away inefficiencies in moving media from A to Z but it enriches the potential for creative collaboration.
This is exactly
what we were demonstrating with AWS at IBC.
Using Cloud for post is far from new - the industry has been using servers held in data centres off premises for aspects of the post workflow for well over a decade. VFX was among the first areas of production to use bursts of Cloud compute to speed rendering. More recently, Camera to Cloud using tools like QTake enable early viewing of footage in proxy form.
The difference between that way of working and Post 3.0 is that you can now send Original Camera Negative (OCN) to the Cloud and work with optimised images as soon as it is captured - irrespective of where your creatives might be.
Traditionally the DI has been done on premises with dedicated hardware but the move to Cloud means you can all but divest your machine room with all the headache of capex, maintenance and heat/power costs that entails.
This game-changing advance could not come a moment too soon. The sheer volume of content being commissioned by studios and streamers together with the heightened demand to hit a succession of tight deadlines presents several challenges to facilities.
The first is that with so much content coming down the pipe there are not enough vendors to actually deal with it in any local market. Consequently, the post production work on tentpole features and major episodic TV needs to be spread internationally. The challenge is how to ensure that file sharing and communication is seamless.
A second issue is that even when you go from facility to facility the experience is inconsistent. This is even the case locally when hiring multiple shops in
London, for example, let alone exporting that model across territories where some vendors won’t have the experience of delivering into Hollywood.
We are seeing a lot of facilities having to step up and deliver on expectations of quality they might not have had manage before.
These are the
challenges that Origami is designed to address. Origami being a suite of tools
for post-production, with the first product released to the market Phoenix,
automating the delivery of VFX files
We’re not the
first to automate VFX and DI/Drama pulls but Phoenix, running on Origami, is
the first to take advantage of the scalability and global reach that Cloud
brings. A unique feature of Origami is it goes to your media, eliminating
unnecessary replication and then delivering to the defined vendor, keeping with
the Movie Labs 2030 Vision. You simply submit your cut file of choice (EDL,
ALE, XML), which Phoenix converts to ACES-compliant Open EXR files (or DPX for
legacy workflows) and delivers to designated stakeholders as and when needed.
There are not enough skilled people and not enough hours in the day to cater for the scale and speed of today’s production output. Trying to do this manually will burn time and money.
Cloud-native tools like Origami erase those inefficiencies and frees talent to do tasks they actually want to do – creating art. Just because you can work in the Cloud doesn’t mean your workflow or the
tools that you use need to change. Also demonstrating Cloud capabilities with AWS at IBC were Moxion, Pixitmedia, Filmlight, Adobe, Autodesk, Blackmagic Design, Qtake, Colorfront and more. Editors and colorists, for
example, can still work as they did before but linking high resolution media and masterfiles in the Cloud will open up new creative opportunities. This includes the opportunity to work in parallel with other departments and the opportunity to introduce AI/ML to enhance production. Already highly repetitive manual tasks like rotoscoping are being driven by AI tools in the Cloud.
Enabling parallel workflows will accelerate production. With Origami, Mission Digital is a part of this pan-industry forward momentum.
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