interview and copy written for Sohonet
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Since opening in
2006, London-based postproduction house Envy has acquired a wealth of
experience working across a wide breadth of projects including documentary,
entertainment, factual entertainment, scripted plus commercials and VFX with
Absolute Post which they acquired in 2022. It has scooped the Best Post
Production award six times making ENVY the most decorated post firm in the
history of the Broadcast Awards as well as being voted Top Facility by
Producers in Televisual’s annual facilities Top 50. Its creative staff has also
been honoured with prestigious recognition with numerous awards including RTS,
BAFTA The Grierson Awards and Broadcast Awards.
Jai Cave has been
with the facility for nearly all its existence, arriving as senior edit
assistant in 2007, elevated to head of operations in 2013 and technical
operations director since 2019.
Could you tell us a
bit about Envy?
We are a
full-service facility offering everything from Envy Capture on set managing
project records and DIT services to ingest and offline, finishing, grade, VFX,
mastering, QC and delivery. Envy operates five facilities buildings, with the
main mother facility being in Rathbone Place, North of Oxford Street. This
houses the majority of our online, grading and audio facilities including a
Dolby licensed studio. It's a bustling hive of creativity, swimming around
state-of-the-art kit.
How do you stay on
top of changes and know when and what to invest in?
It is constantly
changing. Every project we do is different and has different requirements,
which is what makes the job interesting! We are constantly evolving and
spending a lot of money on kits each year, whether upgrading existing kits or
coming up with new ideas and workflows that might make our clients’ lives
easier.
That cycle is
constant. We go to trade shows, talk to a lot of people and we have lots of
deep relationships with our suppliers. We start from a baseline of ‘what is the
capex we’re spending this year?’ Delivering that change as well as managing
everything else that goes on day to day in the facility is the challenge.
Ideally you try as much as possible to get ahead of the technology curve but
that takes a lot of time and investment.
Where does AI fit
into your facility workflow today and where might it be in 18 months?
Ultimately, AI will
be used everywhere and in every tool. Vendors are rushing to add AI into their
product, sometimes spuriously when it is really just rebadged automation, but
quite a lot of it is genuine AI. The technology will pervade every area of post
from scheduling to creative tasks such as making grading easier or helping
editors choose shots or discovering what they didn’t even know they were
looking for.
I don’t think any
facility is going to own their own AI model. Among other things, the data we
have on media is not our own. Where it fits in will be in products that help us
improve productivity, speed, and efficiency. There’s no escaping that it will enter
both the creative and operational process making things faster and more
efficient.
We are though an
industry of talented individuals are still going to be needed in that creative
process. Creativity that initiates ideas, makes decisions about what story we
want to tell and how it is best told, will always come from humans but there
will be tasks that can benefit from automation enroute.
What skills do you
need to bring into Envy and what do you look for in new recruits?
We are fortunate
that we have the ENVY Academy which we use for our recruitment as
well as for educational purposes. Over the last 10 years as an industry, we
have moved rapidly towards file-based integrated workflows, merging the skills
traditionally found in IT and systems backgrounds and combining it with video
and audio specific knowledge. Add to that the pandemic where new recruits
didn’t have anyone physical to train with and you have a challenging
environment for finding new staff and training existing teams. In the past year
we have met this challenge by adding the new role of staff development manager,
who is a member of the team solely dedicated to staff training and development
allowing us to accelerate in these areas and ensure we can promote from within
for almost every role.
Whilst a technical
background is always an advantage, post production is a people business so soft
skills are often more important. The ability to work effectively as a team,
explain complex workflows to colleagues and clients and crucially be approachable
is absolutely key.
Are you finding
that knowledge of AI is a specific requirement?
Anyone that has
relevant AI experience will be very attractive to many companies. - In a post
facility an awareness of how you can connect to different AI tools and how you
might use them will be valuable. There is going to be so much AI related
product out there that selecting, testing and integrating the ones that work
effectively could be a full-time job.
How have you
changed working practices over the last four years?
Cloud has enabled
distributed working in a way I never thought anyone would need or want. Having
people in dozens of different countries working on our platform at one time is
quite a change – but the desire from clients for hybrid hasn’t changed. Most people
tend to want both remote and on premise.
Completing final
grade, picture online and sound mix outside of a professional equipped and
calibrated suite is not routine but there’s no technical reason why an offline
editor can’t work at home for the whole project. Most production managers want
their editors in all the time and most editors want to be at home some of the
time, so it’s a push and pull. Remote reviews are being used more but it’s not
currently the norm to have a project where a client doesn’t want to come in at
all.
The need to offer a
true hybrid solution is why we use private cloud, connected by Envy Remote. A
client can be in a suite then go home and use the exact same technology from
their bedroom. It is the same pipeline. They are able to access the same project,
view updates and high-resolution files all instantly accessible via an
on-premise system or a system that we host in our data centre.
How do you connect
your facilities?
Envy sits on
the Sohonet Media Network (SMN) which provides our managed internet
connection between our five sites. It means we sit on the same SMN connection
as dozens of other facilities and studios around the world. Another benefit of
being with a company like Sohonet is you can vary that connection month to
month, so you don’t have to make a multi-year commitment for a fixed amount of
bandwidth. When it comes to file transfer and capture on set, the connectivity
that you will get will vary from job to job. Sometimes there’s zero, sometimes
there’s a lot so having that flexibility is really useful to flex up and down
when needed.
We also have the
opportunity to change how that is carved up, for instance by changing some of
our bandwidth to AWS Direct Connect if a project requires this. That’s all
included with Sohonet. There’s no additional charges no matter the cloud
provider you want to connect to. That flexibility is really useful.
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