Wednesday, 13 March 2019

The future of media


InBroadcast

Object based broadcasting, cloud post production, ultra high frame rate cinema and entertainment on wheels


Cloud lift off
Cloud is coming of age lifting post production out of the restrictions of physical location. Long theorised, the technology is rapidly maturing. Late last year vfx house Untold Studios launched in Shoreditch as the world’s first cloud-based studio. It has Sohonet links for super-fast connectivity to AWS Cloud where all processing and rendering take place. From Linux-based workstations artists can open 3D design, animation, compositing and paint software. All storage, creative applications and processing takes place in the cloud.
“What we’re doing is putting technology back at the forefront of what a creative studio can be,” says Sam Reid, Head of Technology. “Instead of being a brake to the creativity of artists we want the technology to enable anything they want to do.”
The set-up enables the facility to ramp up or scale down really quickly just paying for the compute and storage it uses with no capex outlay.
As data demands have grown the pressure on finite on-premise storage space has grown. Companies like BASE Media Cloud offer facilities a managed way of outsourcing their requirements to the cloud. Aframe is in the business of facilitating cloud-based production. Forbidden Technologies has developed a cloud-based remote production suite based on its codec Blackbird and continues to develop browser-accessed editing tools. VFX tools developer Foundry markets a cloud-based pop-up vfx pipeline for smaller houses wanting to take on large projects.
Ultimately, it will be a matter of the virtual facility coming to the talent rather than the talent having to move to a central location. Vfx house Jellyfish has already armed itself for a bordered post-Brexit world by investing in a cloud-based infrastructure. In theory, artists could work from Paris or Berlin with all the material accessible and secured online.
“The technology has now evolved to a point where any filmmaker with any VFX project or theatrical, TV or spot editorial can call on the cloud to operate at scale when needed — and still stay affordable,” says Chuck Parker, Sohonet CEO. “The ability to collaborate in realtime with teams in multiple geographic locations is a reality that is altering the post production landscape for enterprises of all sizes.”
InCartainment
With connectivity for mobile phones saturated in many markets, attention is turning to joining everything online from self-driving cars to high-performing industrial robots.
The dual trends of 5G networks and the explosion in sensor-laden products are the enabling forces for what mobile operator’s lobby group GSMA calls ‘the era of Intelligent Connectivity’  
This year the first consumer handsets with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 chip will be released. These will be capable of two-way Gigabit speeds, computer vision and neural network capabilities to support the surge of AI voice, gaming and extended reality experiences over 5G networks.
The telecom network is evolving and is quickly becoming integrated into every kind of industry. According to Ericsson’s November 2018 Mobility Report [https://www.ericsson.com/assets/local/mobility-report/documents/2018/ericsson-mobility-report-november-2018.pdf

] by 2024, the number of connected devices will exceed 22 billion. 

Connected vehicles are the current fastest growing connected vertical outside of phones. AT&T already has the most number of connected cars “in history” at 27 million, according to research firm Chetan Sharma Consulting.
The introduction of driverless cars over the next few decades is predicted to open up an infotainment market worth anywhere from $800 billion in 2035 to $7 trillion by 2050, according to Strategy Analytics. Computer, internet and consumer electronics companies are jockeying for a piece of the pie. None more so than Intel, which coined the term Passenger Economy for the explosive growth in yet-to-be-realised economic potential when today’s drivers become idle passengers.
Intel partnered with Warner Bros. to mock-up an autonomous BMW X5 with an experience based on the DC Comics universe. The vehicle’s interior was fitted with a large-screen TV and projectors spanning 270-degrees, mobile devices, sensory and haptic feedback, and immersive audio and lights to offer passengers a virtual ride moderated by Batman’s trusted butler, Alfred.  Both companies have vowed to continue R&D on the vehicle at the Warner Bros. lot in Hollywood.
The future of in-cabin entertainment is a focus of Amazon and Samsung which are integrating their voice assistants into future car models. Other companies with automotive ambitions advancing AI-driven autopilot systems include Nvidia, LG and Microsoft.
Car manufacturers are wanting in on the game too. Audi is developing Holoride that enables VR experiences from the backseat. The tech is designed to solve the major hiccup in watching VR content while on the move - motion sickness.
Object Based Broadcasting
Of all the technology initiatives that broadcasters are exploring the one with arguably the most profound impact is not UHD-HDR or virtual reality. It is the ability to slice and dice content into a personalised feed delivered just to you on-demand, with customised editorial, length and quality of experience that fits the device you are using and the environment where you watch. This is all underpinned by object-based delivery over an end-to-end IP acquisition-to-distribution chain.
BT Sport recently revealed that it is developing plans for OBB, a move that will enable it to offer viewers the chance to personalise and control some aspects of programme output such as the audio or graphics. Example applications include controlling stadium and crowd noise levels versus commentary, and, for blind or partially sighted viewers, allowing access to Audio Description of live sport.
By breaking down a piece of media (a frame, a piece of audio, an object in the frame) into separate ‘objects’, attaching meaning to them and describing how they can be rearranged, a programme can change to reflect the context of an individual viewer. The individual would, in effect, be allowed to curate their own programme.
The BBC imagines how audiences in 2022 might create their own personalised streams for Match of the Day, the weather forecast or even EastEnders. There could be interactive drama producers who use automatically marked-up rushes of actors to offer bespoke packages, and who have access to all camera streams (from the cloud), with rushes classified automatically from AI-powered transcription.
“It’s about moving the whole industry away from thinking of video and audio as being hermetically sealed, and towards a place where we are no longer broadcasters but datacasters,” explained the BBC’s CTO, Matthew Postgate.
The next step for object-based media pioneers is to find ways of making this concept scale, and making it infinitely repeatable and standardised.  The BBC, for example, has devised a media composition protocol to help drive scale and standardisation.
There is a maze of complexities to solve. An object-based workflow will need to manage rights for new versions of content that are assembled from many existing content parts. Then there is the IP infrastructure needed to efficiently narrowcast different versions of, say, Match of the Day to millions of viewers at a time.
Despite the challenges, this is the way forward – content tailored just for me and you. The more sophisticated this becomes, the more personal the service will be, as the User Interface itself will be different for each individual.
High Frame Rates
The artistic merits of high frame rates have divided audiences and critics but some filmmakers are intent on breaking out of the arbitrary 24 frames a second speeds adopted to accommodate the synchronisation of sound reels a century ago.
While director James Cameron appears to be prepping his Avatar sequels in HFR, the format has a less likely champion in Ang Lee, maker of Brokeback Mountain. His previous film, Iraqi wartime drama Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk, was a box office dud, but its production in 4K, stereo 3D and 120fps was unprecedented. So much so that it was only able to be shown in its full fat glory in five theatres (two in the US, two in China, one in Taiwan) outfitted with specially customised projection equipment.
Later this year Lee will release the sci-fi thriller Gemini Man which was also shot at 4K 3D and 120. The film’s cinematographer Dion Beebe suggests that HFR is “without question part of the future language of cinema” particularly tuned for younger audiences more used to seeing crystal clear images at 60 up to 240fps from computer gaming.
Lee is using the high frame rate largely because he wants to shoot natively in 3D – a brave move on its own considering how few filmmakers are doing this. The speed of playback erases the judder and blur inherent in capturing fast action stereoscopically or when panning the dual cameras.
HFR also lends the film a unique look that some describe as like a window on the world and another grand step toward immersion in the story. Others think that its ultra video quality is alienating and somehow removes us from the innate comfort of viewing a story as a sequence of flickering images on a screen.
Beebe describes the extreme clarity of Gemini Man’s visuals as “incredibly vivid and confronting” and talks of alternating the speed for different scenes to convey different story moods, much in the way one would light or compose a scene.
Special effects legend Douglas Trumbull as been trying to get HFR to go mainstream for decades and the format did find a niche as a short form attraction in theme parks. It could be that the technology has yet to find the right story. It wasn’t The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, but it could be the super bright CGI space opera of Avatar or maybe the Mohammad Ali biopic that Lee plans for his next project.


HFR is the next stage of the roll out of UHD on TV. With high dynamic range coming in this year attention will turn to upping the frame rates to 60 then 120p which would be incredible for sports like soccer. Audiences would welcome that, but seem to have a problem suspending disbelief watching HFR narrative drama. Just as Cameron kick-started the entire 3D cinema craze with Avatar, my bet is that his sequels will also prompt exhibitors to buy into LED cinema screens which are capable of playing back 8K 120p and beyond.
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Friday, 8 March 2019

Behind the scenes: Captain Marvel

IBC
The lack of female nominees in key craft categories – editing, cinematography and directing – was a glaring gap in the Oscar line-up this year. Indeed, the dial has barely moved in an industry dominated for more than the century of its existence by men.
What’s more, there’s money to be made in U$100million-plus superhero franchise movies with female heroines.Slowly, that’s changing as studios belatedly attempt to reverse decades of, at best unconscious bias, to selecting non-male and/or non-white craft talent on merit.
The breakthrough in this regard was arguably Warner Bros. DC universe origins story Wonder Woman, directed by Patti Jenkins in 2017. The film went on to make nearly U$900m worldwide, with the sequel Wonder Woman 1984, slated for released in 2020, also starring Gal Gadot and helmed by Jenkins (from her treatment) releasing this Christmas.
Before then, we get Captain Marvel, Disney’s first title in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) with a female superhero lead which is also the first to be directed by a woman.
Anna Boden co-directs with Ryan Fleck, a directing partnership best known for 2006 indie Half Nelson (which propelled Ryan Gosling to stardom on the back of an Oscar nomination), co-writing and co-directing the 2008 baseball drama Sugar and the 2015 poker drama Mississippi Grind.
Budgeted at U$150m and expected to make $1bn in line with other MCU releases, Captain Marvel is their biggest film to date by some margin.
MCU studio chief Kevin Feige is on record saying that he was impressed with Boden and Fleck’s ability to create character-driven stories in their previous work. Feige was instrumental in selecting Ryan Coogler to direct Black Panther after Coogler stamped his mark with indie films Fruitvale Station and Creed.
The Avengers prequel features the writing input of four women. The screenplay is by Boden and Fleck with Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Jac Schaeffer from a story by Nicole Perlman (who wrote the script for Guardians of the Galaxy) and Anna Waterhouse.
“We’ve been talking a lot about archetypes and what we want this movie to be about and just how to write a strong female superhero without making it Superman with boobs,” Perlman told Wired. “We’ll catch ourselves and say, ‘Wait a minute, what are we saying [here] about women in power?’ Then we have to say, ’Why are we getting so hung up on that? We should just tell the best story and build the best character.’”
This woman in question is Carol Danvers (played by Brie Larson), former US Air Force pilot, who joins Starforce, an interstellar police squad and is pitched into a heated battle between two rival alien races, the Krees and Skrulls.“The story lends itself to a [feminist narrative],” Boden explained to Marie Claire. “We just found what we thought was strong and powerful about this character and stayed to that story. No, we’re not trying to make this movie about all women—we can’t make it about all women’s journeys—but we want to just be really true to this woman’s journey.”
The film is set in 1995, a period which Boden and Fleck have mined for ‘90s nostalgia.
This includes the detailed recreation of a Blockbuster video store that Captain Marvel crash-lands into in LA. Fleck, incidentally, was working at a Blockbusters store in 1995. Like Guardians of the Galaxy, the film has a retro soundtrack including songs by Nirvana and female-fronted bands Hole, TLC and Garbage. The duo’s treatment references darkly comic ‘90s sci-fi action movies like Robocop,Terminator 2 and also 1970’s classics of paranoia French Connection and The Conversation.
Its lensed by British DP Ben Davis, BSC who previously photographed Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange and Avengers: Age of Ultron.
“Of all the Marvel features I’ve shot this is the most naturalistic,” he told IBC365. “There’s a lot of handheld and location work and we’ve tried to emulate the look in the earthbound scenes of cinema from the 1990s. I enjoy these stories the most when you have an extraordinary person in an ordinary world and that’s essentially the story we’re telling.”
Returning character, S.H.I.E.L.D. boss Nick Fury required septuagenarian actor Samuel L. Jackson to be digitally de-aged 30 years to suit the MCU timeline. This CG facelift was performed at LA and London-based facility Lola VFX starting from referencing older movies and photographs of Jackson.
The more than 2000 vfx shots were supervised by Christopher Townsend, who has worked on just about every Marvel movie you can name, and farmed out to multiple facilities including ILM, Framestore, Cinesite-owned German studio Trixter, Animal Logic, Luma Pictures and Digital Domain.
Regardless, it is the female-powered storyline, which like Black Panther’s black power theme, which will resonate. A recent report revealed that women accounted for just 8% of directors working on the top 250 films in 2018, which was down by 3% from 11 in 2017.
Speaking to the LA Times just before this year’s Academy Awards where Black Pantherwas up for Best Picture, Feige said that inclusion has been a very long time coming to the MCU — both onscreen, in the form of the heroes who get to carry their own movies, and behind the camera.
“I really do think that the talent was always there, but the talent wasn’t always, to be honest with you, on the lists that we were going through,” said Feige. “That has completely changed today. Not only because, with Captain Marvel, we said, ‘We must hire a woman to direct it’ internally, but also because the entire world has changed. And there will be many more announcements to come. Put it this way, it’s only the beginning.”
While the very idea of a female Marvel hero (Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow Avenger aside) has certain fanboys hot under the collar and posting negative reviews and comments on social media, Boden herself want to move the conversation on.
“This is the movie I really wanted to be a part of. It has been really amazing to work on this canvas with a character that so many people care so much about,” she told a press conference promoting the film. “But it’s 2019… and everybody here looks for the day when it is not news worthy that a woman is directing this kind of movie.”
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Mandy Walker ACS, ASC in interview

IBC 
In the latest in IBC365’s series of interviews with inspirational women in the run up to International Women’s Day, director of photography Mandy Walker reflects on working on projects as diverse as Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, Ted Melfi’s Hidden Figures and Niki Caro’s upcoming Disney blockbuster Mulan.
Director Baz Luhrmann once described Mandy Walker as “an artist and a general”. It’s how she sees herself as cinematographer, a role she has pioneered as one of the few female DPs from the 1990s and who is uniquely a member of both the Australian Cinematographers Society (ACS) and the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC).
She’s just shot Walt Disney’s Mulan for director Niki Caro, the second Disney movie after Captain Marvel with a female director, and due for release in June 2020.
Walker was in the fortunate position of knowing what she wanted to do from a very early age. Born in 1963 in a suburb of Melbourne, she visited art galleries with her mother, went to the movies with her father and got interested in stills photography. Her father built her a dark room in the back yard where she developed black and white photographs. 
“Aged 13 or 14 I knew I loved photography and the movies, so I thought why not become a cinematographer. That’s really what I wanted to do.”
A teacher introduced her to surrealist films and she visited the State Film Theatre in Melbourne to see foreign language pictures, both contemporary and classic: “The idea that cinema can be so diverse, opening up completely different ways of looking at the world, really excited me.”
She shot Super 8 movies in high school and applied to film school aged 18 but was declined for being too young. Undeterred, Walker got a job as a runner on a film set, ferrying dailies and actors around, talking to the camera department.
“I made everyone on that project aware that all I wanted was to get into the camera department. Getting a job means being persistent.”
With no formal cinematic education, Walker worked up the ladder from the inside. While focus pulling she shot student films to teach herself how to light and expose film, to frame and move a camera, learning from mistakes. She asked other DPs for their advice.
Cinematographer Ray Argall offered Walker her first big break. She had been working on some of his bigger multi camera set-ups for music videos and live concerts as his focus puller and camera operator. When he began to direct his first feature film Return Home (1990) he asked Walker to be his DP. She was 25 years old.
Soon Walker was shooting promos for INXS and Foo Fighters, then Parklands starring Cate Blanchett and Lantana directed by Ray Lawrence.
She has juggled short form with feature work throughout her career. “Working in different formats with different directors and trying out different equipment keeps your brain moving,” she says. “Commercials requires quick decision making. Features are more about finding the story.”
One of those spots was for Chanel No.5, directed by Luhrmann. Sometime later, looking for a DP for his next project, he called Walker.
The project was 2008’s Australia, an epic romantic adventure starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in the manner of Hollywood sagas like Giant and Gone With the Wind.
“Baz said something to me early on in that film that has stood me in good stead for everything I’ve done going forward,” Walker says. “He said, ‘It’s important for me that you are not just artistic but also a general’. Australia had three multi-camera units shooting simultaneously, a crew of over hundred and we were prepping scenes far away from anything in the Northern Territories. I learned on that movie, that as well as being an artist, I was a collaborator and a general capable of running large scale logistics.”Principal photography lasted a suitably epic five months and Walker was involved in total for some two and half years.
For Hidden Figures, the story of female African-American mathematicians who served a vital role in NASA during the early years of the US space program, she got director Ted Melfi to write bullets for every scene.
“One was simply the word ‘Breakthrough’ but it was enough for me to see how he saw the storyline for that scene emotionally and atmospherically.”
She explains, “My next stage on most movies is to look for references which could be other movies or paintings that may be relevant. I like to location scout and take lots of photographs of different possible angles. I’ll note the light and time of day. All that will go into devising the look.
“I’ll be quite meticulous about the look and will spend a lot of time doing tests, finding the right lenses and camera. I think a lot of it, for me, comes from an intuitive sense about creating an experience for the audience to help them understand the emotion in each scene.”
Walker went through this process on Mulan for Niki Caro. This U$100 million-plus live-action adaptation of the studio’s 1998 animated film of the same name is itself an adaptation of the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan. The film stars Liu Yifei as the eponymous character about a maiden who disguises herself as a male warrior in order to save her father. The cast features a roll-call of Asian-Hollywood crossover stars Jason Scott Lee (Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story), Gong Li (Farewell My Concubine) and Jet Li (The Expendables).
“We began by talking about other successful Disney films that have been made from established sources (Jungle Book, for example), asking what made them work. Mulan is already an ancient Chinese fable so it was about taking something well known, introducing a new audience to the story, and allowing Niki to stamp her personality on this version.”
She travelled all over China seeking locations for the film: older buildings that looked architecturally right for the film’s time setting and desert landscapes all the way up to the Uzbekistan border for lengthy sequences following Mulan’s journey into battle. She photographed everything, then visited New Zealand.
“Remarkably, a lot of landscapes in New Zealand could work for China which was handy for our scheduling.”
She test shot in LA with different lenses and formats, light and colour using an actor as stand-in for Mulan and some art department elements “working out what felt right for this movie”
“Although it’s a big film I wanted to give Niki as much time as she could with actors so we aimed to be very efficient on logistics.”
In the end Walker shot Mulan on Arri Alexa 65 for which Panavision build a bespoke set of lenses as the only way to achieve the particular look, of a Chinese painting she’d referenced, for certain scenes.
She commanded two units and “tried to keep as much of the amazing scenery and locations and effects in camera as possible.”
Walker is widely respected but, at times, she’s been made to work for it.
“When I was starting out in the camera department in the eighties there were no female assistants let alone cinematographers. So, I did get a lot of push back from crew like grips and electrics – just people thinking I couldn’t do the job. I just ignored it and got on with it.
“In terms of my job now, I can’t say I’ve had any overt situation where I’ve not got work because I’m a girl. I am sure it has happened but probably an unconscious bias rather than conscious for most people since this is a field that men have just done for a hundred years. There’s no logical reason why women aren’t being hired and it is getting better. But, that said, only about 5% of DPs are women.”
A recent artist in residence at UCLA, Walker mentors women and those of diverse culture to encourage more people into following in her footsteps.
“The most important things are to be dedicated, collaborative, amiable, and willing to try new techniques and equipment. You have to grasp each opportunity and never behave like you know everything because no matter how long you have been shooting there is always something new to learn and discover.”
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Thursday, 7 March 2019

Live Sports Streamers Want Sub-10 Second Latency


StreamingMedia

M2A Media explains how it orchestrates live streaming worldwide for DAZN, at the Vortech.by conference; Amazon talks AI and the Royal Wedding.
http://europe.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Live-Sports-Streamers-Want-Sub-10-Second-Latency-130405.aspxOne of the biggest SVOD sports streamers in the world is attempting to tackle end-to-end latency, but finding it a challenge.
"Customers want to get down to 10 seconds latency," declared Marina Kalkanis, CEO of M2A Media. "Of course, the aim must be zero, but even 10 seconds is a challenge."
The London-based software developer has been working with aggressive live sports aggregator DAZN for two and half years, in that time underpinning its expansion into regional territories Japan, Canada, Italy, the U.S., Germany, and shortly, into Brazil. 
"This pace of change is only possible if you take advantage of the cloud," said Kalkanis.
She was speaking at Vorethc.by, an inaugural conference for coders and software engineers hosted in Stockholm by API-based cloud media asset management platform Vidispine and with the support of AWS.
Kalkanis said that while the lag from camera to viewing on DAZN is 30 seconds at present, "we pick up the feed from playout so it's 5-10 seconds plus the twenty on our end. There are things we can do to shave more time off, but it is tricky."
She showed a live metric of DAZN usage revealing that (on Tuesday lunchtime) live stream activation on its network worldwide was zero but that last Saturday its network was handling upwards of one million concurrent users.
M2A's Live Streaming service orchestrates DAZN's entire cloud video workflow, from starting origin servers and transcoders, and loading transcode profiles to presenting cached CDN end-points.
"Our solution can orchestrate any number of concurrent channels and cope with multiple CDNs pulling from multiple regions simultaneously, which in turn serve millions of users," Kalkanis said.
For DAZN, the live playout signals are captured to two data centres and unicast either in RTP with forward error correction or Haivision SRT to AWS Elemental Live. From the encoder the feeds are encoded into the ABR ladder, sent to origin servers running Apache modules for packaging in HLS and DASH with DRM
The live capture-to-VOD workflow is managed in one of two ways. The first is by taking the live stream out of Elemental and passing that to S3 then, when the event is finished, to go back to S3 find the files needed to create the VOD. 
"The one drawback is that content is already encoded so you are relying on fragments (files) that already exist. We can only be as accurate as those fragments so there's more room for error."
The second path is to capture source video from playout then transcode in the process of creating the VOD assets. The advantage here, she explained, is frame accuracy and the output of higher quality video asset."
While the first path is faster and easier, since there's no additional transcode, the risk is a lower quality VOD. The trade off with the second path is the expense of using more AWS resource but a reduced bitrate at the end. 
"You've got to want it and you've got to have enough audience for it," she said.
Another key, for DAZN and for any live streamer, is to constantly review all aspects of the service and figure out where incremental improvements can be made. 
"If you want five 9's availability you need 24/7 operator MCR with eyes on glass," she said. "I don't know anyone who can use AI today for monitoring to work without fail.
Operator teams, she added, have to be aware at any point in time what is happening with development: "They must be hand in glove."
Quality of service and experience are ever more critical factors, as OTT sports companies start to compete for eyeballs. 
"Latency must be chased down; buffering is not tolerable; frame rates must be high, but bitrates should be as low as possible; and output must be viewable across a panoply of devices," Kalkanis said.
AI, the Cloud, and … Brexit?
The Vortech.by (where Vortech means fluid or dynamic ideas, according to Vidispine) conference also featured sessions Ingesting linear broadcast streams and distributing to multiple platforms from Grabyo and real-world applications of machine learning from AWS as well as speakers from Arvato, Valossa, Mayam, and the DPP.
Lee Atkinson, AWS principal solutions architect, media & entertainment, ran through AWS' ML and AI software stack for everything from automatic subtitle generation and multi-language translation to object and activity tagging in live sports streams using Rekognition.
One high-profile use case of Amazon's AI was with Sky News during last summer's British Royal Wedding.
Live feeds were taken from physical AWS Elemental encoders on site and fed Elemental Media Live as a mezzanine stream for media packaging delivery by Amazon Cloudfront. In this process, metadata company GrayMeta extracted single frames of video and sent them to Rekognition for identifying of people (famous guests like David Beckham) output them back to Amazon S3 as a JSON file and onward to the video player built for Sky News by UI Centric.
Atkinson revealed that this process was not entirely automated. "We built in a 30-second delay in the live stream for manual moderation of the AI recognition just to confirm the AI was correct," he said. "AI (object, activity, facial) recognition operates on prediction and degrees of certainty. You want the threshold to be as high as possible. Nothing is 100% certain. Since this was a working proof of concept, Sky felt they needed human eyes to confirm. If they didn't react quick enough, the AI wasn't confirmed (published live)."
Tim Burton, managing director of IP systems integrator Magenta Broadcast had some timely Brexit analogies. 
"What does Brexit and cloud have in common?" he posed. "Until recently, [the industry] created an island where it was nigh on impossible to integrate with other people's offerings, blocking trade within workflows. We were so concerned about the sovereignty of code we forgot about sustainability. Requests meant backlog, not integration.
"And while we didn't charge export tariffs [egress of media to the cloud] the only way to trade with us was through export—which made workflow slow."
Fortunately, ingress costs and download costs have reduced and entire cloud-based workflows can be built or migrated to without regard for physical borders. If only politics were so simple.

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Tuesday, 5 March 2019

Interview: Carolina Costa, DoP


IBC
In the second in a series of interviews with inspirational women in the run up to International Women’s Day, director of photography Carolina Costa reveals what motivates her.
Selected as one of American Cinematographer’s Rising Stars of 2018, Brazilian cinematographer Carolina Costa has traveled the world photographing feature films, documentaries, shorts and commercials. She most recently shot director Minhal Baig’s coming-of-age story Hala, which premiered at Sundance and to which Apple acquired worldwide rights.
 “When I was 15, I was already working with a photographer, from his lab in the back of his house,” Costa recalls of her childhood in Brazil.
“That’s where my passion for images started. I got my first camera and went around shooting, and I learned the basics about exposure and composition.”
She studied journalism in Brazil then moved to London in 2005 to pursue film at the University of the Arts.
“The [college] programme was very general and more theory than practice but there were a few of us who wanted to shoot so I spent my days in the camera room playing with equipment,” she recalls. “It was just very clear in my mind that I wanted to be a cinematographer.”
Costa was mentored by the late Sue Gibson, the renowned first female member of the British Society of Cinematographers and the BSC’s first female president.
“In her career she had moved from being a clapper-loader right into being a cinematographer and she told me to go after what I wanted. I’ve been told so many times that I would never make it as a cinematographer but you have to keep pushing and hopefully someone will give you a break.”
At a dead end after a succession of low budget music videos, shorts and documentaries during which Costa had herself progressed from clapper loading to DP, she applied to the American Film Institute, moved to LA and completed a Masters in Cinematography.
“I wanted to shoot narrative films and the AFI (American Film Institute) opened that door for me. I learned a tremendous amount, technically. It also made me trust my instincts, and that is the tool I use the most.”
Her AFI thesis film Way in Rye went on to compete at Cameraimage in Poland. Her AFI alumni short Contrapelo, about a Mexican barber who is forced to shave the leader of a drug cartel, premiered at Tribeca before being Oscar nominated in 2014.
That led to The Chosen Ones, a sex-trafficking drama directed by David Pablos which shot on location in Tijuana, Mexico and premiered at Cannes before winning five Mexican Academy of Film Arts and Sciences’ Ariel Awards, including Costa’s for Best Cinematography.
Since then, she’s photographed producer James L. Brooks’ documentary Icebox, Anahita Ghazvinizadeh’s Cannes selection They; Max Winkler’s Tribeca film, Flower; and Darya Zhuk’s Karlovy Vary festival selection Crystal Swan.
Social justice, gender identity and characters forced outside the system are a consistent theme running throughout this work.
“I’m in a fortunate position now where can choose my projects and I am mostly interested in telling stories about immigration or movies build around female leads.
“I always try to and portray these characters with empathy, to understand why these people have made these choices and why here, today.”
Crystal Swan was shot on location in Minsk, Belarus and is about a young female DJ whose American dream is derailed by a typo in a forged US Visa application. Iceboxis a drama about a boy trapped in the US immigration system.
Hala is an intimate look at the experience of growing up as a Muslim-American teenaged girl in America.
 “These are the type of stories not seen that any screen let alone an American screen.
”It’s important to me as an artist and as a person that these stories are told. These kind of stories are always hard to get funding – but once they get started they tend to gravitate toward someone like me.”
Director Minhal Baig made it on condition of an inclusion rider, a contract clause that guarantees a certain amount of diversity on set. Aside from Costa, the film’s production designer, composer and editor were female and its executive produced by Jada Pinkett Smith.
“One of the challenges of the lighting design for Hala is that, because we’re depicting a Muslim family, the direction in which they prey to Mecca is very important. We were shooting at a house on location in Chicago and once we’d decided on a direction for Mecca (the northeast) we had to stick with that which meant we couldn’t cheat on the direction of our principal light sources. The direction of where the sun entered this house was hugely important philosophically and aesthetically in the film.”
Her commitment to social projects extends to commercials. She shot The Journey, a spot for Mexican soft drink brand Jarritos showcasing the struggles - and triumphs - of immigrants living in the US.
Costa’s biggest budget feature experience to date was on 2018 horror remake Suspirawhere Costa handled second-unit cinematography and B-camera for director Luca Guadagnino and DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom.
“I was hired to the dream/nightmare sequences but in the end I collaborated quite a deal with the main unit. I learned a lot about working with natural light combined with operatic camera movement.”
Those are lessons she’d taken into Wander Darkly, a horror shot in New Mexico starring Sienna Miller and Rogue One actor Diego Luna.
“My mother has been a huge influence on me. She changed her career so many times and started a fresh and this gave me the courage to not be fearful of what’s about to come. It’s about trusting your instinct.”


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Monday, 4 March 2019

Is the new Lenovo phone the next big jump in mobile camera technology?

RedShark News
The incoming 5G cellular network promises a lot of things to a lot of people and one of them is ultra high-speed video. Outside of a few labs in Finland, Korea and trials at sports venues, no-one has seen this in action so we can only best guess at what the consequences of it might be. To even get to that stage we need mobile devices capable of handling data at Gigabit speeds.
Chinese brand Lenovo, which owns the American consumer electronics and telecommunications company Motorola, is at least making the right noises.
At MWC2019, the mobile operator’s tech fest in Barcelona, Lenovo announced that its new flagship smartphone Z6 Pro would capitalise on future 5G networks with a 'HyperVision' camera that will be capable of something the company calls Hyper Videos.
Since the firm’s spokesman Edward Chang was vague to the point of opaque about what this actually means, it’s mostly speculation at this point, although with the phone due for release in June we won’t have to wait long. And since its Hyper Vision capability is the phone’s main selling point there may be something more to it than marketing fluff.
Chang did tease details about the company’s angle of attack. Where 3G permitted the capture, send and receive of rich images at 384kb to 100Mb and 4G upped this to video at data rates to 1Gb, 5G would deliver 10 Gbps and what he called the era of Hyper Video.
He also referenced HMD’s new Nokia 9 PureView smartphone with five rear cameras and an unnamed 100-megapixel phone, which could be one from Chinese maker Gionee.
100MP cameras have until now been fitted only in DSLRs but processing smarts with chips like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855, mean that imaging of similar resolution is possible. Many leading phones contain around 40-50MB optics, with some, like the Huawei P20 Pro combining four cameras into 92MB.
Chang also referenced the R&D focus of companies like Apple and Google on time-of-flight 3D sensors and inferred that Lenovo were going to go beyond all of this tech.
“What type of new technologies can make the smartphone look at the world as you see the world?” Chang posed.
The answer to that would be some form of stereoscopic imaging although ideally one that we didn’t have to wear googles for. So perhaps this is a hint at a holographic phone, along the lines of the RED Hydrogen.
10GB is about the rate at which VR applications are expected to fly. Some people are predicting data rates in excess of 10Gb up to 70Gb over 5G mobile. IT giant Cisco says that in three years’ time more data traffic will created in one year than in every year since the inception of the internet combined - and that the vast bulk of that will be video.
Qualcomm’s boss Cristiano Amon says that 95% of the time 4K video will be streamed at full bitrate over 5G.
“It’s big opportunity because anyone with 4K cameras can become a broadcaster.”
Such superior imaging and near instant reception would also enable “live virtual presence” or the next evolution of social networking.
RYOT Studio in London, an innovation hub for emerging technologies, has built a 5G-networked space where it has trialled instant motion capture—the immediate translation of performance captured live into animation.
“That’s never been done before,” claimed studio chief Mark Melling. “Imagine the future production of Avatar where it won’t take a month or a week to render every single frame. You can do it instantly.”
Hyper Vision or hyperbole? The future decides.
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Friday, 1 March 2019

MWC's Inflated Claims for the Future of 5G Demand a Reality Check

StreamingMedia
Now that the dust has settled on MWC 2019, it’s time to take a breath. The mobile industry is in a headlong drive to the future but at such a relentless pace that some sanity risks getting lost along the way. So, let’s pause to reflect.
As expected the conversation was all about 5G, but the near-realization of this long-anticipated network upgrade hasn’t come alone. It is the combination of 5G with AI, cloud, and the IoT which have all come to maturity at the same time and are spurring a new wave of computing. In different combinations this will unleash incredible compute power in our personal devices and unlock patterns in data that humans just can’t see. Together these technologies will transform how we live, work, and play.
But not so fast. There are those at MWC who may wish 5G had never been invented.
It’s clear that for all the exaggerated claims made for super high-speed connectivity—from lifting rural populations out of poverty to solving climate change (both essayed by the GSMA)— the thing will cost. Most operators have barely made their money back on 3G, let alone ramped their networks to 4G.
What’s more, no one really has a clue what actual business models and bone fide applications will fly. That’s why vendors are panicking operators into buying 5G software equipment and why operators are panicking national governments into selling off high value spectrum on the cheap.
It is clear that video is the 5G killer app for consumers. Given the amount of video trafficking over the global internet today let alone in future, MWC should be re-named Video World Congress, joshed Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud.
But downloading a box set of Better Call Saul won’t cut it. Will 8K VR or live streamed interactive sports or synchronous AR multiplayer games? No-one knows.
The biggest bets are being piled onto heavy industries like mining, private healthcare, or the military: those with the cash to spare for the premium of millisecond precision engineering and tailored algorithms.
The sagest comment I heard was from Dr. Ali Parsa, founder of medical app Babylon who was speaking about AI but might as well have been referring to 5G.
“It has an exaggerated capacity today, either possible of immense benefit or potential harm. The reality is it could go either way. In the short term it will do a lot less than many of us pretend it can do and in the long term it will go far beyond our wildest imagination. We should all think about what it can do today and try our best to manage that future.”
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