Postproduction continues to move at pace to the cloud

RedShark 

The pandemic panicked much of the post industry into remote workarounds. Now, as vaccine rollouts bring back some normality, companies are grappling with the long-term structure of work and most see cloud as the answer.

https://www.redsharknews.com/postproduction-continues-to-move-at-pace-to-the-cloud

Choosing cloud over bricks and mortar has been the known direction of production and post for a while. Covid-19 drop kicked this 5-10 years into the future.

The advantages of cloud store and compute are well rehearsed. They include the ability for creatives to work from home by using familiar software applications from Adobe or Avid for example accessed on virtual workstations. All of the data is stored in a database; all the conforming and rendering and other high-performance tasks are carried out in the cloud.

Clients can be connected from anywhere too, giving them the flexibility about to spend time and cost travelling to a site, over and above Covid safety restrictions.

The cost of buying hardware to sit on-premises and having to ‘sweat’ that cost of many years can be replaced by a pay as you go operational model. Updates which would otherwise take time and cost to implement should be almost instantly accessible in the cloud with the IT/engineering tasks outsourced to the provider.

This distributed workflow which is not locked into a few physical sites in theory opens up the market by allowing smaller less resourced companies to access an almost infinite freelance market and buy cloud resources on demand to compete with larger studios.

Few post and production facilities are going to head to cloud overnight. Most will adopt an interim approach which retains some resources and dedicated suites on-premise with greater flexibility to expand in the cloud. But the ratio of on-prem to cloud is definitively shifting toward the latter.

Moving over to the cloud

An example is Soho facility Green Rock. It is looking to move completely out of that facility and to use cloud to connect clients and colleagues with the Adobe editing and finishing applications.

It is rolling out a cloud-based hybrid workflow to connect its Soho hub with a sister facility in LA using storage from BASE Media Cloud and the Iconik cloud MAM. On prem storage will remain for high performance tasks with burst capacity enabled in the cloud.  

 “In essence this means your data becomes centralised in the cloud, your workstations run in the cloud but your users can be anywhere in the world,” says Ben Foakes, the founder of BASE Media Cloud.

Post production has evolved. From the days of physical film cutting, into tape to tape and the transition at the end of the 1980s into nonlinear file-based editing, now things have now gone pure digital.  

“The virtual hybrid cloud has arrived as part of the eventual move towards full virtual,” Foakes says. 

This is by way of saying that not everyone needs to use Amazon. It’s the 900lb gorilla in the media cloud marketplace and its innovations keep on coming. Media is clearly a major focus at Amazon and it is making a tremendous effort to onboard everyone from the largest Hollywood studios to the smallest VFX house, but there are other technology options.

Amazon Nimble Studio

AWS latest is Amazon Nimble Studio, a service that makes it possible to stand up a new creative studio in hours from almost anywhere and at low cost too.

In AWS jargon this means “elasticity that gives companies near limitless scale and access to rendering on demand. …they can rapidly onboard and collaborate with artists from anywhere in the world, and produce content faster and more cost effectively. Artists will have access to accelerated [NVIDIA GPU-powered] virtual workstations, high-speed storage, and scalable rendering. There are no upfront fees or commitments to use Amazon Nimble Studio, and customers pay only for the underlying AWS services used.”

The announcement comes with testimony of several smaller creative media companies including gaming studio Anjekumi, San Francisco, animation and vfx house Evil Eye Pictures Toronto production facility Sinking Ship Entertainment and Spire Animation Studios.

“We believe the future of production is dispersed teams and agile studios,” James Bennett, Founder and Director of VFX & Animation, Shomen Productions is quoted. “Geographical access to a ready pool of talent is no longer an obstacle to creativity. We believe Amazon Nimble Studio will be as impactful to creative production as iTunes was to the music industry.”

Amazon's Nimble Studio means users can access powerful rendering facilities even if they are in a hotel room.Another recent initiative from Amazon, called CDI (Cloud Digital Interface) is an ambitious attempt to do something similar for live broadcast production. That is, host the entire range of live production applications including switching and graphics in AWS and do so by transporting uncompressed live video using the high performance features available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

At the Hollywood Professional Association event HPA Tech retreat in February a live demonstration of a workflow taking pictures direct into AWS for editorial manipulation showed just how far the tech has come and the inroads it is making. The media management piece for this demo was Frame.io’s camera to cloud software which has only recently launched.

This demo also revealed some of the gaps or challenges that still need to be managed before all workflows head to the cloud. Crucially this includes cost. Since the workflows are still nascent, there are question marks about the cost of getting material – especially raw rushes – into and out of the cloud as well as transferring around inside the cloud.  The cost of online storage and long-term archive in the cloud are also up in the air, so to speak.

Another gap that needs plugging is the ability for media producers to mix and match workflows between different clouds. Some protocols making the exchange of media seamless – and not expensive - between say Google Cloud, Amazon and Azure is something that content producers of large productions would want to see.

This also speaks to a degree of scepticism about cloud vendor interests. No-one really doubts that cloud security is an issue, though no-one can be complacent. But what worries some in the industry is cloud vendor lock-in. Having escaped the siloes of proprietary vendor environments of hardware SDI, they don’t want to have their media held hostage if a cloud provider goes bankrupt or simply crashes, however unlikely that may be.

Professional media is also a relatively small business for the largest cloud providers who will see financial and IT sectors, medical, education and industrial enterprise as larger cash generators. Once on board, what’s to stop cloud providers from ramping up the cost of media? Would the media industry have the leverage to act?

Competition, open standards and cloud agnostic software tools should provide some of the building blocks for media production going forward.

 

Torti Gallas + Partners – Cloud architecture for the future of work

copy written for LucidLink

Award-winning architects and master planners redesign their own workspace using LucidLink and superfast connectivity

https://www.lucidlink.com/case-study/torti-gallas-partners-cloud-architecture-for-the-future-of-work/

The Company

Torti Gallas + Partners (TG+P) is one of the largest planning and architectural firms in the United States and a leading proponent of New Urbanism. Founded in 1953, the firm comprises award-winning architects and master planners, urban designers, sustainability experts, construction administrators, and community facilitators. It has offices across the United States from Tampa and Washington D.C. to Philadelphia and Los Angeles, with an international base in Istanbul, Turkey. Torti Gallas believes that design can be a powerful force in the creation of environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable communities.

Long term issues

Like many global firms in the Architectural, Engineering & Construction industry, communication and collaboration are key to a productive workflow. 

Even before the pandemic, Torti Gallas + Partners was looking for a solution to better manage, transfer and manipulate data across all of its offices and to centralize it into one place. 

“We had a lot of siloed NetApp storage systems that were aging and we needed something accessible from both the office and remotely,” explained Omer Mushahwar, CTO at Torti Gallas + Partners. “Speed is everything, as without it the file access is extremely slow. We needed the same access experience regardless of geographic location.”

TG+P had already begun research into switching out its internal storage for a cloud-based system before COVID hit. Consequently, the firm wasn’t caught off guard when the shelter-in-place orders were mandated.

“The biggest thing for us was getting people quick access to the programs and the data they needed,” said Mushahwar. “We shifted all the Autodesk workload on Bim360, and basically, everything else was done through VPN – which for architecture files is a pain, because the files are so large. If there are 100 people connected to a 100MB or 1Gig circuit they are going to eat it up real fast. It slows access down a lot.”

Essential file access stalled

TG+P uses the full range of tools in the Autodesk AEC Collection including Infraworks, Navisworks Manage, Civil 3D, AutoCAD, and Revit, as well as Adobe and Office products and Sketchup. Its file sizes range anywhere from a couple of Megabytes to multiple Gigabytes with some files in excess of 100GB.

Before going remote the company had begun moving Revit projects to Bim360, Autodesk’s cloud collaboration platform, but all other workflows remained glued to the internal Virtual Private Network. 

“Torti Gallas has built its success on the power of collaboration,” says Mushahwar. “In practical terms today that means collaboration at the desktop. Pre-pandemic we were concerned about getting access to applications more quickly from workstations in the office so that we can share, iterate and design the next steps in the process. 

“It is now clear that the flexibility and agility that hybrid workflows bring to creative collaboration and productivity – from anywhere – will underpin our entire business approach going forward.”

Solution – turbocharged experience

Mushahwar took charge of researching and testing technologies that could help TG+P’s architects and designers collaborate as efficiently in the cloud as if their workstation was attached to a stack of local discs. 

“We looked at Panzura and Nasuni and all the big collaboration platforms like Box and Dropbox and nothing fit all of our needs. A lot of them didn’t always work with all of our file types. Linking for CAD files just didn’t always work. With Panzura and Nasuni we would still have had to VPN into the office which is sort of pointless. It didn’t solve our work-from-anywhere initiative.

“We even explored doing a cloud dump in Azure or AWS with NetApp files but nobody had a really good solution for remote. No one handled that piece well.”

A particular roadblock was the ability for the team to work seamlessly with the large files of modeling software Revit.

“That was a big sticking point with the vendors we looked at. Our teams create dozens of versions of models as we iterate a project and the systems we tested just couldn’t go back to the older versions quickly enough or not at all.”

That was when they struck on LucidLink Filespaces for enabling the team to quickly work together on design models directly out of the cloud.

“The decision to go with LucidLink was a no-brainer,” says Mushahwar. “Importantly, the end-user saw no difference in the application they were accessing. The only change they experienced was a leap forward in speed. Opening and saving files in Bim360, for example, was suddenly superfast.”

“It was rock solid in terms of reliability. Plus, we got everything we needed at a price point we could jump on, especially during COVID.”

TG+P went directly from proof of concept into production.

Results – Dramatically boosting responsiveness 

Beginning July 2020, Torti Gallas replaced its entire internal storage for an AWS S3-compatible object storage cloud solution from Wasabi, with data migration managed by LucidLink.  LucidLink’s cloud-native NAS solution dramatically boosted responsiveness by enabling file data of all sizes to be delivered efficiently and streamed on-demand.

“LucidLink is unique,” Mushahwar shares. “The app has allowed us to mimic all our old file paths and now we have one unified storage system. It worked well with all of our software and server-based systems from day one due to the way it ties in and is read by the servers.”

LucidLink simplified and made access to project data across all of TG+P’s offices in a network that can scale easily for secure remote distributed workflows.  

“We reorganized our seven network drives and data held in more than a dozen different silos into one cloud-driven location that is now easily accessible by all at any time of the day. All of our staff love it, especially when working remotely. It has made file access and speed exponentially better than VPN and has given our employees better access and experience while working on files.”

He adds, “LucidLink lets us bring data into one place and keeps everyone on the same level playing field.”

Reshaping the corporation

With hybrid office/work-from-home structures becoming the global standard, LucidLink allows multiple authenticated users at Torti Gallas to access data concurrently from one centralized location in the cloud, the single source of truth. 

“Going forward our virtual office in the cloud will make it so much easier for Torti Gallas as an organization to flex our business in response to client demand. We will continue remote working as a permanent facet of our employee’s work-life balance. As a company, we can dedicate less space to housing hardware on-premises, and in turn that helps us expand our presence around the world both physically and virtually.”

He adds, “The updates the LucidLink team has added, even in the short time since we signed up, have all improved the experience. All round, this is a game-changing solution for our firm.”

 

BT expands remote and sustainable production with Blackbird cloud editing and publishing

copywritten by Blackbird

BT and BT Sport is the most technological progressive broadcaster in the world. It launched Europe’s first live sports Ultra HD channel, BT Sport Ultra HD and the world’s first regular UHD High Dynamic Range (HDR) live broadcasts. It continues to pioneer trials for production and presentation of content using Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, enhanced audio, 8K UHD and 5G – priding itself on always putting the quality of experience for its viewers first.

https://www.blackbird.video/case-studies/bt-expands-remote-and-sustainable-production-with-blackbird-cloud-editing-and-publishing/

The ethos guiding production of its impressive portfolio of live events is to get fans closer to the action. Delivering an immersive experience for its audience means taking a lead on applying new technologies, workflows and tools across content production to distribution.

Over the past year, these efforts have dovetailed with an accelerated build out of remote production operations. During the pandemic the broadcaster derigged virtually its entire production set-up and rearranged equipment and workflow into a decentralised gallery operation from crew and talent homes.

Remote and scalable browser based pro editing

Continuing this initiative, BT is deploying ultra-fast pure browser-based production solution Blackbird for the high performance, scalable cloud native editing and publishing of content for its media operations.

Working in conjunction with the Head of Content Operations, Pete Harvey, the Content Operations team at BT use Blackbird to access and edit multiple live broadcast streams of sports and other content for the rapid production of assets for downstream distribution to over the top (OTT) and video on demand (VOD) channels for its viewers to enjoy.

The focus for BT is on the fast turnaround of VOD content produced from its live broadcasts where Blackbird significantly improves speed and efficiency of content to consumers.

Remote production is now BT’s preferred and standard operating model, according to Chief Operating Officer Jamie Hindhaugh and sustainability is embedded in its agenda.

By rolling out an IP core at its studios in Stratford and with increasing focus on migration to cloud architecture, the flexibility, resilience and carbon efficiency of the Blackbird technology is the future proofed fit.

With these foundational technologies BT Sport is able to transition from delivering the decades-old broadcaster-directed view of a live event to one in which it will offer viewers the chance to immerse themselves in the action with rich and personalized interactive experiences.

“We’ve got an initiative that I’m leading at the moment called Staying Smart, which is about actually how we operate post-COVID-19,” stated Hindhaugh. “We called it Staying Smart because we’re already working smart. What we’ve found is by having proper connectivity you can change the model long term for how you work.”

He added: “We will never go back to how we worked before. If you give people the right tools and the right set up, then allowing them to work in the best way for how they want to work has got to enhance your product.”

 

E-learning leader, Typsy, selects Blackbird to support unique training platform for hospitality professionals

copywritten for Blackbird

2020 may be in the rear-view mirror, but the COVID-19 pandemic is still in full force across the globe. Many countries are still facing restrictions, especially when it comes to restaurants and bars. Others have started to re-open, but there are still safety risks to consider, including post-lockdown burnout for employees who are having a tough time getting back to normal. 

https://www.blackbird.video/case-studies/e-learning-leader-typsy-selects-blackbird-to-support-unique-training-platform-for-hospitality-professionals/

Across the board, from managerial to operational levels, the hospitality industry is having to heal, adapt and refocus energies on the return to business.

Typsy has long held hospitality industry support as a key priority, particularly through the COVID period and beyond. Now, the world’s fastest-growing online hospitality training platform, has chosen Blackbird for ultra-efficient, remote cloud-native video editing of its world-class virtual training and development programs.

“We’ve seen an exponential increase in demand for online hospitality training over the past few months. As a result, we were in need of a service that not only provided top-quality production but could ensure we kept up with demand for new, industry standard course content.”

Jonathan Plowright, CEO, Typsy

The Australian headquartered educational technology company is a market leader in the production of e-learning content for the global hospitality industry. Led by industry experts, its courses are designed for multi-national hotel and restaurant chains, learning institutions, small businesses, and individuals to upskill for exceptional careers in hospitality.

Counting Swiss-Belhotel International, Hyatt Hotels, Aria and Solotel among the world’s largest hotel and restaurant chains in its user community, Typsy empowers its members with access to insider tips and knowledge to serve the world better and make every hospitality moment exceptional.

Globally distributed production

Typsy’s globally distributed production team remotely access and use the Blackbird toolset to edit and enrich online classes. The crafted content is published alongside Typsy’s existing library of learning materials for immediate availability to their global community. The deployment is another of Blackbird’s installed base running on Microsoft Azure public cloud infrastructure.

Typsy also works with federal and state governments and hospitality associations to provide large-scale industry support. The current Typsy video library consists of over 800 lessons on a variety of topics, ranging from compliance to food and beverage to marketing.

Recently, its library has expanded to include Coronavirus-specific content, providing practical information for business owners and employees on how to continue to operate well under Coronavirus restrictions and concerns, including COVID-19 Responsibility and Service Tips.

Learning methods have evolved and today digital access to knowledge is crucial. Of the multi-year collaboration with Blackbird, Plowright said,

“We’re excited to be working with Blackbird, where speed and access to media are critical in reducing post-production times and removing technical overheads and file movements. The platform enables Typsy editors, from Australia to Belgium, to access the new content, create new courses and publish them to our platform in a timely manner.”

 

EduTech leader, Boclips, deploys Blackbird to scale demand for e-learning video content

copywritten for Blackbird 

The pandemic has become a watershed moment in education, and for hybrid and blended learning in particular. Study and training have continued apace as schools, universities, and workplaces have wholeheartedly embraced a new educational reality – a mix of in-person and online learning.

https://www.blackbird.video/case-studies/edutech-leader-boclips-deploys-blackbird-to-scale-demand-for-e-learning-video-content/

These circumstances have accelerated an acceptance of what the research has long demonstrated to be true. That video is a surefire way to increase student engagement within and without the classroom. Whether supporting learning in the classroom, online remotely, or in combination, video has proved itself an invaluable tool for keeping the educational machine running and Boclips is at the heart of the enterprise.

The EduTech leader is on a mission to make learning more captivating with video with an easier, safer way to access content from the world’s leading video producers.

Its cloud-based educational platform provides teachers and courseware developers with simple access to over two million rights-ready curated video clips from the world’s most respected content producers.

Collaborative, dispersed global production teams

The globally distributed Boclips production team use Blackbird to rapidly access all incoming video content. Covering a wide range of topics and learning objectives, Boclips extensive library includes high-quality content from news producers such as Sky, PBS and Bloomberg, talks and lectures from TED Talks and Crash Course, and teacher-led materials from Boseman Science and Flipping Physics. 

Working remotely, the entire team can access Blackbird’s browser-based professional level toolset to rapidly edit and enrich content for publishing to the Boclips platform for immediate availability to its global community. Blackbird is also enabling Boclips to search and retrieve content from its AWS storage solution for re-versioning work so that the value from assets can be realised effectively

“Blackbird will dramatically speed up our video production capabilities and drive significant efficiencies throughout our operations. We’re excited to be working with a fantastic partner that offers such a great solution for our video workflow.”

Rob Weeks, Head of Content Operations, Boclips

With the global e-learning market expected to grow to $275 billion by 2022, according to a report by Orbis Research, and over 5 billion videos watched on YouTube daily, the appetite for both online learning and video is huge and growing.

Video is also the preferred learning method over traditional textbooks for Generation Z. It makes sense then that the preferred learning method of subsequent generations will be video-based learning too. Old school chalk-and-talk is going the way of the dinosaur. 

While it’s clear that video is effective, the challenge for instructional designers becomes how best to restructure video and video-based activities into a hybrid learning model.

Video-based learning without reinventing the wheel

“Segmenting information into more digestible chunks not only increases student engagement, but allows them to make the most of available time within their schedules,” explains Weeks. “As learning content is reimagined to suit the growing needs of hybrid-learning environments, we need to convince educators of the efficacy of repackaging their well-crafted hour long lectures (for example) into 6-minute chunks of video content.”

Luckily, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. The vast majority of Boclips’ videos are in and around the magical 6-minute mark that maximizes student engagement and avoids cognitive overload.

“This means that including well-produced, high-quality videos in your course has no barrier to entry,” Weeks says. “And also makes it a much easier sell to educators. Who doesn’t want to see their learning content supported by well-made professional video resources?

“Video content can be perfectly suited to engaged, active learning. Whether through post-video follow-up activities or the interactive quizzes, assignments, and questions that often follow videos, video is ideally suited to fill the gap created by the upheaval to traditional learning environments caused by recent events.”

By replacing traditional methods of production with Blackbird across distributed and remote production, Boclips’ team can transform their production cycles. The Blackbird technology and architecture enables genuine collaborative cloud native video editing to reduce content delivery lead times and boost productivity.

 

Chris Menges BSC ASC

British Cinematographer

Personal integrity defines the work of Chris Menges BSC ASC, whose storied career ranges from classic observationally-shot working class drama Kes to the Oscar-winning masterpiece of the Cambodian genocide The Killing Fields.

https://britishcinematohttps://britishcinematographer.co.uk/chris-menges-bsc-asc/grapher.co.uk/chris-menges-bsc-asc/

The composer and conductor Herbert Menges introduced his son to West End theatre. “Going with him as a kid to The Old Vic and listening to concerts had quite a huge influence on me,” Menges tells British Cinematographer. “Very early on I became fascinated with photography and had the lucky break to meet Alan Forbes after I’d left school.”

The American documentary filmmaker took the teenager under his wing and was the first of many influences that Menges absorbed. “Alan was a complete inspiration. His big influence was the cinema of Roberto Rossellini and the realist movement that came after WW2. I became hooked on what might be called a free style of cinema. He taught me about sound, editing, camerawork and basic film construction.”

This “maverick left-of-centre education” was a godsend to a young man who had applied and failed three times to join the BBC’s trainee scheme because, he feels, “of my lack of education.”

Other influences included the Czech New Wave, notably director Miloš Forman and DP Miroslav Ondříček, the love for which he shared with director Ken Loach. He and Loach had met on Poor Cow (1967) where Menges was camera operator to Brian Probyn BSC.

“We talked about Czech cinema and how it exhibited a kind of freedom. By some extreme good fortune, I happened to be asked to assist Miroslav on [Lindsey Anderson’s classic satire] If…. During the shoot, Ken phoned me up about Kes. He said I should learn all I could from Miroslav. So I did. I learned the technical and logistic problems of being a DP and I learned about his way of lighting.”

Kes (1969) was Menges’ first feature as solo DP. His relationship with Loach burgeoned over decades to include The Gamekeeper (1980), Fatherland (1986) and Route Irish (2010).

 

Equally formative was Menges’ career as a documentary maker which for a time ran parallel to his dramatic work. He joined Granada TV’s World in Action as a cameraman in 1963. Much of the rest of the ‘60s was spent covering conflicts around the world in such places as Angola, Burma, Cyprus, Nepal, South Africa and Vietnam, often undercover and with writer-director Adrian Cowell.

“If you’re in a news situation you are in competition with the other crews, so you have to learn to be smart,” he says. “In the jungle you are up every morning before dawn and you try to catch the truth of what you are seeing. You learn about composition and the power of light and how the sun reflects different colours. All these little things are learned the hard way.

“With some documentaries you have a long time to digest light and composition and where the camera should be without all the pressures of a cinema film. You learn how not to chase the dialogue and how to be receptive to the people you are filming so you become, as much as possible, part of their community not an outsider.”

He also credits an apprenticeship with Canadian documentary maker Allan King with teaching him how to capture image with sound. “In those days, the only sound camera was an Auricon – a big cumbersome thing. Later came the Éclair NPR. From Allan I learned about the relationship between the camera and recording sound and that the picture was of no importance without the dialogue that came with it.”

Menges defers to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the “decisive moment” in his own quest for finding the perfect second to press the shutter. “It is like the image is enduring,” he says. “It burns in your brain.”

However, being embedded with local communities in conflict zones came at a cost. “I covered the Zanzibar revolution with Michael Parkinson in 1964 and we were arrested and imprisoned in a hotel straight after we arrived. After a few days we were taken by guards to a compound surrounded by barbed wire within which were 2-3,000 Arab men of considerable age. All squatting on the ground. We get inside, the gates are locked behind us and there’s a couple of soldiers escorting. I whipped out my Bolex to film and this old man turned away from the camera. He didn’t want to be a part of it. Then ⁠— bang! ⁠— he was smashed in the side of the head with a rifle by one of the soldiers. A thing like that stays with you forever because if I hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have got his head smashed. So, there’s a huge price to pay.”

Menges manoeuvred away from documentaries and began collaborations with Neil Jordan (Angel, The Good Thief, Michael Collins – for which he was Oscar nominated) and Bill Forsyth (Local Hero, Comfort and Joy). He shot Steadicam for Alan Clarke’s coruscating skinhead drama (Made in Britain) and with Stephen Frears made noir pastiche Gumshoe (1971), several TV plays (including Walter with Ian McKellen in 1982) and Dirty Pretty Things (2002).

 

He has also worked with directors John Mackenzie (A Sense of Freedom), Niki Caro (North Country), Roger Donaldson (Marie), Jim Sheridan (The Boxer), Steven Knight (Redemption), Sean Penn (The Pledge), Richard Eyre (Notes on a Scandal), and Stephen Daldry (The Reader). The thread connecting these films is one of social conscience and stories about the outsider, the marginalised, the political activist.

“I’ve never chased after a particular film. I’ve just been lucky that I’ve been chosen. To me, the cinema is about how certain stories inspire you.”

None more so than in the masterpieces for which he won the Academy Awards. Both The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986) were directed by Roland Joffé and produced by David Puttnam. In typical self-effacing fashion, the cinematographer refuses to take credit for either and in 1984 even declined an invite to the Oscars ceremony.

“The Killing Fields is a special film to me,” he says. “It was storyboarded by Roland and we had the opportunity to do a lot of research in Thailand. We had a great production designer, Roy Walker, and special effects supervisor, Fred Kramer, and a great operator in Mike Roberts. My focus puller Jeremy Gee pulled off so many tricks. So, in a way you could say it was the pooling of a lot of talent that came together at that moment to tell Sydney Schanberg’s story in a devastating but poetic way. What we shot is in the writing really. It was Bruce Robinson’s screenplay that made it work. That and Roland’s storyboard.”

 

The Mission, shot on location in the Amazon, won the 1986 Best Picture Academy Award and always seemed like a Herculean shoot. “The hardest thing was shooting in the jungle without generators because we were in an inaccessible place,” Menges recalls. “It was a hard slog. Despite having worked in the Amazon before, it was a big teaching curve for me personally. Everybody contributed hugely to the production. You can’t achieve anything without them. The icing on the cake was Ennio Morricone’s score which is so beautiful.”

If there’s an anomaly on his C.V it’s the second unit work on Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Typically, he did it to broaden his craft.

“When Peter Suschitzky ASC asked me to do his second camera, he chose me because he knew I would do what I was told,” Menges says wryly. “He would be on another stage at Elstree and I’d be shooting away and he’d jump on his bike and cycle over from his part of the studio and tell me I’d got it all wrong.

“I was thrilled to do it because my kids thought that I was finally doing something that impressed them and, secondly, I did it because I wanted to learn about blue screen and vfx. It definitely helped me later on.”

Menges turned to directing in 1988 with the well-received apartheid drama A World Apart featuring the acting debut of Jodhi May. Crime drama CrissCross with Goldie Hawn, Second Best with William Hurt and The Lost Son (1999) with Nastassja Kinski followed without attaining similar heights.

 

He says he loved working on The Reader “because of the power of the acting and the simplicity of the story” and reteamed with Daldry for 9/11 drama Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was the first film shot on ARRI Raw.

“What I miss about electronic imagery is the chance to be able to feel the composition, the light and the performance. When you look through a reflex camera you have a certain feeling, knowledge, and response. That’s why I love operating because when you operate you are working out in your mind about coverage and where you are going and how much longer you have to shoot. If you’re the operator you can actually make those decisions.

“But in the end it’s the word that counts and if you are inspired by a great story then it is immaterial what system you use.”

Aged 78 he shot Waiting for the Barbarians, an adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s novel which Menges had wanted to direct 35 years ago as a follow-up to A World Apart.

“At the time, I couldn’t convince the people who owned the rights to the book that I was the right director. They wanted somebody a bit more ‘presentable’,” he says.

In 2003 he was invited to direct a version from Coetzee’s own screenplay, by producer Michael Fitzgerald who had met Menges while making Tommy Lee Jones’ directorial debut Three Burials.

This time, Menges declined. “I didn’t think I could pull it off. It’s a very internalised story about a man struggling with his masters, the Empire and the suppression of indigenous people. It’s a searing indictment.”

Fitzgerald never forgot the attachment that Menges had to the story and in 2018 finally enticed him on board to shoot for director Ciro Guerra. Shot in a fort on location in the Atlas Mountains, Morocco with Mark Rylance and Johnny Depp, the film was released last year.

Typically, Menges credits the visual energy of the film, shot widescreen on Alexa SXT and Mini, to his crew and the work of the “brilliant” art and costume departments. A camera was Serb Barraclough, 1^st AC Olly Tellet. On the B camera David Gallego operated, Mouna Khaali was 1st AC. 

“Ben Appleton was DIT and kept our work feeling alive,” Menges says. “Jonathan Spencer was our gaffer and with his crew got us to the winning post thanks to their dedication. Jac Hopkins as key grip excelled. “It was always a labour of love,” he says.

 

Earth-i delivers geospatial intelligence at scale with big data storage by BASE Media Cloud

copy written for BASE Media Cloud

Advances in earth observation satellite technology, big-data analytics and cloud computing are combining to position Earth Observation data as a pivotal source of business and organisational intelligence.

https://base-mc.com/earth-i-delivers-geospatial-intelligence-at-scale-with-big-data-storage-by-base-media-cloud/

A world leader in the field is Earth-i. The UK-headquartered company uses AI and satellite remote sensing data to provide unique insights in support of strategic decision-making for governments and organisations in the commodity markets, precision-agriculture, construction, and transportation industries.

“Our Earth Observation specialists and geo-spatial analysts use high revisit multi-resolution data to provide near real-time transparency of global supply chains by identifying changes in features, objects, and activity anywhere on the Earth’s surface,” explains Gary Crowley, Head of Technology, Earth-i. “The data is multiformat including colour video, infra-red and radar from a range of sources including satellite, aerial and drone and varies in size, volume, and frequency. Data storage and processing are mission-critical to our daily operations.”

With its image analysis and AI workloads in high demand, Earth-i needed a storage and processing solution that could flex and scale with its business.

“Our legacy storage solution, which was an on-premises NAS with a cloud back-up service, no longer fitted with the way we operate,” explains Crowley. “It was costing us time and money in maintenance, support and licensing. We needed to consolidate and migrate data from our existing solution to the cloud for cost, speed and security reasons.”

BASE Media Cloud provided the full solution design, build, testing, data migration and ingest setup. An initial 30 Terabytes of large-scale image data were migrated from a variety of on-premises storage and other cloud storage providers to BASE Media Cloud using custom syncing workflows.

This enabled Earth-i to mount its cloud storage with BASE Media Cloud to both local and cloud-based workstations and use it like a local shared storage device.

Crowley says, “BASE Media Cloud made it easy to find the solution that best suited our business and our use cases and were on hand to guide us through every step of the process. They assessed our requirements and came back to us with more than one option which we trialled before making our final decision.”

Instead of having multiple data silos and multiple sites of hardware, BASE Media Cloud manage everything for Earth-i as a cloud service. Data replication, redundancy, up-time and support is all provided through BASE, saving Earth-i the overhead in hardware, hosting, electricity and headcount for support.

“The key benefit of our new storage and processing solution is transparency to our operational workflows enabling us to continue to access data through the same processes as before. In addition, it is much more cost effective than before with low storage costs and no maintenance required from our side.”

He adds, “Earth-i has made a significant transition to the cloud in preparation for upscaling our processes as our business grows, as we’ll be ready to support the vastly increasing amounts of commercial data available from new satellite constellations that are being launched”.