Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1152338
29 production companies can build or purchase their own server solutions, which eliminates the vulnerabilities of third-party storage options. Fortunately, these improvements are occurring at an ideal time within our industry. As productions have left the traditional filmmaking hubs of Los Angeles and New York in favor of exotic locations around the globe, production activities have become decentralized. Rich tax incentives offer unique opportunities that incentivize productions to shoot in new hubs that may not be where the footage is ultimately processed and undergoes post production. A project may shoot in Atlanta, undergo general editing in New York, and source out visual effects, color grading, and post-production sound to companies based anywhere else in the world. In complicated workflows such as these, every entity involved with the project needs access to the digital assets. Transporting physical drives can be costly and time-consuming. But simply uploading the entirety of the project's assets to a server where any relevant parties can download the information is an ideal solution. This allows post-production teams to begin processing footage almost immediately, regardless of whether the shoot is occurring a few blocks away or on another continent. The expediency of this process also allows for near real-time feedback from the editors and dailies, which can eliminate the need for costly reshoots later in the production. For Local 695 video engineers, whose responsibilities include media playback, off-camera recording, copying files from camera media to external storage devices, backup and redundancy creation, transcoding, quality control, syncing and recording copies for the purpose of dailies creation, this emerging technology presents an opportunity. Those who become well versed in its finer points will be ideally suited to jobs looking to take advantage of improved online distribution. While the need for traditional media managers who offload cards to hard drives is not going to disappear in the foreseeable future, a new breed of FTP media managers will become necessary going forward. Media managers who possess a basic understanding of network-attached storage (such as Avid's Nexis or Pronology's rNAS m.3) and common FTP client programs (such as Signiant's Media Shuttle or Aspera's Client) are ideally suited to take on these new roles as they become more prevalent. In an ideal setting, a media manager is able to ingest/ offload multiple streams of 4K media, perform transcodes if necessary, and then drop completed footage into what is called a "watch folder." From there, the FTP client can parse the folder for any file containing a specific string of characters, such as the ".r3d" file extension of a Red camera or the identifying label of a particular camera. When it finds files that meet its criteria, the FTP client picks up the file and begins duplicating a copy of it to its web-based server. When the file has finished being copied to the cloud, the client software moves the original copy to a "transferred" folder in order to avoid sending the file multiple times. Signiant's Media Shuttle is even capable of replicating folder structures, meaning that all of the organization and offline to online directories created on set by the media manager are retained when they are sent to post production. This sort of workflow has already been successfully carried out on shows such as MTV's Wild 'N Out, MTV's Video Music Awards, TED Conferences, and NBC red carpet shows. Wild 'N Out, in particular, is noteworthy for sending multiple episodes' worth of content from Atlanta to New York on a daily basis during the production of its recent fourteenth season. In total, the show's video engineers successfully transmitted fourteen cameras' worth of video, amounting to more than twenty-five terabytes of data. Nonetheless, this technology is not without its limits. In April of 2019, a team of astronomers successfully captured the first photograph of a black hole—a revolutionary feat that required more than five petabytes (or five thousand terabytes) of data to accomplish. Unfortunately, limitations in bandwidth and storage costs still meant that it was faster and more cost-effective to mail the physical drives back-and-forth across the globe than it would have been to upload the data to any online server. So for the time being, if a production has a few million gigabytes of data that they need to send out, it may be more efficient to physically transport the data back-and-forth. Even limitations such as these are a temporary matter at best. As the nightly phone call was replaced by a single mass email, internet limitations will also disappear. Ten years ago, uploading even a terabyte of data to the cloud was a monumental task. As our industry continues to evolve and demand more efficient workflows for bulkier and higher resolution files, FTP clients will rise to the occasion. Ten years from now, it is likely that the threshold for transmitting a petabyte's worth of data will be crossed. When that time comes, 695 video engineers should be prepared to jump at the opportunity for the new work created by this ever-evolving technology. For Local 695 video engineers ... this emerging technology presents an opportunity. " "