Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1189824
www.postmagazine.com 27 POST NOV/DEC 2019 OUTLOOK O OUTLOOK O OUTLOOK WORKFLOW E stablished in 1990, Chesapeake Systems is a full-service provider of technology systems and solutions, including pioneering asset management technology, that specializes in optimizing media workflows from creation to distribution and preservation. Here, Chesapeake's Luis Sierra addresses some of the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) issues facing our industry today. STRENGTHS: The rising volume of digital content is only going to continue. A study by Cisco this year predicts an unprecedented 82 percent of all Internet traffic will be video media by 2020. Furthermore, as more streaming services launch — Disney+, Apple TV+, Peacock, HBO Max and more — it's clear that content will continue to be produced at record levels. Even more pressing for networks, news outlets and political influencers is the coverage of the 2020 Presidential race that promises to be unprecedented in its scope and detail, including leveraging video content as soon as it is generated by any and all means possible. WEAKNESSES: Most post facilities, departments and in-house post teams are running out of space — and the pace at which it happens will only accelerate. Accurate assessment of bandwidth needs is vital to the process of planning for the future. It's critical to have a clear under- standing of your provider's bandwidth offerings in both upload and download speeds. High-speed media retrieval has become a key factor in the technical post production equation. Many providers tout high download speeds, but upload speeds have to be equivalent so that creatives and engineers working behind the scenes can collaborate efficiently and move and deliver assets in a timely manner. OPPORTUNITIES: Integrating media asset management (MAM), once not consid- ered a significant part of the post deliver- able equation, will become more intuitive to the process. Questions like whether storage should be cloud-based, on-prem- ises, or hybrid; how team members will locate files; and how to access render locations have motivated some of the leading solutions providers in post to beef up their platforms with the expectation that MAM will be core to every workflow. We are also experiencing growth in the prevalence and popularity of collaborative workflows and how these platforms cater to them. Creative teams want to interact with the many members of the post team in realtime. There are new opportunities to implement instantaneous, collaborative processes into highly flexible and func- tional workflows, which should be a target on everyone's hot list. THREATS: Once 5G is implemented, editing in the cloud will become even more prevalent and interest in physical drives will phase out. This will simultane- ously elicit significant security concerns. Collaborators on a project won't care whether the footage they are working on is cloud-based or not — and as long as it can upload and download quickly, creatives will be happy. However, the fact that 5G will be easily accessible to the public makes it a security risk. The faster files in the cloud can be accessed, the less time security teams have to react. Two minutes is an eternity if there is a breach. Implementing a solution without thorough attention to the proper permis- sions, copyrights and licensing to thwart security risks is a recipe for disaster. Moreover, the speed and agility of NAS setups, which at one time were only available with a SAN, means that media-rich color correction can now be done on a NAS, opening up new doors for how post teams can operate. While this path will be a viable new option for some, post and IT teams need to understand the ideal environment for this type of move. Hurdles in security or scalability can be serious complications to making this transition successful. DIGITAL CONTENT CHALLENGES FOR POST PRODUCTION BY LUIS SIERRA SENIOR WORKFLOW CONSULTANT & PROJECT MANAGER CHESAPEAKE SYSTEMS BALTIMORE, MD HTTPS://CHESA.COM/ many days, nights and weekends could be retrieved if rendering wasn't a thing? You'd have so much time to make every- thing that little bit better. Perfect monitor calibration throughout all environments and all conditions would be a huge timesaver. Knowing that ev- eryone was seeing the same thing in the same colorspace at whatever resolution or viewing angle on whatever monitor wherever they were in the world would give everyone so much confidence in the final product. If it was possible to tie that in to a universal frame rate and aspect ratio we could reduce the amount of work required on every job by at least half. A standard file format for all live-action footage, graphics, 3D assets and elements. Maybe we could end to the race to make pictures bigger and bigger, whilst ignoring the compromises in quality and compression that occur in the process. Automatic recording of camera posi- tional data, lens and angle information merged seamlessly with a point cloud scanning everything in the scene giving color and depth information would make everyone happy. Let's include instan- taneous generation and attachment of dialogue files, analysis of the image searching, and creating a library of sound effects. If all of this data was automatically attached to the camera RAW files and al- lowed you to recreate the original scene in your 3D, editing, mixing and compositing software, so much the better. Perhaps some of this already exists and is possible right now. Perhaps most of this will be created by AI and ML in the near future. But getting it all on every project would be amazing. Think how much could be achieved if you had all of these tools at your fingertips. Finally, to make life complete in VFX, the perfect chair, the perfect playlist, and the perfect coffee would top everything off nicely.