Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469942
42 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Summer 2022 department, and all of the regular on-set crew would be utilizing the stream and would need service. COVID Zones A, B, and C would all need to be set up for streaming. New Directors would be coming in every other block and would need to be set up, along with their assistants. After doing the math, I realized this would be about ten times more clients than we had on King Richard or any other film I had worked on. And just one video assist person? It was massive! What show was going to need so many people? I had a lot of ideas of how this all could work. Every scenario was rather a tantalizing puzzle to solve. So I asked Jeb, "Well … when do I start?" It wasn't until later that I learned that the show in question was Star Trek: Picard and that we would be shooting show's second and third seasons back-to-back. This was a dream come true. I grew up watching Star Trek with my dad. Having very keen knowledge of the show, characters, and episodes, I realized that this was monumental and could showcase all the new technologies that Video Assist Engineers could utilize. Star Trek: Picard had a very strict COVID protocols, as most of the cast was over the age of fifty. The Producers were thorough and safety was their prime concern on the set. We had very limited crew allowed to be on set, as well as in Zone A. Everything that production had gotten familiar with over the past fifty years was thrown out the window. It was an odd experience, filming a science fiction story whilst seemingly living in one as well. COVID made its presence known on the set. One day, a co-worker would be gone and someone would inform us that they were working from home in quarantine. At the height of January's COVID surge, we never knew who would show up to work each day. Therefore, everyone had to be able to utilize the QTAKE. It became a vital tool for production. In fact, the production became so reliant on it that our Showrunner personally thanked me and told me they couldn't have done it without my workflow. If video assist went down, we all went down. Jeb and I spoke about how this show, and this role could really set a precedent for video assist. This was the moment that I could get every Producer, Director, crew member, and the staff on our show to see and experience video assist and the stream like never before. Video assist would become the eyes and ears of production. There's no other way to describe it. So we had to start from scratch and created it on the Star Trek: Picard set. It was exciting to figure out all the possibilities. I got to work on the design and infrastructure of it. I ended up making a lot of flow charts and maps. On a show this large, it would have been impossible to wing it. I needed a complete plan in place. Maybe two or three of them. Thankfully, I was working with Todd Marks of Images on Screen, who was the Video Department Head on Picard. He was a veteran Video Playback Engineer and he spoke to production about getting me the essential prep time needed to create an ideal scene to stream for this show. He and his team of Video Engineers were able to understand the more technical aspects of our craft and vouch for it if something was needed. I was not alone and knew I had the backup of a full team of tech wizards at the helm of the show. Having such a large amount of Local 695 representation on set was wonderful. If I was getting a hard no from production and really needed the help, I was no longer a one-person band raising my hand. For studio work, I decided to create a local QTAKE network for streaming by utilizing the stage's IT department. I needed a bandwidth of 50mbps up and down on every stage. Then I created a secondary network for all the production offices, the art department, and to communicate with the other stages. Each remote stage required its own VPN (virtual private network) so that we could all be on one network that pointed to my system. The Ruckus (my Wi-Fi access point) beams a signal in a radius of about 100-150 feet, so I needed to set up several of them to boost the signal each time we were shooting. By setting it up this way, everyone on the QTAKE network could stream locally while everyone working remotely could stream from the cloud. This allowed the studio's network to power the bulk of the Wi-Fi without having to rely on my individual Wi-Fi access point to supply the stream to the entire team. So in essence, a Producer or crew member could walk from one stage to another stage, into the office, out into the art department, through the production offices, and still be connected to the stream all using the QTAKE network I set up. This allowed for more crew to be able to be farther away from set and not have to rely on their cellphone signals (there was barely any service on our sets) to stream. The minute I tapped into the Ethernet plug in the wall and my system was up and running, we could all be streaming. Once we were, I found it worked better than anyone could of imagined. At one point, we had two teams and six cameras on the stream. The team could open up an iPad and see everything being shot at one time. It was actually quite fun to see the look This was the moment that I could get every Producer, Director, crew member, and the staff on our show to see and experience video assist and the stream like never before. Video assist would become the eyes and ears of production. There's no other way to describe it.