Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1541878
www.postmagazine.com 27 POST NOV/DEC 2025 lackbird, which specializes in cloud video editing technol- ogy, regularly works with some of the world's biggest broadcasters and events (think Olympics, World Cup), enabling them to edit live footage. With their Elevate.io solution, Blackbird is bringing its cloud video R&D, along with its fast online video codec, to con- tent creators large and small. Elevate.io is a browser-based editing solution that allows users to upload video to the cloud and then edit it with- out any desktop software. The tool is free, with limited storage, and additional "paid" subscriptions expand the offering. To prove the point of how accessible it is, Elevate.io chief product officer Sumit Rai says the company performed a test, purchasing a $150 Lenovo Chromebook, which proved more than capable of taking full advantage of the tool. Rai, whose background includes time with soft- ware developer Vegas Pro, as well as in the streaming business, thinks Elevate.io is a natural transition to using the cloud for content creation. "Look at the trend of every other industry," he suggests. "Design has gone online with Canva at the lower end; Figma at the higher end. 3D for film and television is going online on Shape...Everything's in the browser. Everything's being stored (in the cloud), and every industry is moving that way. Why? It's the SaaS move. It's the ease of convenience — the backup. You just don't have to worry about anything. And more importantly, with almost all those products — and probably spearheaded in our opinion by the Google suite — was the collaboration element. The idea that I can be working on something and you could be working on something, and we can work on it together." Cloud workflows, says Rai, are being embraced, and the move to cloud stor- age is also gaining acceptance. "When we started this project, 'cloud' was a bit of a bad word," he reveals. "Now it's just a given. I don't think people have an issue with it in any way, shape or form. There's going be a lot more comfort in people saying, 'This can be not only our working system, but also our archive system.' We don't have it yet, but we will be introducing a second layer of archive, which is where you'll be able to put the content you have into [Glacier] storage. And in doing that, we become so significantly cheaper than if you try and buy any kind of backup system." Rai recently sold off his personal storage solution — a 96TB drive — and feels consumers, which will be the initial customer for Elevate.io, are already comfortable with the concept of streamed video and the cloud. As Elevate.io becomes more familiar to content creators, he sees its use moving up to the prosumer and media professional levels. "Movies are on-demand," he points out. "You've got Netflix, Apple TV, Spotify. The music's coming on-demand. Everything's cached fairly locally, so regular stuff is there. I just feel like we've made the consumer move." EMBRACING THE CLOUD FOR EDITING B WORKFLOWS OUTLOOK COMPOSITING IN THE AI ERA BY MATHIEU MAZEROLLE DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT FOR NEW TECHNOLOGY FOUNDRY WWW.FOUNDRY.COM Compositing has always been the make-or-break point of film- making. Pulling together images from different sources requires exceptional skill and great judgement. Artists are constantly challenged to walk the fine line between illusion and distraction. However, the rise of AI is quickly reshaping many longstanding creative processes — and it's also making compositing more important than ever. AI holds tremendous artistic and operational promise for expanding creative choices and accelerating workflows in visual effects. It broad- ens accessibility to key storytelling tools, but also introduces pipeline fragmentation, diminishes creative control and surfaces questions around data provenance. Studios can mitigate some of these challenges by building AI-empowered workflows around compositing. Today, AI is great for concepting and brainstorming, but it won't output fully-editable or production-ready assets. Even for non-generative tasks, like shot retiming, AI often introduces artifacts or imperfections that must be resolved to get the content to final frame. Leaning on compositing as the backbone of AI-powered workflows, studios and artists can harness the many and still-emerging benefits of AI while maintaining creative con- trol. This is even after countless iterations that will inevitably be necessary. The magic will continue to happen visually in the last mile of the workflow, in tools like Nuke that preserve the precise and collaborative nature of compositing, and enable artists to polish AI-powered deliverables. The VFX craft has been balancing artistry and technology for decades. Like with any new advancement, artists and studios need time to learn to determine what aspects can be handled by AI and those that must remain firmly in their hands. As they navigate this new normal and feel the pressure to deliver more with fewer resources, compositing will re- main key to modern filmmaking and AI's continued influence on content creation workflows. Foundry's 3D compositing system. Elevate.io's edit window.