Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/297945
www.postmagazine.com Post • April 2014 35 Technicolor's Production Services division now encompasses dailies, VFX, grading and conforming. www.postmagazine.com Post • April 2014 35 S3 Simple Storage, and then render various deliverables faster-than-realtime using Trans- koder in the cloud." This type of innovation is happening across the industry, and these companies are hardly alone when it comes to new or improved products that address important needs of content creators today. In recent months, Bling Digital, for instance, has been pursuing the need for television and small, indepen- dent movie productions that operate in far- away, remote locations to use smaller and more portable dailies technology, so that they can travel without "large amounts of bulky gear" to such locations, in Parker's words. He says the company has responded to this need by developing "an ultra-portable dailies system based on the new Mac Pro, whose redesign includes a much smaller form factor. As we often receive new technology before it becomes generally available, we were able to acquire several new Mac Pro units a few months ago, and have been battle- testing them as platforms for dailies process- ing for television and smaller features that can pare down their needs when [traveling to remote locations]. We like the system because it provides a lot of power in a device that can fit into the overhead bin of an aircraft. We currently have a prototype built, and expect to begin delivering our ultra-portable dailies system within a few months. The advent of these types of dailies systems can save pro- ductions a lot of time and money, and also deliver creative benefits, because they can enable productions to travel to places that they previously would have shied away from. That will result in richer and more interesting content. We aren't showing it at NAB, because we are a service provider and are not making these products to sell. We cus- tomize hardware and software solutions to meet the needs that our clients face, but it does fit under our trademarked POD [Post On Demand] line of services." There is a lot more going on in these arenas and others, of course. Several facilities and key color and workflow management technology manufacturers like Colorfront with its Express and On-Set Dailies technologies; MTI with its new CarryOn Appliance connected to the Cortex system (See the March 2014 issue of Post); and other industry leaders like Filmlight, whose Baselight was recently used by Efilm on the new feature Divergent (See this month's "Bits & Pieces" section). SCALABLE POST What most of these trends make clear, though, is that the post production industry is re-making itself as it adapts to new tech- nology and new economic realities simulta- neously. Companies like Colorfront, for instance, probably would not have existed in their current form in an earlier era. While operating a European-based digital interme- diate and post service facility, the company provides dailies, data processing and finishing software tools to major clients across the industry simultaneously. Jaszbereyni suggests the synergy between the development side and the service side of the company's busi- ness is, in fact, essential to the health of both at the end of the day. "Having close, in-house access to the developers has obvious benefits," he says. "Any critical issues can be dealt with swiftly, the latest unreleased tools may be available earlier to [our projects], the latest color sci- ence, camera format support, grading tools, hardware suppor t, and so on, can be accessed. But, at the same time, we also work closely with customers like Deluxe, Tech- nicolor, and Light Iron, who are often pushing the envelope themselves, and need custom development and specific features on the shows they service." No matter what the structure of the company may be, Light Iron's Michael Cioni suggests the kinds of innovative trends discussed here are, quite simply, smart business moves. From his perch, it's all about leaving the linear behind and becoming scalable on the industry's newest frontier. "In post today, we have found the dividends and yields are higher in scalable business models than for linear business models," he says. "That has led us to expand, for example, our R&D team, which is one reason [Light Iron] was able to open up [a New York facility]. R&D does not require us to scale everything in a linear way — we did not go to New York and build the same thing we had in Los Angeles. Instead, it is scal- able: it's Web-based, software- based, and mobile dailies-based. The cornerstone to being able to expand for us was research and development — a post house with more employees dedicated to R&D and soft- ware expansion, rather than engineering and color-correc- tion staff. Yields on software became more scalable than yields on our DI work. We can create one tool, and thou- sands of people can use it. That doesn't mean we don't need dailies and DI work. We do — we need dailies and finishing experience, and then we can apply that experience into software development. If you make only the tools, and lack the dailies and finishing knowledge, the tools can suffer. If you only do the dailies and finishing work, you lack the ability to develop your own software. So, to my mind, the future of post is about scalability — come up with revenue streams to let you scale." C M Y CM MY CY CMY K pdf-no-bleed-has-crop-and-trim-fmc-20th-annivesary-one-third-based-on-v5-fixed-again.pdf 1 2/19/2014 2:40:54 PM