June 2014
www.tvbeurope.com in association with
TVBEurope 17
parallel universes of old and new running side by side for some time, both from the consumer point of view, and within the production environment. “How long will it take for that to change? Probably twice as long as you think.”
25 major players, 400,000 small businesses Wilson-Dunn expressed admiration for Avid’s unifi ed, all-encompassing vision, but was concerned that the dominance of a single player could exclude opportunities for small companies and innovators. “My observations at NAB and IBC last year were that the market for workfl ow is starting to mature. It’s starting to have some deliverables. With Sony, Prime Focus, and Avid — and HP back in the market — people are going to choose different platforms, as much as we’d like to see one dominating platform. It’s the interoperability between platforms that is the big question for me. We know that the ecosystem in this marketplace is probably 25 major players worldwide and then 400,000 small businesses based in lofts and garages. How do those small businesses get along?” Avid’s Craig Dwyer said that the UK’s DPP deadline, coming up in October has helped force the industry into maturity, by encouraging an agreement on common standards, which has helped companies at all levels He noted that Avid now has a variety of options available for
Culture change Though much of the conversation had been about the diffi culties of effectively managing and leveraging new technology. Martyn Suker said that the big issue was not technological change, but that it was — particularly in a production environment — culture change.
From atop BT Tower, the industry’s workfl ow challenges seemed manageable. And the appearance of a double rainbow was auspicious
users, including monthly subscription licenses. Jose de Freitas of TV3 in Ireland addressed the issue of small broadcaster operability based on his own experience: “Obviously, representing the smallest organisation in the room, one of the interesting things is a subscription-type model that facilitates the ups and downs in the production cycle. Tom Cordiner believed that Avid was offering a fl exible model that served the interests of both big and small companies alike. “It depends on workfl ow and what organisations are trying to achieve. If you’re a big broadcaster like RAI in Italy, where you might have hundreds of editors or journalists working, fl exing up to buy 20 or 40 licenses isn’t such a critical thing. But if
you’re a small production house in Soho and have peaks and troughs in use, it’s a very different thing. But we have the option to fl oat licenses around different user groups. I think we scale across from independents all the way up to big organisations.” “I think that’s Avid’s winning proposition,” seconded Wilson-Dunn. “It’s that scene of the creative organisations at the sub-fi ve people level that drives the rest.”
Paul Stevenson was cautious, but hopeful: “Broadcasters have the big end infrastructure that does exclude a lot of small third parties. That connection for third parties still feels like a challenge to me. It feels like there’s a cost overhead to join the party. Anything that eliminates that, I think helps the cause.”
Suker noted that there is a common conception that moving around media in the digital realm is easier. “But I’m not sure that it is, actually. We’re entering an environment now where we’ve got a hell of a lot more media than we used to have in a tape- based environment. It’s gone crazy in the fi le-based world. And managing that has become much more diffi cult. We’ve almost lost control of it. Why have we got more? Because we can. And because we’ve got a lot more people who are self- shooting these days. And because we’ve lost sight of what it means. “If you had a 30-minute DigiBeta tape, if you shot fi ve rolls in a day, you knew you got two and half hours. You knew what your shooting ratio was. What does a 64 gig card mean to anybody? You can fi ll it up and empty it and fi ll it up and empty it, and before you know where you are, you’ve got a hell of a lot of stuff to deal with. How do you do that seamlessly and move that around?” The unstoppable deluge
of fi les fi lling a workfl ow necessitates better and better
metadata, but managing the metadata becomes as much, or more, of a challenge as managing the fi les themselves. “It costs money to enter metadata. It costs time. And who knows what that metadata should be? The people who created the content in the fi rst instance. And where do you want to use it? Everywhere else in your organisation. So the seamless fl ow of that metadata is absolutely vital. And that’s a thing that we really don’t do very well.”
Suker noted that the industry does have some common standards for metadata that have been around for some time, but broadcasters still don’t employ them consistently or effectively. Suker’s assessment of the metadata problem was heartily seconded by the majority experience at the roundtable. The discussion that followed delved deep into the problem of metadata.
Why aren’t broadcasters employing metadata as well as they should — or could? And if metadata is the key to managing fi les, is successful metadata the royal road to a successful workfl ow?
The second part of our Avid Roundtable coverage will appear in TVBEurope’s July issue. Selected excerpts from the day’s proceedings, including exclusive video footage, can be found on our website, and at:
smarturl.it/workfl ows
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