POST PRODUCTION THE FUTURE IS HYBRID
A
s the media and entertainment industry gradually unlocks from months of quarantine it is
doing so into a world which has been permanently changed. Above and beyond the social
distancing and sanitary measures which will be routine for an indeterminate period, the film and TV business faces an uncertain future which stretches from the
“WE’VE BEEN TRYING TO PUSH REMOTE WORKING and THE INTELLIGENT use of
technology for the past few years but it’s never just about technology
foundations of production to the economics of consumption. “Post production and VFX
companies were not required to close during the lockdown,” explains Neil Hatton CEO, UK Screen Alliance. “However, demand for their services has dropped drastically and has now almost dried up, as the filming of new material has been halted since late February.” The fuel in the tanks of post houses
has run dry. Drama, in particular, has dropped off a cliff. The offlines that soak up so much square footage are idle while rent drains the resources of even those facilities with reasonable
financial clout. Work is returning, with order books filling up from the autumn. Far from the end of post,
this is a time for reinvention or reconfiguration. The severing of normal workflows and business practices under COVID-19 called on all the industry’s ingenuity to survive. If nothing else, the crisis has proved the prudence of a business continuity policy centred on routing media to remote locations. Most editorial applications are already software- based with only the very last reviews of critical colour or Dolby Atmos mixes necessitating dedicated studios, calibrated monitors and client attend. There is no tech formula that will
work for everyone but each business is on different tracks to the same end game which is to transition the functions of storage and compute that currently reside in bricks and mortar into the cloud.
GAPS IN THE CLOUD “We’ve been trying to push remote working and the intelligent use of technology for the last few years, but it’s never just about technology,” says
David Klafkowski, CEO, The Farm Group, who points to client reticence to transition as one reason Soho has been seemingly slow to move. “It’s been on our ‘to do’ list but has kept moving down because of demand.” You could call it inertia. Nobody
likes change. “If it ain’t broke why fix it?” says Lee Griffin, EditShare’s Sr. Director of Product Marketing. “It is also quite difficult for facilities who have bought into a hardware platform that they amortise over 5-7 years. If they’re in the middle of that payment it very hard to pivot 180-degrees into cloud.” Thanks to the collective enforced
remote experience, however, those mindsets have changed forever. The Farm rolled out 70 editorial
rooms into a remote scenario during Covid enabled by tools such as Teradici (virtual desktop infrastructure using PC-over-IP) and its in-house asset tracking and viewing portal Fred. “We don’t spin up much in
the public cloud, apart from some monitoring and approval tools, but anything that involves horsepower is in our own cloud,” Klafkowski says. “So,
when we need more Isilon (scale out network-attached storage offered by Dell) we use opex to buy it.” Short term. The Farm’s store and
compute will remain on-prem shared into its private cloud. “Mid-term it’s the same – our cloud, our tin, though we might use data centres more,” Klafkowski says. “Long term will all be on the cloud.” The chief reason for not switching
any sooner is economic. “It’s cost prohibitive,” he says.
“We’ve been buying Isilon for years. Running them on our power is cheaper than buying from AWS. Because we run multiple projects the costs of cloud haven’t worked for us yet but if we had a smaller operation that might be different.” Conversely, he says, if The Farm
were to expand with global reach then cloud might make sense sooner. “If we were doing massive projects for, say, Amazon, and working internationally then using AWS to solve latency and scale would be a no-brainer. We’re just not there yet.” It’s not just cost though. The Farm feel that there is a huge missing piece
wasn’t in place at the time. It has always been a key part of our strategy to be flexible with regard to where and how our clients work. So, it’s not something we’re moving toward, it’s something we do, we’re just moving toward doing it in a more seamless and flexible way. “Remote working or cloud
JOHN ROGERSON CEO, HALO
“Halo was originally conceived as a ‘virtual’ post house when it was opened 16 years ago but the connectivity, technology and infrastructure required to make it a useable solution
storage is not a silver bullet. It’s just another tool, another golf club in the bag. It will be perfect for some productions and not suitable for others. We simply aim to be good caddies and make sure our client has the best club for the shot they’re trying to play.”
Summer 2020
televisual.com
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