REMOTE POST PRODUCTION
POST PRODUCTION
“Covid has forced the industry into innovating ways to monitor, feedback and sign off on cuts, vfx, and colour grades”
ways to monitor, feedback and sign off on cuts, VFX and colour grades in scenarios where you can’t bring people into the same room. Dolby Vision Dailies guarantees that everyone is mastering the same image.” Clear Cut’s preference is to work
with local media on a technical setup that matches that deployed in the suite: broadcast monitor, IO device, a grading control panel, high speed drives and workstation with grading application. “In this situation, the monitor is calibrated to match that at the facility with the WFH room setup to try and emulate the lighting conditions of the grade suite too,” says Nottage. When it comes to online, Clear
Cut’s creatives use a hybrid solution of remote and local working. Remote connecting to the facility’s online suite works for the bulk of sequence preparation and some fixes. Working locally with media and outputting to a grade 1 monitor is essential for critical
review and final sign off. Again, like for like kit is required for a home setup. The facility’s dubbing mixers tend
to work locally with media when at home. Nottage says they each have home setups that comprise a workstation with ProTools software, mixing desk and calibrated speakers. Ultimately you need to deliver the
result into some other workflow by sending it somewhere. For example, an editor may be sending EDLs to the colourist, sound designers or VFX teams. A commercials producer may need to retrieve archived footage from a previous campaign. “For internal file sharing, you
may consider synchronising your tools so files are automatically shared and updated across your team’s workstations,” says Chuck Parker, CEO, Sohonet. “This works great in the office – when you have tons of bandwidth for sending and receiving. But most home-based solutions are going to have an asymmetrical
connection, where the upload speed is significantly slower than the download speed. In this scenario, sending the deliverable file only when needed is a better approach than constantly synchronising all your source files. You might supplement this with a sync at the end of the workday, which can continue through the night if needed.” Facilities are tending to toward
extending remote to the home while maintaining storage and compute at the premise. In the case of Clear Cut and The Edit Store, the facility’s infrastructure is, in effect, its own private cloud providing virtual workstations and shared storage. “The enhanced benefit for
producers of having their facility manage a project is that it not only supplies storage and workstations but also the supporting services that productions are used to such as post producers, tech support, shared infrastructure,” says Nottage. “Drives can still be delivered to the facility or
a close look at remote working
The senior team at The Look have always been keen on offering their team the option to work remotely. Ever since they started
working with clients in the US, where there will be incoming notes and feedback at the end of the UK working day, its colourists and online editors have enjoyed the flexibility of perhaps taking an earlier train and completing their WFH. “All of our workstations at home and terminals in our offices are connected via Teradici,” says Mark Maltby senior online editor. “All our work is done over IP
even when we’re in the facility. Pre-Covid, anyone who wanted could connect by VPN and put a zero client on their desktop to work from home. When Covid struck we made sure everybody had a PCoIP box available to take home. With a monitor, keyboard and mouse everyone is set.” Maltby uses Grass Valley Rio software and grading panels and finds hardly any latency even over standard home internet connections. “With a lot of people in the house using the internet you might notice it becomes a bit laggy but the Teredici will scale the image on screen to adapt to low bandwidth.” The Look also use Streambox to stream live grading or finishing
sessions to any facility in the world that also has a Streambox and a calibrated screen. “We send a video signal
to the Streambox 4K which is then compressed and sent along an encrypted channel to a receiving Streambox 4K. This is usually plugged in to a Sony X300 or comparable monitor. “We can also stream to
multiple Streambox systems via Streambox cloud, as well as a browser window (if reviewing in SDR) so locations anywhere can join in on the review sessions.” Monitoring has long been
the Achilles heel of remote work. There’s no hard and fast solution other than doing as best you can to calibrate the screens at both ends to match.
“At the start of a session
we play out a grey scale chart to set the screens up. You can get it pretty exact such that if one of you mentions a tinge of red in one shot the other person does understand what you mean.” Maltby doesn’t think that virtualising workflows in the cloud is right for the facility just yet. “We are handling 3 TB per episode in most drama so when you start looking at the cost of pushing 400TB of deliverables for one project to the cloud it’s eyewatering. We upload directly to platforms like Netflix and Sony but a lot of them are still requesting back up to LTO tape. I imagine we’d deliver that way for the foreseeable future.”
Autumn 2020
televisual.com
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