FEATURE | FUTURE OF POST- PRODUCT ION
T his future of post-production article is an exercise in crystal-ball gazing; everyone does it and the answers you come up with depend usually on who you ask. We hope this article will be the start of a series looking at the future of different areas of the business. For this article we’re very happy to ask questions of two experts in their field, Lee Danskin, who is CTO of Escape Technology and Zak Turner CEO of US-based post group HARBOR. What service or technology will have the most impact on post- production in the next five years and why? years. I don’t see post houses as being machine learners in the first instance, I think they’ll be consumers of the learning outcomes. Most of the manufacturers are working on some sort of AI solution; there’s AI in Flame now and there are a lot of things coming from the likes of Adobe with their research that are all super interesting for the future. Obviously, that requires a lot of compute, it requires a lot of ‘tin’, something that everybody out there is trying to move away from for all the right reasons. The technology is changing at such a pace now that you don’t really want to be using hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of whatever that is under your desk to read your email on. The more VFX-like work, the more Maya, Houdini-type workflows you have, the more you can specialise the compute resources that you need and then just consume them as and when you want. If it’s just a traditional editing, broadcast kind of place then their technology requirements are very different from a simulation VFX kind of house. Each one has its benefits and disadvantages but obviously within the next five years Lee Danskin: It is the cloud, to a degree. From a technology standpoint cloud and AI are the two things that will have the most influence over the next five
The cloud will be one of the tools in the arsenal required to address the scale of demand for content production and distribution
we’ll probably see the end or the death of the spinning disk. We’re beginning to see that now with, for instance, 15TB SSDs and bigger capacities coming in the solid state arena. That starts to offer up other potentials in terms of central storage; there are a lot of companies that are still working around the single GB/s networking to their machines and still use restricted file formats of the ProRes, DNxHD type, not fully uncompressed video formats. A lot of people have been skirting around the cost requirements but with Adobe Premiere now being able to play native file formats straight off the camera, the only thing stopping this growth is technology and hardware costs. It’s super expensive right now but that will come down immeasurably, the days of hugely expensive HDR monitors for instance are coming to an end. There’s still going to be a requirement for a grade 1 monitor without a doubt but soon you’ll be able to sit at a workstation and do an end- to-end production without having to dive
in and out of other suites. So, the editors of the world will become more than just the editors which will affect the broadcast world a lot more with the 4K agenda being pushed by the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Apple with new subscription services. You will also see the legitimising of mobile screen technology with new panels from companies like Apple and its HDR- compatible screen tech. The excuse of it just going on mobile is going to go away very quickly especially with 5G on its way, so delivery to mobile devices is going to change the way you view programming and there won’t be any scaling up to achieve broadcast-standard resolutions. There are also more pipeline technologies like Universal Scene Description from Pixar which is the open source file format. That has been adopted by Apple with USDZ so you’ve got a crossover there where you can start to utilise film-quality assets being used in AR and VR type scenarios. You can then
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