FUTURE OF POST- PRODUCT ION | FEATURE
ZAK TUCKER The co-founder and CEO of HARBOR. For more than 20 years, Zak has been strategically disrupting to create one of the first end-to-end, cross-genre, independent production studios of its kind. Zak started as an editor for commercials and documentaries, but soon progressed to directing. He launched Swete Post in 2000 and in 2012 launched HARBOR. Zak built HARBOR from a staff of four and a footprint of 400 square feet, offering two services, into a staff of 100 and a campus of 70,000 square feet, offering the full range of production and post-production services.
LEE DANSKIN Lee started his career at Alias as a senior applications analyst. He helped build and launch Maya 1.0 before moving to The Film Factory as VFX supervisor. He then joined Smoke & Mirrors as head of 3D before becoming deputy head of 3D commercials/ broadcast for MPC. Lee moved to Escape Studios as training development director in 2006, where he redefined its training programme by making it more industry relevant. A year later he was made a Maya Master. Lee is now CTO of Escape.
the pull process, which has been done to some extent already, but also automate the delivery back to the post house from the VFX vendors and the off-line suites, maintaining colour pipelines and metadata integrity so you can iterate and reiterate and deliver on time. We’ve have already implemented parts of this with our own coders and R&D sections. We can already automate the pull process with our own process for delivery to the vendors, we’re really focussed now on retrieval from them. Also auto-conforming and auto-updating on offline suites along with exposing the pull system to our clients so that we can get out of the way as well. Our clients can then do 24/7 pulls and retrieval without human intervention except for the skilled human QC elements, troubleshooting and customisation. Is the traditional model still relevant especially when post companies are increasingly active in pre-production? ZT: Going forward the cloud will be one of the tools in the arsenal required to address the scale of demand for premium content production and How will the cloud’s growth reflect on post-production’s performance?
everything is a cookie cutter result. AI will be part of the toolset but I’m also talking about all sorts of other coding and scripting that can take processes that we normally do by hand on a daily basis, and automating them. The demand for premium content creation has gone through the roof and there are literally not enough people and expertise to achieve it at that level if you don’t automate. The speed of turnaround will not be possible. One example would be around VFX pulls, for instance, and retrieval automations. Especially on larger VFX features and episodics you can automate
have multiple teams working not only on a pipeline within a building, but because of the way USDZ been structured, it can be used via the cloud as well. Zak Tucker: The sheer scale of demand for premium content creation is mandating really intuitive automation for appropriate post-production processes; coupled with quite high-touch bespoke human QC, intervention and customisation. That’s why we don’t see it a particular service of a particular technology but more of an approach that couples automation where it’s appropriate with humans overseeing it. So you still have custom workflows so not
OCTOBER 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 33
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