DEFINITION October 2019

FEATURE | FUTURE OF POST- PRODUCT ION

Post houses have upped their game to achieve more real-time workflows because of the way they’re working from a business standpoint

distribution; the post partners, archiving and retrieval. Some of the current barriers of full cloud adoption include egress costs, bandwidth costs, especially enabling real-time, high-resolution and low latency. It’s going to get more and more adoption and will allow for more and more remote collaboration and delivery of even higher- end processes. Is the traditional post-production model still relevant especially when post companies are increasingly active in pre-production? year and if you look at what a post house once was, especially the heavy VFX-type post houses who once upon a time only did commercials or promos, now we’ve got people doing AR, VR, real-time game engines etc. The whole convergence of being able to stream games with services like Arcade from Apple is changing the traditional concentration on just video. That’s having a massive effect on the back- end pipe lines and workflows; we once knew what a post house did, maybe commercials or promos or features. Now they are seen as more of a collaborative creative resource. Advertising campaigns are now much more rounded and fully fledged and most of the post houses that we deal with have had to evolve to reflect that including diversifying to make up for the downturn in commercials work. Post house are also getting closer to the camera with the new virtual capture LD: We’ve visited quite a few post houses in the last six months to a

is required at 4K. Moving the data around Europe for instance is not feasible so you’ve got to move the pixels, whether that’s remote workflows through the cloud or dark fibre between sites. That’s going to allow us to get the talent pool big enough to actually feed this huge demand for content. ZT: The traditional model for post- production houses is still relevant; there’s too much riding on these workflows that have been very successful over time to throw them out. Post companies are increasingly moving upstream, including previs, near-set dailies, near-set editorial and even further upstream in pre-production – and even in script writing consultations and line producing budgeting consultations. That said, for us the most intriguing innovations are around facilitating less linear post-production workflows, where filmmakers have non-linear access and interactions with all their post teams and divisions; dailies, editorial, VFX, colour, sound, you name it. They are then more easily able to iterate with a real- time feedback loop so creative options are maximised and easily riffed on and explored. If you think about it, the main thing we do in post is the enhancement of the vision of the filmmakers. We’re working relentlessly to put options at the fingertips

technologies appearing on-set. Post houses now have a mixture of revenue avenues including the rise of the pre-vis companies that have been using viewports of certain 3D software and are now trying to use game engines to raise that bar even further. Then there is the whole on-set virtual production world which is coming the other way and they’re sort of meeting in the middle nicely. The post houses have upped their game to achieve more real-time workflows because of the way they’re working from a business standpoint of the need for diversification. It’s also allowed for them to do more on-set. With the rise of films like The Lion King and The Jungle Book where 90% of it, or 100% for The Lion King, is virtual. That type of process isn’t going to go away, it’ll become more of the realm that we’ll be going down. The art of what is now possible has now shifted quite considerably. The classic cloud scenario is allowing post companies to not have to be based in London but perhaps have showroom houses there. You could have just review and editorial in town and take advantage of cheaper premises in many other places. There is a huge amount of content to be made and in many ways longform TV is outstripping some of the quality levels required for film. Film is still done in 2K in most instances and content for Netflix

34 DEF I N I T ION | OCTOBER 20 1 9

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