FEATURE | FUTURE OF POST- PRODUCT ION
The traditional model isn’t going to drop off a cliff; there’s too much at stake for everyone to throw out what we’ve already done
of the filmmakers. So yes, the traditional model isn’t going to drop off a cliff, there’s too much at stake for everyone to throw out what we’ve already done. That said we’re looking at and wondering how to customise the combination of the traditional model with a non-linear model so that we can address all the filmmaker’s needs. A good example would be rather than waiting until the end of the show or lock- to-picture to do final colour correct, we’re final correcting as soon as there’s a rough cut. So by the time we get to lock-to-picture, not only do we have essentially final colour but the editors and directors have been working with final colour updated in their AVID projects all along. So the guide track actually reflects what the final show is going to look like. Those for us are the really interesting places as it allows a director, for example, to really riff between sound, colour and visual effects editorial. Then you don’t get a situation where the director finishes one process and moves on to the next without being able to go back and iterate the edit if they see something in sound that they would like to iterate later on in the process. If you keep it all open and iterative throughout the process they can play off each other. Time and again we have seen creative possibilities happen that wouldn’t have happened in a truly siloed, linear traditional process.
LD: If you’re planning on starting up with a post service, you may be
the data sizes are over. You can’t use these services to share VFX content. So, you’ll have guys just sitting at home spinning stuff up, anyone working on a local desktop workstation in five years is a crazy idea. Having central storage and being able to dial up the power of the machine as and when you require it is where we’re going to be. For me, yes we’ll sell desktop workstations but it really depends on how the businesses move forward. Everyone will eventually move to an online licensing model for their software needs. How far out that is, who knows, but the data sets are going to be so large that you will need render farms and some sort of AI compute. You’re not going to put that one machine under the desk, it’s going be multiple machines that you’ll need. If you’ve got an AI that’s doing roto perfectly and following instructions like “just give me the mattes for all these people in this shot”, you’re not going to run that on a local workstation, you’re going to run it on something that has massive GPUs. Even a freelancer sitting at home is going to be using the cloud in a different way than we are today.
looking at a place you go and sit and do the work with all the trappings of a place like Soho for instance. But if your idea of a post house is to use people all over the planet to achieve the work, then you won’t want to set up a company for a project as at the end of that project, whatever it is, you might want to give it all back. If you wanted to work on a single project you might want to achieve it in the cloud with remote workstations with no kit but software that is activated with a log-in. You can just log in wherever you are and just use the software. You just pay for what you use. At that point buying a desktop workstation is kind of a crazy thing to do; if you’re only going to want it for six months you will only rent a machine or you’re going to use a cloud-based workstation, especially with the remote workflows available. We’ve seen that already with people all over the country who are accessing central storage through Amazon. The days of use Google Drive or Dropbox for instance with their fair usage policy and
As software and desktop workstations become more
powerful, how will technology pricing change? Will this lead to a more service- oriented equipment supply industry?
36 DEF I N I T ION | OCTOBER 20 1 9
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