GE AR . 5G: A NEW DAWN OF CONNECTIVITY
capital for the next project and making more immediate returns. As if bringing set and post- production closer together than ever isn’t enough, Mitchell believes the potential doesn’t stop there. “There are direct savings to be made with automation, through a lack of costly human error. But 5G will also deliver more tools. Cloud potential is humongous, and AI is set to be more than a buzzword. “You could use it for facial recognition, so teams can immediately find all shots with a particular actor in it, for example. Those kinds of tools can be put in place, because we won’t simply be handing files over on hard drives. “If we take the journey of a VFX artist, they do days of admin before finally sitting down to create art. But what if they could just get to it? Well, 5G is one of the elements that will make that world a reality.” Mitchell explains a great deal of ‘filtering’ will need to be done on- set, to ensure the correct data is fed into the AI machine. That will be part of the evolved role of the DIT. It also makes pre-production more integral than ever. But what of other creative roles, so far uninvolved in cloud workflows? They are set to benefit hugely from more advanced versions of what are most likely in their pockets already. “We’re going to see more digital interconnectivity between departments. And more shared knowledge across one giant network, where we don’t have to duplicate information as we do now,” Mitchell says. “Costume, makeup, production designers and more will have their own personal playback devices, where they can take screenshots, draw, make notes, then send that back to their team to Signals great and small It’s likely that major comms providers will use small cell technology to supply us with a constant 5G mmWave connection. We may see a day when these miniature, short-range ‘base stations’ are all around us – indoors and out.
A razor’s edge Increments of vision or sound are barely perceptible in person, but when collaborating via a remote video, the most fractional delay can have a noticeable effect. In a 5G white paper, Frame.io states that the 24fps capture rate of motion picture equates to roughly 42 milliseconds per frame. At a latency of 20 milliseconds – which is well within 5G’s capabilities – the publication proposes that a first AC could use a high-quality camera feed to pull focus with less than a single frame’s worth of lag, all from a different location. a long way from the cell tower, bandwidth might be limited. “Satellites like Starlink interest me particularly. In any open- air space, you’ll have coverage, so the only question mark from the ground up is, how much bandwidth can a single unit get?” On that front, 5G is designed to be capable of one thing its predecessors were not – in foresight of its virtually limitless use across countless industries, no doubt. “There’s a unique protocol that enables companies to make their
own 5G networks. With stages 400 to 500 yards away from each other, you could potentially transmit fairly high-bandwidth camera data from one to the next.” What about those not sitting a stone’s throw from the principal crew on-set, like the VFX team or editors? The hands-on section of their workflow – the editing or effects – has been done in the cloud for some time. But the same can’t be said for getting set up. “VFX pulls and the delivery of dailies are still done in person,” Mitchell explains. “With 5G, we’re approaching what some have called ‘camera to cloud’. “Our developing platform, Origami, is the first to provide pulls for VFX vendors, and it’s done using Amazon S3 storage. “Right now, on a project where 90% is staged, we’re able to put in a 10Gb connection and essentially provide a camera-to-cloud workflow. When 5G is here, it’ll open up the same opportunity to location-based productions. It won’t be long before we can provide other services up the chain.” TALENT ON-SET The importance of a faster workflow must be considered in financial terms. Productions wrapping sooner means they’re sold sooner, freeing up invested
Staggering stats
TIME Experts suggest 5G will offer latency of just one millisecond
LIMIT 5G data rates are expected to peak at around 10 to 20Gbps
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