35
ROUND TABLE
NEAL ROMANEK: What will remote – or distributed – production be like in five years?
TIM PUSCHKEIT: Remote production will always have to be a consideration in the future. It isn’t the key to success, nor the answer to all our questions. Remote stands and falls, at the end of the day, on what the customer or broadcaster want to achieve. It’s all about emotions. We’re already starting to go back to a bit more travelling, so it will be a balance. The discussion will move to setting priorities and deciding what is best for the next project. ROBERT ERICKSON: The biggest difference is that we’ll just call it ‘production’. Technologies we have developed today for remote production are going to be innately baked into everything we do. It’s just a toolset that we have to create the content required. On the engineering side, there is a unique challenge. Our job is to allow creative people to make the best content they can possibly imagine. Do you think a TD really cares if his switcher is a big Grass Valley keyframe sitting in a truck, or a bunch of compute in AWS, if it gets the job done? They just want to focus on what they’re doing. We still make switchers, and have to do some things in hardware, but if you want to do a medium or small production in the cloud, we can do that. A lot of the things we still have to do in hardware today, we’ll be able to do in software. CLAIRE WILKIE: I ask all my clients: “How big is your imagination? What is the most outlandish project you can think of?” Then, we look at the tools to see how to make it happen. It comes down to that translation between technology and creativity. Half of my job is being able to do that for production companies or
producers. They have an idea and say: “I want to live stream from the North Pole or a mountain in Italy. I have no idea if I can do that. Is that possible?” I love that question. Of course it is, because we have unlimited technology available and it’s always being innovated. Everything is going to get better. Delays will be smaller and the most outlandish ideas are going to happen. That’s why I’m in business. NORBERT PAQUET: Cloud, remote, IP, you name it, they will all just be part of the way we’re working – a mixture of ways to create content. The methods of working and toolsets will be put together based on the objective of
the creatives. There will be a lot of flexibility in what people pick and choose. That’s why I like this distributed production model. You pick your resource – whether it’s a creative brain, the engineering or processing back ends – you put them together and you go. The options palette will just get wider. STEVE DARGHAM: I like what Claire said. In 2012, James Cameron wanted to go to the Mariana Trench, the deepest point of the Earth. And guess what? We connected him live, from the Mariana Trench, all the way from National Geographic HQ. Let me take you back to three years ago, when Fox Sports Australia decided on distributed production. For the past three years, the National Rugby League, Australian soccer and AFL have been done remotely from Melbourne or Sydney. In five years, there will be more AI, but remote will just be part of production.
Switch it up: Creative minds are sure to excel with the latest methods of remote production
“THE PALETTE OF OPTIONS WILL JUST GET WIDER”
Watch
this clip online
feedxtreme
feed_xtreme
feedxtreme
MAY/JUNE 2022 FEED:XTREME
Powered by FlippingBook