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New Regency, MarkLogic to Take on Data in Production Workflows

On Feb. 1, Lulu Zezza, physical production executive for New Regency Productions, Matt Turner, CTO of media and entertainment for MarkLogic, and Guy Finley, executive director of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), will tackle the value of metadata in productions, in the webinar “Lights, Camera, Actionable.”

And if you want to know how important getting data out of today’s TV and film production and post-production workflows, just ask Zezza.

She relayed a story around the Leonardo DiCaprio thriller The Revenant, where the actors were so made up with make-up, it was nearly impossible to recognize many of the bit players. Several bit actors contacted New Regency post release to claim they were not credited. New Regency could not determine whether they were or were not in the film more than a year after the scenes had been filmed, despite several screenings, lawyers, and paperwork review – the end result, all were added to the residuals list.

That will change, with the introduction of the production company’s new and unique software-driven production data hub, which allows enabling creatives to work easily on any project, with executives able to analyze data, and utilize it for anything from residuals management to product placement receivables.

“We’ll be able to link contract data on actors to the dailies on a daily basis, and create the list of who’s in the movie, as well as determine approvals of products as well, avoiding expensive, manual processes,” Zezza said. “Just because I have a contract with an actor doesn’t mean I owe them residuals, and that’s not clear at all with the bit players.”

The webinar will take a deeper look at the tools New Regency is using to squeeze meaningful production data — including production tools running in Microsoft Azure, and data integrated with MarkLogic, in partnership with Avanade, and reporting and analytics via Microsoft Power BI — and can serve as a model for others in the industry, according to Turner.

“That’s where it strikes home, lawyers watching a film in a screening room, doing expensive manual work, because we didn’t have the data that could simplify the process,” he said. “That’s changing. It’s data driving the business, and every aspect of the business, and making it all available in one place is crucial.”

The webinar will look at how content creators are challenged to pull meaningful data from their productions due to the use of multiple, disparate software applications, a “data disconnect” that makes it challenging to manage siloed metadata.

To register for the webinar, click here.