Management

As the media and Entertainment industry continues its rapid digital transformation, post-production houses, and those that work tangentially to the post house, are experiencing a bit of trepidation about what the future may hold. Even the word post-house itself, which implies a physical structure, has become something of a misnomer as a new generation of SaaS-based companies are entering the post-production space offering cloud-based, end-to-end platforms for production, post-production, distribution and delivery with very limited physical infrastructures. The challenges and opportunities facing post houses are significant as studios and filmmakers seek out more collaborative, connected, cost effective and scalable platforms to manage their content.

The Future of the Post House
It is a widely accepted fact that the media management role of the post house, along with key staff positions such as the digital imaging technician (DIT), remain exceptionally important in the modern film industry. The management of the media itself and the need for efficient quality control has also helped enhance the role of the post house.

However, current trends in the industry have reduced the need for a traditional post house as it was once understood. For example, one of the most outwardly visible signs of Hollywood’s conversion from film to digital is the successive closure of the town’s once great film processing labs. In May, the Deluxe Hollywood Lab, which was built on the Fox Hollywood film lot in 1919, finally closed its doors. Technicolor has shuttered both its Glendale lab and its iconic boxy black building on the Universal lot (now a cutting-edge NBC Universal media center.) And this past year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences offered the ultimate posthumous tribute to the film-processing business when it presented an honorary Oscar to the men and women who operated the labs, with Chris Nolan giving a stirring eulogy for their “more than a century of service to the motion picture business.”

These lab closings have helped spark an intense debate over the direction of post-production in the digital age. One of the key questions is whether a centralized brick-and-mortar post facility still makes sense at a time when so many film companies are turning to a cloud-based post-production model, in which work is globally dispersed and subcontracted to a wider range of companies.

On the one hand you have giants of the business like Technicolor, Deluxe and ModernVideoFilm which have made significant investments in physical infrastructure. All these major players are transforming themselves and adding new digital services and cloud-based offerings to meet the changing needs of their clients. On the other hand you have companies like Hulu Post and platforms like Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud Platform, which allow for a virtual workflow and don’t necessarily require a physical infrastructure. Both sides are searching for a business model adaptable to an industry that requires ever more streamlined and connected solutions to manage the digital production and post-production value chain.

I’ve worked on the creative, production and technology sides of the film industry for more than two decades and have seen countless business models come and go. When we stared FilmTrack more than 14 years ago, the relationship between content creators and post-houses had been largely unchanged for decades. Film companies would simply hand over their materials to a single post-house with instructions for distribution and delivery, and the post-house would handle the entire back-end servicing.

Today FilmTrack manages the content and data for close to 200 companies and works with some of the leading post-houses to define what the next-generation post-house will look like. I’ve seen the complexities of this process through our employees’ involvement in organizations like the Hollywood Post Alliance, EIDR and SEMPTE. The forces driving these changes to the post-production landscape are manifold: vast improvements in technology and processing power; huge increases in digital and file-based content that is cheap to produce; and the vast amounts of data and metadata that must now be cataloged and stored for every film and television series.

The evidence is right before our eyes: Studios and filmmakers are now thinking in terms of end-to-end solutions for their artistic and business workflow – from ingestion to vault/storage, transformation, QC, delivery and commerce. More and more they’re relying on cloud-based platforms which have the potential to provide content owners, distributors and their customers with a safe, secure and sophisticated model for the long-term life-cycle management of their content. In conjunction, the rate card for services found within the traditional post house are changing as functions like encoding and transcoding can be done with out-of-the-box software.

However, when you look at final color correction, visual effects and sound mixing, these processes are more complex than ever, and no less time consuming than 10 years ago. According to Bob Pfannkuch, an industry pioneer who founded Rank Video Services, now a division of Deluxe: “The post house of the future may be called a ‘finishing house’ not a ‘post house.’ It will be known for taking content that is 90 percent done and finishing it.”

Such changes have fueled consolidation among the industry’s bigger players, with traditional rivals like Technicolor and Deluxe working together to offer complimentary services. This evolution has also created opportunities for new SaaS-based companies which provide a whole new level of flexibility and collaboration to meet evolving industry needs.

They’re also fundamentally transforming the way in which studios do business with post-houses. As James Staten, a Vice President at Forrester who blogs about cloud computing and next-generation business intelligence, points out: “Disney’s Frozen required 50,000 CPU cores crunching simultaneously to process its 3D effects and meet its opening date. The next Frozen, shot in 4K, will up the effects complexity 10-12x, according to visual effects experts.” Staten also observes that, “on-premise workflow systems are hitting the limits both in ability to on-board and manage a federation of identities and support the collective editing of the growing video files. As such, nearly all the major workflow tools makers now offer SaaS-based workflow systems that are either used purely in the cloud or in a hybrid mode with some workflows on-premise and others delivered from the cloud.”

This is forcing industry professionals and technologists to start thinking in terms of file access rather than file transfers. Right now the major emphasis is on how fast can you transfer files, speed and bandwidth. But we want to get to a place where we’re giving access to files, not transferring files around. On a consumer level, we’re already doing this with music, pictures and email that are stored in the cloud and accessed with different devices. We’re going to get there on the B2B level too: eventually the file will exist in one place in the cloud. That will bring cost savings and reduce concerns about asynchronicity since everyone will be working on same thing at same side.

These changes cut across the whole production, post-production and distribution cycle. Dailies captured on set are now routinely managed through virtual platforms that can be run for directors and producers in far-flung locations and allow for transcoding and color correction on premise. The dailies business has quickly morphed into another role managed by the DIT and others.

Furthermore, the management and delivery of global marketing assets has been radically transformed by the advent of cloud-based DAM services. In other words, a lot of things that used to be done with hardware processing are now being done with software updates and SaaS solutions. However, creative services for quality films with extensive digital effects will still be performed by the post house.

Bob Pfannkuch points out that “regardless of whether you have a big centralized lab or remote worker utilizing the cloud, the common and necessary thing for a post production house is to tie information together — the necessity to keep track of who’s doing what and where everything is.”

Moshe Barkat, CEO of Modern VideoFilm, agrees: “Regardless of whether you have a big lab or people at home with storage in the cloud, you need a data infrastructure so that everyone can collaborate.”

That’s been a core mission for FilmTrack, as we team with partners across the industry to help them collaborate and connect the dots across the entire life cycle of their IP. At FilmTrack, we understand there is no one-size fits all solution. That’s why we’ve made all metadata fields user-definable and configurable allowing clients to develop standards that fit with their unique business needs.

As we consider the future of post-production, one thing is clear: the business of content is expanding not shrinking. Emerging distribution platforms like Neflix, Hulu and Amazon are fueling this transformation, as is the rapid proliferation of devices on which content is being viewed – from iPhones to Androids, smart TVs, HD sets, 4K sets all of which have different constraints. Furthermore, the consumer is becoming more and more demanding – expecting more personalization and interactive options. The critical question is whether cities like Los Angeles, or even the US itself, will continue to serve as the hub for post-production.

By: FilmTrack