News

By Bryan Ellenburg

For many years, the media and entertainment industry has largely focused security auditing on traditional brick-and-mortar vendors, including visual effects vendors, mix facilities, mastering and digital intermediate labs, replicators, and more.

However, the way movies and television shows are produced, edited, and distributed have transformed dramatically over the last few years. With rare exception of filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, and Quentin Tarantino, 35mm film shoots have all gone digital. With digital productions comes diverse workflows.In the past, on productions that shot 35mm film, the exposed negative was sent to a lab to be developed, scanned to a high resolution digital video format, with dailies transcoded and distributed. Much of the process was primarily physical in nature, with a component of digital transfer and cloud storage involved.

With digital productions, the footage is recorded onto any number of removable memory formats and hard drives. Quite often, the footage is reviewed, color corrected, transcoded for dailies, backed-up, and even distributed right on-set or near-set. There are no set guidelines on how, where, and when to conduct these activities, and there are not security best practices and the handling and storage of camera media. In many cases, the content bypasses the traditional brick-and-mortar vendors, where there has been a great deal of security assessments over the years. Or, the editing rooms are housed within the confines of a studio lot, making entry more difficult.

Even more dangerous, these productions shooting on location are often housed in temporary offices and warehouses. Because the productions are only there for a few weeks at a time, it has been too costly to invest in the security infrastructure (CCTV cameras, Access Control Systems), so by-and-large, security has been an after thought. The digital and cloud security components are also of great importance.

In response, the CDSA has developed Recommended Best Practices for Productions and Post Production / Editorial. We encourage all productions, studios, mini-majors, networks, and independents to use these guidelines to access risk, and to implement these best practices where they see fit. The CDSA also offers the services of these risk assessments around the world.

These recommended best practices cover everything from the Production Office, Camera Media Security, Physical Security, IT Security, Incident Response, Editing Rooms, Script Handling, and more. We also have recommendations for Non-Disclosure Agreements, Social Media Awareness training, On-Set Visitation Policy, Personal/Mobile Device Policies, and much more.

The aim of this framework is to provide appropriate security measures for on-location productions and the post-production editorial spaces. The process is designed to encompass all stakeholders in the feature post production process, and the objective is to promote a responsible security culture on commencement of the project and to introduce a structured approach when determining security requirements.

We have presented these best practices to many of the studios, mini-majors, leading independents, the Studio Security Chiefs group, and to Creative Future. Our hopes are to make presentations to the Directors Guild of America and Producers Guild of America over the next couple of months, to seek their endorsement.

Bryan Ellenburg is a security consultant for production and post production editorial for the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA). For more information about the new CDSA best practices, content him at [email protected].