Advances in Televisual/Digital Media Workflow 2020

By: Ozzy Quiroz

Producers, broadcasters, content creators and technologists are in a constant race to a finish line that will never arrive. “February Freeze 2020” is an exhibit in Toronto hosted by William F. White International Inc. that showcased nearly 60 top industry manufacturers’ new equipment and technology. This year 3 things stood out:

LED There Be Light

in recent years every major and minor entertainment lighting company has officially gone to LED; no major breakthrough has happened in the LED strip itself, but in software engineers are pushing boundaries and creating creative apps to speak to these lights, these apps allow you to remotely control them wirelessly ultimately saving the production company some money on manpower once it’s set up, speaking about saving money another major point to LED lighting is that studios can now add more lighting to their studio grid and massively reducing on that pesky monthly hydro bill for operations.

4K Or Go Away

Secondly to own a 1080p 24fps camera days are gone. Today, if a camera doesn’t offer a 4k resolution, don’t even bother bringing it to set. The slogan for new camera companies is “$1000 per 1K of resolution” but those rates don’t apply to the big boys manufacturing cinema cameras. The advance is in the size, 8K resolution cinema pocket camera are now small enough to fit in a Canada goose jacket pocket. For $10K you can build a full-fledged cinema camera with some limitation – levelling the playing field.

Head In the Clouds

Lastly, creators can now transmit live events to social media platforms using small mobile studio vans equipped to transmit camera and audio signals to any network, excellent for e-gaming, mobile radio shows and even music festivals. Just pull up in the van, set up cameras, audio, connect to a server and stream high-quality from anywhere. Currently, I’m production supervising a reality tv show-13 episodes/13 weeks for a U.K broadcaster. We have a film crew in Toronto Canada and a film crew in London UK. We are constantly filming in different timezones, the turnaround time is 7 days to broadcast with a quick 5 day shooting schedule, which means we need a workflow with no downtime and a post-production software solution in the cloud.

In Toronto, as soon as the shoot wraps each night, the footage is driven to a file transfer data centre where we use fast file transfer software, there we’re transferring media over IP and satellite then storing it in 2 different cloud-based software; one software for storage and backup and the other for editing. The cloud editing software allows all the editors, and executives across the different time zones to access the material from a web browser and collaborate from anywhere in the world. If changes need to happen it can be done in realtime. These virtual servers help us save time and money, due to my NDA obligations I can’t release the actual names of the paid solution software, sorry, but they do exist for anyone wishing to push the geographical boundaries.