Production

Video: Cloud Services for Media and Entertainment: Production and Post-Production

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

My content producers and broadcasters have been forced into the cloud. Some have chosen remote controlling their on-prem kit but many have found that the cloud has brought them benefits beyond simply keeping their existing workflows working during the pandemic.

This video from SMPTE’s New York section looks at how people moved production to the cloud and how they intend to keep it there. The first talk from WarnerMedia’s Greg Anderson discussing the engineering skills needed to be up to the task concluding that there are more areas of knowledge in play than one engineer can bring to the table from the foundational elements such as security, virtulisation nad networking, to DevOps skills like continuous integration and development (CI/CD), Active Directory and databases.

The good news is that whichever of the 3 levels of engineer that Greg introduces, from beginner to expert, the entry points are pretty easy to access to start your journey and upskilling. Within the company, Greg says that leaders can help accelerate the transition to cloud by allowing teams a development/PoC account which provides a ‘modest’ allowance each month for experimentation, learning and prooving ideas. Not only does that give engineers good exposure to cloud skills, but it gives managers experience in modelling, monitoring and analysing costs.

Greg finishes by talking through their work with implementing a cloud workflow for HBO MAX which is currently on a private cloud and on the way to being in the public cloud. The current system provides for 300 concurrent users doing Edit, Design, Engineering and QC workflows with asset management and ingest. They are looking to the public cloud to consolidate real estate and standardise the tech stack amongst many other drivers outlined by Greg.

Scott Bounds Architect at Microsoft Azure talks about content creation in the cloud. The objectives for Azure is to allow worldwide collaboration, speed up the time to market, allow scaling of content creation and bring improvements in security, reliability and access of data.

This starts for many by using hybrid workflows rather than a full switch to the cloud. After all, Scott says that rough cut editing, motion graphics and VFX are all fairly easy to implement in the cloud whereas colour grading, online and finishing are still best for most companies if they stay on-prem. Scott talks about implementing workstations in the cloud allowing GPU-powered workstations to be used using the remote KVM technology PCoIP to connect in. This type of workflow can be automated using Azure scripting and Terraform.

John Whitehead is part of the New York Times’ Multimedia Infrastructure Engineering team which have recently moved their live production to the cloud. Much of the output of the NYT is live events programming such as covering press conferences. John introduces their internet-centric microservices architecture which was already being worked on before the pandemic started.

The standard workflow was to have a stream coming into MCR which would then get routed to an Elemental encoder for sending into the cloud and distributed with Fastly. To be production-friendly they had created some simple-to-use web frontends for routing. For full-time remote production, John explains they wanted to improve their production quality by adding a vision mixer, graphics and closed captions. John details the solution they chose which comprised cloud-first solutions rather than running windows in the cloud.

The NYT was pushed into the cloud by Covid, but it was felt to be low risk and something they were considering doing anyway. The pandemic forced them to consider that perhaps the technologies they were waiting for had already arrived and ended up saving on Capex and received immediate returns on their investment.

Finishing up the presentations is Anshul Kapoor from Google Cloud who presents market analysis on the current state of cloud adoption and the market conditions. He says that one manifestation of the current crisis is that new live-events content is reduced if not postponed which is making people look to their archives. Some people have not yet done their archiving process, whilst some already have a digital archive. Google and other cloud providers can offer vast scale in order to process and manage archives but also machine learning in order to process, make sense and make searchable all the content.

The video ends with an extensive Q&A with the presenters.

Watch now!
Speakers

Greg Anderson Greg Anderson
Senior Systems Engineer,
WarnerMedia
Scott Bounds Scott Bounds
Media Cloud Architect,
Microsoft
John Whitehead John Whitehead
Senior Engineer, Multimedia Infrastructure Engineering,
New York Times
Anshul Kapoor Anshul Kapoor
Business Development,
Google Cloud

Video: What is esports? A crash course in modern esports broadcast

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

With an estimated global revenue of over USD1.1 billion1 and a global audience of almost half a billion people2, esports is a big industry and all accounts report it as growing. Although it sounds different, when you look behind the scenes, there’s actually lot of equipment and production that a broadcaster would recognise, as we showed in this behind the scenes footage that we featured in a previous article

Press play below as a taster before the main video to be a fly on the wall for five minutes as the tension mounts at this esports event final.

In this today’s talk from the Royal Television Society, Thames Valley, we’re introduced to esports from the bottom up: What it is, who does it and which companies are involved. I think esports is special in its ability to capture the interest of the broadcast industry, but exactly what it is and how it’s structured…few actually know. That’s all changing here, with Steven “Claw” Jalicy from ESL.

Steven explains that ESL is the largest company that runs tournaments and competitions outside of the games publishers. He explains that, unlike sports such as tennis, athletics and football which don’t have ‘owners’, all esports games have publishers who are able to control the way that gaming happens and have the ability to run tournaments themselves or, in effect, franchise this out around the world.

 
Steven takes us through the broadcast chain. Usually held in a stadium, OB kit and temporary set ups are nothing new to to the broadcast sports community. The first thing which is a change however, is ‘in-game’. There’s a lot more to covering esports than tennis in as much as for a tennis match you can turn up with some cameras and ball tracking kit and televise the games. Whilst doing it well is by no means trivial, with esports there are many more levels due to the fact that we have human players who are playing computer characters; to experience both the real and the in-game drama you need camera angles both in the real world and within the game. These in-game camera operators are call observers and just like real-life camera operators, their task is to capture all the action of the game. Sometimes this is done by following the players, sometimes by a birds-eye-view camera, depending on the game and, as ever, the publisher.

Naturally when you have a peak viewership of over a million people, streaming and live content distribution is really important. ESPN and, more recently, Eurosport have been airing esports so it’s important to realise that linear distribution is very much part of the mix for esports, it’s not an on-line only thing, though most of the numbers shared are the verified streaming numbers.

Steven talks about some of the challenges ESL faces in delivering the highest quality streams with so many tournaments happening and then moving to remote operation.

ESL prefers to build their own hardware for several reasons that Steven explains which include having the result fully-customisable and simplifying replacements. Similarly, ffmpeg and other open-source encoding is favoured for similar reasons.

The discussion finishes off with an extensive Q&A session including the ‘sanctity’ of the players’ equipment, the threshold for choosing to use vendor equipment (EVS vs Mediakind), transport over the internet and much more.

Watch now!
1Statista revenue report
2Statista eSports audience report
Speakers

Steven Jalicy Steven “Claw” Jalicy
Global Head of Streaming,
ESL Gaming

Video: Reopening Film and TV Production in NYC

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


Restarting productions and stepping up MCR staffing could be the difference between life and death if you get it wrong. What are the right precautions to take, what’s proportionate and can you get your staff and freelancers to follow the rules?

This SMPTE panel looks at the recommendations and rules generated by the bustling TV, film and advertising industry in New York. The cornerstone of the session is an overview of the guidelines called The Safe Way Forward which is a collaborative document being put together with negotiation with the unions to ensure there’s a widely agreed and understood rules to run safe productions with.

The Safe Way Forward is based on regular testing and zoning productions. Talent and crew which work closely with them such as sound, make-up, etc. are considered zone A. Often there are times when close contact and/or PPE are not practical so anyone who works in zone A is tested 3 times a week or more to catch any infection quickly. Other crew are considered in zone B and cannot come on set or in designated zone A locations. Zone B staff are tested once a week or more. Zone C is considered anyone else and/or outside of the studio.

The panel agrees that testing is a really important part of the safe working strategy using the example of the Miami Marlins who had 16 members of their team infected. Regular, thorough testing would have caught this earlier and helped reduce the impact of the initial infectious person.

Matt Miller makes the counterpoint that from the perspective of commercials production, testing just doesn’t cut it when your whole shoot is only a day and a half long. For the Association of Independent Commercial Producers, creating a safe environment is the focus of their guidelines which is already on its 5th edition. There are no ‘either/or’s, it’s about PPE and social distancing and</em frequent hand washing etc. Matt says it’s been very effective in maintaining this safety.

Short-term jobs are a source of concern for the panel when it comes to extras who may book themselves in for several different jobs over a week. How do we stop them from spreading the virus from production to production? The idea of a testing passport is under discussions, but this problem has not yet been resolved. It’s certainly possible that scripts will be altered to reduce extras, particularly if they have to be paid to come in ahead of their work to take a test.

Efficiencies are also a topic of discussion. Certainly one benefit of working at home is the ability to remotely collaborate without commuting/travelling and, depending on the type of work can be very effective. On the set, the panel anticipates an increased desire for monitoring. People in Zone B who are used to being on set will want to be able to see what’s happening which will drive increased demand on the network and electrical distribution. But with this more distributed monitoring, there may be more effective ways for people to work. Time will tell how much this will have an effect and where the balance is. Never will the DIT role be more important.

Watch now!
Speakers

Dejan Georgevich Dejan Georgevich
National vice President,
IATSE
Andy Shipsides Andy Shipsides
Presient – North America,
ARRI Rental
Peter Abel Peter Abel
CEO & Co-Founder,
Abel CineTech
Alan Suna Alan Suna
CEO,
Silvercup Studios
Matt Miller Matt Miller
Presient & CEO,
AICP
Mary Rae Thewlis Mary Rae Thewlis
National Vice President,
DGA
Joseph Reidy Joseph Reidy
1st vice Chair, Easter AD/UPM Council
Co-chair, 1st AD Committee, DGA

Video: News in the New Norm

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Whilst television marches on despite the pandemic, whilst not to overlook the decimated sports broadcasters, the mantra is ‘the show must go on’ so everyone has been trying to find ways to make TV production safe, practical yet still good! There is so many practical issues behind the camera from the typical packed OB trucks to simple bathroom sharing in the office which needs to be considered. In this video, we hear from BBC News explaining how they have managed to reshape their production to keep the news reaching the public.

“It’s hard to do your job in these circumstances.”

Morwen Williams

Morwen Williams, Head of UK News Operations at the BBC, describes the news workflows that have been created to make the news work. The term ‘Zoom workflow’ is in the fore, in the same way as a ‘Dropbox workflow’ has, perhaps forever, changed many file-based workflows, for live production a ‘Zoom workflow’ is the same. Though Morwen is quick to point out the work is as much technological as practical with the need for ‘long poles’ to ensure social distancing for sound engineers and the like. Workflows have had to remove roles, such as vision mixing, or move people to otherwise spare galleries.

Morwen explains that within the mobile journalism team, there was a pilot last year to test how well an iPhone X would be able to capture real packages which had some good results which ran on the national news. This is just one example of how the technological groundwork to enable mobile journalism during this crisis was already being laid.

Meeting virtually has its advantages, we hear, because when you have a lot of staff physical space is hard to acquire at the best of times. Since attendance can never be 100%, it’s better to have meetings more frequently to give people a better chance of attending some. Whilst this is certainly no replacement for physically meeting with people, it is likely to be retained when that is again possible.

Robin Pembrooke then takes some time to explain the shifts in production that he’s seen. All of the digital teams are now working from home. 15,000 people went from the offices to working from home which was a fraught transition but with no major outages. Radio shows are often now being presented and run by the presenter themselves from home. Talkback now takes many forms whether that be WhatsApp or other more broadcast-focused talkback-over-broadband products.

Watch now!
Speakers

Morwen Williams Morwen Williams
Head of UK Operations,
BBC News
Robin Pembrooke Robin Pembrooke
Director, News Product and Systems,
BBC News