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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1420529
major topics at NAB and IBC as studios, production/post and content distributors get insights into what worked and what didn’t since the last live events were held two years ago. Early in the pandemic, film/show production came to a screeching halt and people were sent home until folks could figure out how to get back to work safely. New guidelines/rules were hastily developed and modified as much smaller production teams returned to work. Jurassic World: Dominion was one of the first major projects to restart at a cost of $5M for the new safety protocols. The protocols included the project’s own medical facility, obligatory masks except when the person is in front of the camera, daily temperature checks, comprehensive/continual cleaning, a significantly smaller crew/team living/working in a bubble, an added security team and more. When Law & Order: SVU returned to shooting in New York City, things were also a lot different with fewer location shots, fewer costume changes, fewer people on the set, fewer close scenes. Even with the precautions, LA shoots had 23 projects halted and nearly 50 in NYC. Tom Cruise went to extraordinary measures taking entire hotels and a cruise ship to keep production on-line for Mission Impossible 7 and was widely trolled for being so vocal in enforcing safety on set guidelines. For large, medium, small projects, that was “almost” the easy part. We got a glimpse of the mythical future of content creation at HPA (Hollywood Professional Association) virtual tech retreat and three-hour Supersession early this year. It incorporated a lot of MovieLabs guidelines (founded by everyone - Disney, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Sony, Universal, Warner Bros) to develop standards for tomorrow’s content - https://tinyurl.com/7zwsywud. For the project, volunteer crews produced films on continents/locations as dispersed as Hollywood, Dubai, Brisbane, London, Mexico City and Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia). Hint: You’ll see a lot of tomorrow at NAB and IBC with the alluring cloud at the center of it all which promises creatives virtually unlimited compute power, thousands of applications to choose from, storage capacity to tackle any job and well … the world. My daddy taught us long ago that “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Cloud production is good, it has a lot of potential, it has gotchas. Even during the pandemic, new production facilities were being built around the globe. Many were reserved on a long-term basis by studios/production houses even before they were finished. We expect global production will be widely discussed at both NAB and IBC. Before crews hit the sets, many jobs changed as the industry worked through new guidelines and others became redundant as projects quickly transitioned to traditional technologies using greenscreens/chromakeying. Mandalorian is an example of the new environment where physical sets are blended with backdrop scenery in real time and projected onto massive LED displays. Expect to see a lot of virtual production options at NAB/IBC; but more important will be the discussion sessions during the programs. Nice to learn from others’ mistakes. The virtual sets can have CGI components, move in parallax as cameras capture the actors and physical sets requiring a small “B-Roll” crew. The backgrounds and effects are all developed before the capture of the action. Professional video cameras are undergoing rapid evolution as you’ll see at the October and December shows. Higher-resolution content, faster frame rates and stereoscopic content capture are only a few of the advances you’ll be seeing across the board from RED, BlackMagic and everything in between. One of the benefits of the newer cameras is that they are obviously digital. They enable producers and cinematographers to overshoot