Media supply chain
Transforming the linear workflows of content production
The five workflows of content production—preparation and R&D, pre-production, production, post-production and mastering, and distribution—have evolved over the last 100 years but haven’t been fundamentally transformed or replaced via digital transformation yet. These workflows have remained as a part of a linear process where content is locked inside a walled garden that physically moves from step to step.
However, in 2024, we can expect these linear workflows to collapse, re-orient, and orbit around a centralized content hub. This linear process will transform into an iterative one with three categories of artist workflows: pre-photography, principal photography, and post-production and mastering. Doing so will allow filmmaking to realize the tantalizing promise of cost reductions and efficiencies, all while boosting content security by eliminating the physical motion of assets.
Production in the cloud
The studios that will continue to hold a competitive advantage in 2024 are leveraging platforms that made remote content production possible during the pandemic. These cloud-based tools and processes platforms enable a digitally empowered Hollywood with streamlined access to content. Specifically, cloud-based content lakes can be used to ingest all assets into a single location, enabling the transition from slow on-premises workflows to digital and dynamic workflows at a global scale.
Cloud-based technology can enhance security for studios by providing unified data and streaming models. For example, a cloud-based content management system can allow filmmakers to store, access, and work with data and content in a secure and centralized location. Features such as user authentication and data encryption can protect against unauthorized access while also providing flexibility and scalability to support the dynamic nature of film production. Different users can be authorized to access content at different phases of the production process.
While digital tools and platforms won’t ever replace the desire to film on location in exotic places, they can enable footage to move at the speed of light and prevent costly reshoots. Camera-to-cloud solutions can stream footage straight into the cloud, transforming “dailies” into “instantlies.”
Additionally, internet-based platforms allow for easy collaboration, as multiple team members can simultaneously access and work on the same project files from any location. This consistent and reliable work environment can streamline the production process, making it easier for studios to create high-quality content.
IMF streamlines the digital media supply chain
In the 2010s, as over-the-top platforms proliferated, they began to compete based on their media file formats, resulting in a cottage industry of media service providers transcoding and packaging content to accommodate hundreds of different media specifications and formats. These workflows were largely inefficient, intensive, and manual, with cost savings often coming more from labor arbitrage in low-cost jurisdictions rather than automation. And, naturally, storage costs surged.
Interoperable Media Format (IMF) has been introduced over the past few years, and it poses the potential to streamline the digital media supply chain and reduce the proliferation of media file specifications. Though it will take many years for full adoption across the industry, there will be continued investment in this file specification and media formatting standard as a means of achieving efficiencies across the industry.
AI-powered media services
Savvy entertainment and media companies have so far been publicly cautious in how they approach AI for above-the-line work, given immense legal implications regarding the ownership of intellectual property and the potential threat to talent.
However, post-production and media services are ripe for disruption. Powered by AI, movies, TV shows, and commercials—which now largely exist as files due to digitization—can be more quickly translated, subtitled, and dubbed into foreign languages. Their metadata can be more easily generated. AI will be able to automatically conduct quality control checks, identify and insert or remove black spaces for ads, color-correct video, adjust audio volumes, sync video and audio, fix or remove artifacts, check the accuracy of credits and titles, and resize and reformat media files. AI will increasingly improve character de-aging and allow characters’ mouths to mimic foreign (i.e., dubbed) languages. Digital asset management and media asset management will improve through more enhanced and automated AI-powered orchestration. Movies and episodic content will be easier to monetize and transform for international audiences, with AI able to recognize opportunities for local advertising in content. Additionally, to improve marketing efforts, AI will be able to generate multiple versions of trailers, each customized for different audience segments and targets.
An ID for everything
As digital workflows proliferate and AI creates more content and data, a continued explosion in the volume and versions of media assets may necessitate better cataloging and identification systems across the digital media supply chain. The Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR) may increase in adoption across the entertainment industry landscape as these trends continue and unique identifiers are needed for film, TV, and commercial media assets. But, perhaps more profoundly, EIDR may provide a blueprint for other identification systems and initiatives across the ecosystem. Scenes, characters, lines of text, specific actions within a piece of content—even the production crew members who contributed to a specific piece of content— all may warrant their own identifiers for cross-reference across disparate systems and tools used by production companies, studios, marketing agencies, post houses, distributors, and applicable third parties.
Slalom contributors: Jason Arnold, Michael Vos
