philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Notes from HPA Production in the Cloud Luncheon

By Phil Lelyveld

Ken Williams and Phil Lelyveld attended the December 11, 2012 HPA luncheon on production in the cloud.  We asked the panelists where they thought the major pain points were in the emerging, non-linear content creation, production, storage, and distribution workflow.  Where were there opportunities to gain efficiencies through standardization, without losing flexibility or opportunities for competitive advantage through product-specific features.

Eric Dachs, Pres./CEO of Pix Systems said metadata.  He is able to move content and associated metadata together from the camera to the cloud, but the two can become separated.  Plus metadata is added, and lost, and sometimes manually re-entered, as the content is processed, stored, and moved.

Dave Scammel, Owner of Sohonet, mentioned connectivity, networks, and bandwidth.  Not only do high speed networks need to be available throughout the workflow, but different networks need to interoperate seamlessly so data can be moved among them.

Steve Anastasi, VP Tech Ops at Warner Bros, noted that archiving begins the moment the content is captured.  Echoing Eric’s point, he said that standardizing the language of metadata related to capture and processing, as well as metadata describing the content itself, would greatly improve the efficiencies of downstream activities including archiving.

Miles Ward, Solutions Architect at Amazon, pointed out that the language in license agreements that he has seen doesn’t work for the cloud.  Legacy content management and security contract terms that are appropriate for physical locations and physical media need to be reworked for the virtual environment of the cloud.

Eric closed with the comment, ‘rather than standardization, let’s agree to a set of operating principles.’

The ETC is holding an organizing meeting of our Production in the Cloud project at USC on December 20^th, from noon-2pm.