Production Technology

The media industry has seen tremendous technological advances and achievements in film making over the last 10 years. We foresee the next 10 years as a period of even greater innovation helping storytellers realize new creative visions, reduce costs for the industry, and increase output for viewers. In collaboration with industry partners, we are examining the potential offered by cloud tech, improved security approaches and innovations that facilitate flexible workflows.

MovieLabs and its member studios have published a white paper that lays out a bold vision for the future of media creation technology some 10 years into the future. We describe technological advances which will enable seismic changes in media workflows, and we propose ten foundational principles as keys to that future. Those principles provide a roadmap for industry collaboration across three key workstreams: New Cloud Foundation, Security & Access, and Software-Defined Workflows. We invite stakeholders across the industry to read the white paper and work with us to deliver on the future of media creation and continue to empower some of the world's best storytellers and the entire creative community.

The first step in building a new cloud foundation for media production is assessing the current cloud landscape. That means understanding existing cloud capabilities across media workflows and identifying gaps where the ecosystem needs to evolve to support the 2030 Vision. MovieLabs is working closely with cloud providers, application providers, and content producers to assess 2030 Vision requirements for a range of media workflows, including requirements for remote access, editorial in the cloud, review and approval, storage of assets and metadata across applications and clouds, integration of different applications and clouds into interoperable workflows. The purpose is to create a roadmap of work areas that can guide a multi-year industry collaboration to achieve the goals and benefits of the 2030 Vision.

Protecting cloud production needs a new approach to security. That includes protection from malicious and unauthorized activity and protection of the integrity of data, workflows, applications and processes. To help enable that level of protection in native cloud workflows, and as an initial follow-up to the 2030 Vision white paper, MovieLabs published a second white paper which double-clicks on the security principles in the 2030 Vision and offers six security principles as the foundation of a security architecture for the future of media creation workflows.

The white paper explains the principles and articulates practical ways that each principle can be achieved. We look forward to working with the industry to build on these principles and secure the creative endeavors our industry.

Delivering on the promise of the 2030 Vision requires supporting creative workflows with new methods and tools to promote automation and interoperability. That requires establishing the means to build workflows that are agile and secure while still meeting the broad requirements of the creative process. These workflows must be practical to implement and must leverage new and emerging technologies, especially cloud and machine learning technologies.

Our approach to workflows, which we call Software-Defined Workflows, are built on industry-consensus methods, terminology, and models. We use tools like ontologies for key workflow elements, common exchange mechanisms between applications and across clouds, standard APIs for passing of assets and instructions, and common definitions and terminology for key inputs, outputs, and tasks.

Creation of these types of workflow requires a collaborative industry effort to identify the best candidates for practices and standardization. MovieLabs has already launched a studio working group on building a family of connected ontologies, and we will be working closely with cloud services and application providers to identify the key shared concepts, terms, descriptors, tasks, data models, and APIs that will help the industry build the automated workflows that can deliver on the 2030 Vision.

As an early step to enable software-defined workflows, MovieLabs has collaborated with the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at the University of Southern California to publish best practices in VFX image sequence naming. The specification covers plates, comps, and other frame-based image sequences. It should serve as a tool for productions and VFX application providers to help organize the multitude of frames that are inputs and outputs in VFX workflows, enabling greater interoperability across the many vendors and organizations involved in VFX production.

To assist with safe resumption of film and television production, MovieLabs has released a detailed breakdown of workflows to help structure development of Covid-19 health and safety guidelines. The document categorizes of production activities, both on-set and off-set, and describes key characteristics and workflow considerations to help inform health and safety professionals.

MovieLabs does not list or recommend any specific health and safety guidelines for the work activities described. We understand that industry, labor and government organizations are working actively with health experts to develop those guidelines. Our goal is to provide a map of production work activities, along with relevant information about each of those activities, that will assist in their work.

We look forward to partnering in every way we can with the many industry efforts working to protect the talented people involved in the production of the movies and shows we all love.