Sohonet on the growth of content production and optimising remote post collaboration with ClearView Pivot

The media and entertainment industry is undergoing a significant transformation. Last year was a record-breaking year for content production. As the demand for ambitious, high-quality, technically challenging content intensifies, so does competition from the global creative talent pool. Real-time collaboration between creatives around the globe is accelerating and many content creators have found they have hit quality limits across the many potential remote workflows with the available technology.

 The distribution Studio is responsible for the heavy lifting of arranging quality connectivity, navigating firewall and security issues and performing a “solution check” before every session as a means to ensure it will work for the often VIP creatives. If you also want to change endpoints and stream the content to another location, the process has to start over again—it is a time consuming and frustrating activity.

How is Sohonet helping?

 In concert with a number of Studio and post-production customers and guided by a simplified vision from key The Walt Disney Studios post executives, Sohonet began the development of a solution offering high quality, hassle-free, and secure real-time collaboration for editing, colour grading, live screening and finishing reviews at full cinema quality. The result is ClearView Pivot -- the latest addition to Sohonet’s real-time collaboration toolkit.

 Pivot enables you to stream colour and frame-accurate footage, at the click of a button, in 4k HDR with 12-bit colour depth and 4:4:4 chroma sampling for full-colour quality video streaming with ultra-low latency provided by Sohonet’s private media network. Users are able to connect or switch multiple endpoints from a single, easy to use, web interface, removing the labour and time-intensive task of setting up new firewall configurations each time, as well as enabling multi-point review sessions.

 Pivot offers the high security required by major global content Studios and is the only integrated solution approved by ISE (Independent Security Evaluators) - the industry’s gold standard for security posture. Additionally, Sohonet’s unique solution provides an encrypted stream between each endpoint and provides an auditable usage trail for every session.

Who’s using ClearView Pivot?

 The Walt Disney Studios’ StudioLAB, brought the resources of its Technology Innovation Group to help drive a cross-divisional evaluation process - putting it through its paces with trials across multiple departments, testing and approving everything from the colour fidelity to the ease of use, ‘pivoting’ between locations across the US and finally to London, all in real-time. With new confidence, The Walt Disney Studios was able to rapidly support remote workflows for productions in both the US and Australia as a proving ground.

 Pivot provides a solution that mimics the creative behaviors of being in the same room while enabling a more resource-efficient method and improved performance with standardized connectivity to enable a faster speed of deployment for productions at all their facilities around the world.

 Launched on the 13th of February 2020, Pivot is already being deployed at more than 70 locations worldwide. Content production demand shows no signs of abating and the future for global, remote collaboration is only on the up. Sohonet, with the help of innovation partners like The Walt Disney Studios has worked to make it a more productive and collaborative future for storytellers.