With production and post production teams beginning to plan their return to the studio campuses and post production offices around the world, we have to adjust the way we finish features. Previously, when the final version of the feature or episodic had finally come together, we would get the director, cinematographer, post and visual effects supervisors, colourist, editor, executive producers and a cast of other creative executives from the distribution studio into a darkened screening room to review the content, pause and make comments, give notes and directives, play more content, and so on.
But even the largest of studio theatres only support a handful of viewers with appropriate social distancing, and with best practice concepts where teams of creatives never come in physical contact with each other to prevent wholescale team infection, we have to design a way to review together while being physically separate.
The solution
Taking advantage of ClearView Pivot’s one-to-many real-time streaming architecture, your post production supervisor can work with the studio post team to establish a multi-screening room approach where two or three different teams of creatives are watching the content from separate screening rooms across campus, around town or even in different cities. The editor can play and pause the content at will, with every screening room seeing exactly the same frame at the same time.
Firing up your preferred conferencing tool (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, BlueJeans) allows everyone to comment (and take notes) when the content is paused, but move quickly back to professional immersion once playback is resumed.
Incorporating creatives who cannot make it to a screening room is also possible. By splitting the video output from the creative workstation to both the ClearView Pivot and ClearView Flex infrastructure, frame and colour-accurate playback can be shared in real-time with multiple screen theatres and creatives reviewing from the safety of their home office on an Apple TV and a colour-calibrated consumer output (eg the LG C9 or CX models).
Similar to the use case above, the easiest way to support audio communication for all parties is to leverage a modern conferencing platform (Zoom, BlueJeans, Microsoft Teams) where the editor mutes all parties before hitting play and then unmutes the parties after hitting pause on the content. There is an extra burden placed on the review coordinator, initiating the “Pivot calls” from the sending creative workstation to the receiving screening rooms and inviting those “Flex viewers” via email to participate in the same session, but once the sessions start, the playback management across both systems should be seamless.
What’s coming soon?
Our developers are working around the clock to increase the depth of colour quality (10-bit), chroma (4:2:2) and colour space (Rec 2020 and HDR) to provide an acceptable “critical review” alternative that can be delivered via high capacity home internet speeds. We are also working on 5.1 audio, to be delivered to the Apple TV, so that you can perform full surround sound audio reviews at home. Stay tuned — we are expecting to deliver this kind of capability on behalf of our industry before summer begins in the northern hemisphere.
