The future of finishing
Robert Keske is sitting in what will soon be a remote viewing theatre being built by Company 3. About a hundred miles east of New York City, this proof-of-concept theatre, claims Keske, will be the way many post houses of the future will operate.
Before delving into the details, he breaks off from our Zoom call to shush two of his engineers, who can be briefly heard banging their way through a tight deadline.
Despite the noise it’s been nice working with his colleagues locally, he says, returning to the call. And supervising this build has been one of the few chances he’s had to meet any of his colleagues in person.
Industry pioneer
Keske had been at the top US post house – best known for its colour grading work – for a grand total of five hours before the pandemic drove the facility into lockdown last March.
Fortunately for Company 3, (whose recent credits include Judas and the Black Messiah, The Trial of the Chicago 7 and The Mandalorian) it had hired in Keske a pioneer of collaborative workflows.
He spent 14 years expanding remote capabilities at a New York-based boutique finishing house, which his manufacturing pals called a ‘move to the dark side’. Before that Robert was at Autodesk, where he built up collaborative workflows for their Flame and Inferno products with Hollywood studios and creative service clients.
“When Covid hit it meant that those skills I’ve spent years building helped us to adapt,” says Keske in his characteristically understated style.
“What Covid has taught us is the need to build out an ecosystem where content creators can work as one, as and when they want to.”
Supporting colour artists
In some ways his role is the same as it was pre-Covid: to support Company 3’s artists by ensuring that the colour is accurate, the tools are responding and that there’s no interruption to the creative process.
“The tools need to respond as quickly as the colourist’s brain. They’re often looking at an image on screen and talking with their clients simultaneously and making decisions on-the-fly. This has to happen in real time to achieve the best process,” he explains.
While clients have always been more than willing to work remotely with Company 3’s top colourists, pre-pandemic this usually meant two parties working not necessarily in the same room or building, but with access to an onsite grading suite with IT support.
Duplicating this set up to support remote home working required Keske to collaborate with both artists and manufacturers.
Vendor collaboration
The main WFH issues that Keske needed to address in the early months of the pandemic were latency and security.
Artists working remotely from home on high-resolution files were finding it difficult to collaborate on the creative process in real time due to the amount of data they were pushing around, he explains.
“Each time they do a key stroke or want to change something or make a colour decision – you can’t have any delay because it breaks up the process. It took people four or five months of the pandemic to understand the implications of this.”
So Keske began the process of articulating the nuances and creative needs of the artists working from home to manufacturers and persuading them to modify their products
Priority was given to tools that perform real-time editorial tasks, such as Flame and Black Magic’s Resolve, on which the company does the bulk of its grading. Then the focus moved on to refining streaming-based real-time review tools such as ClearView Pivot.
Secure and seamless
“It’s a case of going through the steps of the issue with the engineering teams and project management teams and proving the delay and the impact that this has on the end product,” states Keske. “Then it’s about going through an analysis of how to modify these products to further enhance remote collaboration.
“Now we can be based around IP technologies it will allow content creators to create what they want when they want – but you have to get the core technologies like video streaming right first before you start on the collaboration,” he says.
Security, he adds, was another priority area.
“Before Covid most of our people in finishing worked in a closed environment. No content ever leaked out. So, we had to work with manufacturers to address the Moving Picture Association (MPA) and Trusted Partner Network (TPN) requirements to ensure the correct protocols were met.”
According to Keske, Company 3’s colourists maintain that they now notice no difference between working from home and working on prem.
“That’s the best compliment I can get: the more the technology is hidden then the less feedback I get, because it’s working as they expect. The best part of working in technology for me is that we enable creativity and, done right, that technology is totally transparent to the creative process,” he adds.
The future of post
Manufacturers need to be convinced of the long-term value proposition in modifying their products, and this involved Keske mapping out his vision for the way he believes that post houses will operate in the near future.
“Attaching workstations to dedicated high-speed dark fibre connections between facilities that cost tens of thousands of dollars every month – that’s very much the old way of doing things,” he says.
The way forward, he claims, is to centralise the compute, keep the content in one place and access it over a dedicated secure internet connection. Remote working for artists, he adds, now comprises of a small computer that gives them access to the visualisation tools, which they can connect to remotely, plus a review solution such as ClearView Pivot to be able to see the reference stream.
“This means that instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per set up it will cost $20,000 or $30,000 – and it can happen in minutes.”
However, checking the final grade is one area that remains more challenging to do remotely.
While a flexible, low-bandwidth review tool like ClearView Flex is a great alternative for early-stage reviews, for a final pass on the colour grade (especially for theatrical release) some creatives feel more confident giving final sign off in a viewing theatre.
Which is why we can hear all the banging in the background during our conversation: Company 3’s new boutique viewing theatre has been enabled to connect to multiple locations and will soon allow two or three key people to enter a small, controlled, safe environment to collaborate on the final colour grade.
“It’s something our artists and clients have asked us for and we may build out more. So instead of entering these massive facilities, there will be these specific rooms in locations that people can visit,” he reveals.
Building for collaboration
While Keske is certain that post-production will move back on premises after lockdowns end, he expects work practices and the shape of the buildings to change drastically.
“What Covid has taught us is the need to build out an ecosystem where content creators can work as one, as and when they want to.”
“Investments will change drastically because we don’t need these big facilities anymore that I’ve helped design and build for most of my career.”
“They will be replaced with boutique offices all around the city because we don’t need the engineers sitting next to the conform artist sitting next to the artists. Even our own data centres no longer need to be based in the same buildings.”
