Presentation

The biggest part of the review process, at least from a technological standpoint, is having the means to view something. Over the years this process has evolved from making prints of developed photographic negatives and projecting in a screening room, through “dubbing” (making copies of) videotapes for playback on a monitor, to sending digital movie files for display on anything from a digital cinema projector to a mobile device. The range of options has certainly increased, but with it comes the problem of compatibility.

Not all devices for viewing digital media are alike. This year’s iPhone might have a different colour profile, a different resolution, a different aspect ratio, and different playback capabilities from last year’s, and that’s for a single type of device by a single manufacturer. There are many different devices, and while there’s a great deal of crossover between them, it’s impossible to create a single movie file that will play back optimally on all of them.

The other issue is one of delivery. Though it’s extraordinarily easy to make perfect copies of digital files, it can still be challenging to get them to the right people, or even more challenging to get them onto specific devices. It is relatively simple (although questionable from a security perspective) to email a copy of a movie as an attachment on an email, at least until you run into attachment size limits, spam filters, and so on. Then if the recipient wants to view it on a device that won’t play the file you sent, you’ve got a problem. Even where things like FTP servers are used, the recipient still needs to get the file from the server onto their device.

With the Cloud, all of these issues become less of a problem. As will be discussed in chapter 13, the Cloud effectively provides a layer of abstraction that means you need only upload a digital video to an appropriate Cloud-based service, and the service will take care of ensuring it is correctly formatted for playback on the device used. It can be delivered directly to a range of different devices, specifically optimised for a particular device. Many Cloud-based services offer playback of video through a browser, mitigating many potential compatibility issues inherent in depending upon specific software for playback. Video can be streamed (played while being downloaded) or downloaded in its entirety and then played.

Box 12.1 Streaming Media

The problem with video on the web is that the amount of data for video means it can take a long time to transfer across a typical Internet connection. This results in clicking a button to play a particular video and then having to wait a long time until the video is downloaded and available to play. This can be time-consuming and frustrating.

As a result, another approach is possible, which is to “stream” the video. With streaming, the video can start playing while it is downloading. This makes for a better experience for playback as there are no long delays, but there are some drawbacks. First and foremost, the image quality can be sacrificed in order to ensure continuous playback. Second, because network conditions are not always consistent, a video might start to play smoothly but then become choppy as it can’t maintain the same rate of data transfer. Finally, it might not be possible to skip backwards and forwards through a video smoothly, as there’s typically an initial “buffering” period (where enough data are downloaded to be able to start playback) before playback can begin, and this buffering must take place again when changing the playback position.

As well as simplifying media playback, the Cloud provides innovative new possibilities for playback. Cospective’s CineSync (cinesync.com), for example, allows for synchronised review, in that you can see exactly what other participants are seeing at the same time they see it, making it possible to discuss specific parts of a video live as you’re watching it, with someone on the other side of the world.

Annotation

There are many different ways to provide feedback. The most common is in the form of text, as comments or notes on an item. These can be generalised and short or long and detailed. One of the best things about textual feedback is that it can be copied and pasted into a number of different formats. Someone can add a comment to a particular image, and that comment could be included in an email (possibly alongside other comments) with a minimum amount of effort. There are many other benefits to having feedback recorded as text, not least of all that they’re searchable and easily edited.

Unfortunately, text isn’t always an ideal medium for conveying feedback. Sometimes it’s more convenient, or even just quicker, to provide feedback audibly. Someone could be on-hand to record the audio feedback (or a system could capture this audio directly), but then it exists within a file that can’t as easily be distributed, edited, indexed, or searched, meaning people then have to listen to it in its entirety in order to get the message, or to transcribe it for others—all of which takes additional resources. Still, audio notes can convey emotion or context in a way that text can’t always do.

A final form of feedback is through visual annotation. Sometimes, drawing a circle over part of an image or a frame from a movie can provide meaningful feedback that would be difficult to convey using text or audio alone. These can be done via low-tech means, such as snapping a photo of an image on a display and then using a mobile image editing app to add the annotation, but several reviewing systems have this functionality built-in.

Review Sessions

With larger productions, there might be a lot of material for supervisors and directors that needs to be reviewed. There are only so many shots in a film, but there are many different ways to cut them together. Furthermore, other materials, such as concept art, may not appear in the finished production but will act as a “blueprint” providing aesthetic direction and having a more general impact on everything else. These materials will themselves undergo similar review processes to ensure they provide a clear direction. All of these shots, edits, and concepts will, therefore, undergo the iterative process of creation, presentation, refinement, and distribution.

Review sessions then typically have a dual purpose: first they provide a way to combine many materials and allow them to be reviewed in a streamlined way, thus ensuring everything that needs to be reviewed gets reviewed in an organised manner. The second is to collect feedback for everything reviewed and work out the implications of the feedback. Some items for review might get approved right then, and even though this might mean there’s no more work to be done as a result, there still needs to be a record of this approval having happened for tracking purposes (in reality, though, the approvals process might be multi-layered, with several tiers of approvals being required before something is considered finished, such as from the art director and then the director; moreover, having something approved might mean that there’s still the logistics of delivering the corresponding materials to have to deal with).

Organising review sessions can still be challenging, though. First, all the items to be included in the session need to be determined. Then an agreed time and place must be set for the review to take place for all the participants. Finally, the items for review must be made available to the system used to display it (where those materials are in a digital form). Feedback must be collected and then forwarded to the people who need it. All of this must also be tracked, particularly where there will be a lot of such reviews taking place during a production. Each of these can be aided by the Cloud in some way.

Cloud storage (as discussed in chapter 4) can be used to hold all the digital materials, even grouping them together for specific sessions where possible. Any of the methods discussed in chapter 6 can help to coordinate the actual meeting for the review session and ensure a suitable time and place is decided. Display and playback of review items can be managed by one or more of the Cloud-based systems discussed in this chapter, and feedback can be recorded and relayed using one or more of the communication systems discussed in chapter 6. Everything can be tracked using one of the services covered in chapter 10.

However, combining a number of different services in this way is not strictly necessary. The review and approval process is so common across productions that a number of dedicated, Cloud-based services exist to streamline the entire process.

Figure 12.1 Review Sessions with the Cloud

Box 12.2 Ad-hoc Review Sessions

It’s tempting to think that with the Cloud, such structured review sessions are redundant. With the Cloud, anyone can join an online review session at any time, from anywhere with an Internet connection. Technology certainly exists to enable everyone to review materials individually, as and when they’re ready. Artists could submit their work to a central hub, and at the same time the people who would need to review it could be notified that it’s ready and then just access the hub to review it when convenient.

In practice, though, that’s almost never desirable. It’s much less mentally taxing for supervisors to review things in bulk than on a per-item basis, and it’s also easier for support staff to track that nothing has been missed when reviews are arranged around batches of items. In addition, there are usually several people who need to be present in a given review session, and there can be some discussion about various review items as opposed to just having a single person issuing a verdict. The difficulty of trying to schedule people’s availability in this way, even if they don’t need to be physically present, is high enough that it makes sense to try and schedule a single block of time and get as many items as possible reviewed in that time. In addition, often there will be materials that can’t be reviewed adequately online, either due to bandwidth limitations, or due to needing a real-world context to view them (for example, to look at props or costumes or needing to watch shots in full quality in a screening room).

That said, there are situations that make precisely these kinds of “ad-hoc” review sessions desirable. An executive, for example, might not need (or want) to sit in on a review session with a director, or be involved with providing any direct feedback, but might still have a need to see certain materials to get a sense of how the overall production is going. For these types of situations, the Cloud can indeed provide many benefits, not least of all the ability to review items from anywhere they choose.

Review and Approval in the Cloud

With a single, centralised place to upload and organise digital media for review sessions, collect feedback, and then distribute that feedback as needed, the review and approval process becomes much easier and more efficient for all involved. A surprising number of such Cloud-based systems already exist, covering a wide range of different needs and review scenarios.

PIX (pixsystem.com), for example, allows various types of files to be uploaded to a central repository, ready to share with others. Reviewers can then provide feedback directly via the system, with notifications generated automatically and sent to whoever needs them. This eliminates a lot of correspondence than would otherwise be needed, such as having to review materials and then resort to email to ask questions or provide feedback, along with the inherent possibility of confusion of which particular item is being referred to with such text-based communications.

Once the basic problems of gathering feedback have been overcome, other possibilities arise, solving problems that would prove challenging in more traditional review environments, but can be tackled in the connected environment the Cloud provides. For example, Screenlight (screenlight.tv) will automatically pause and log the point in a video being reviewed when the reviewer starts to type a note and tracks when a new version of a file is submitted, carrying across previous comments and sending notifications out.

Similarly, Wipster (wipster.io) provides an uncluttered interface for reviewing multiple video files, with all the commenting and visual annotation you might want to empower reviewers with, but without expecting them to learn a new, complicated system. In addition to allowing comments on specific frames and specific parts of those frames, there’s also the option for reviewers to reply to each other’s comments, making it less ambiguous and more conversational. Once feedback has been gathered, it can then be converted to a series of actionable items on a “to-do list” automatically.

Comparing different versions of media is something that can be rather complicated in more traditional setups, but with systems that have access to everything, and some understanding of how different files relate to each other, more possibilities emerge. Frame.io (frame.io), for example, allows two different versions of a shot to be played side-by-side as needed, so it’s easier to determine the changes. Critique (critiquecloud.com) utilises a mobile app to allow media to be available offline, with any notes added while disconnected being submitted automatically the next time there’s an Internet connection available.

Other systems go even further, allowing for structured review sessions to be created. For example, Shotgun (shotgunsoftware.com) allows for media to be organised into playlists, which can be shared with others in a similar manner to other systems, but these playlists can also be used to accompany a more traditional review structure, giving coordinators a convenient list of items included in the review with which to quickly add notes and look up related information, such as tasks still awaiting completion, or the notes from previous sessions. This can be completely independent from the system actually used to display the media, meaning that notes can be taken against videos being projected on a big screen from a hard disk drive.

The process doesn’t end with approvals either. Systems such as Sony Ci (sonymcs.com) recognise this by enabling the media used for review to be easily consolidated into “mediaboxes”, digital packages that can be transmitted to others. This allows recipients to have the full-quality, original media instead of (or in addition to) the web-viewable version.

Greater connectivity will allow for more possibilities in the future. With more of the media stored in the Cloud, and with systems becoming smarter about how all the media relates, it will be much easier to address common queries in review sessions, such as knowing how different versions compare to each other and whether previous notes have been adequately addressed, as well as seeing things in context—by being able to show adjacent shots within the current cut.

Digital Dailies

Over the last decade, film production has made a gradual transition from shooting on photographic film to shooting using digital cameras. Though there remains a source of contention as to whether or not this transition has been for the best, there are some indisputable benefits to shooting digital, chief amongst them their immediate availability for viewing and the ability to make perfect copies that have no degradation whatsoever.

The rise of digital capture formats for film and video has enabled the “dailies” (or “rushes”) process of reviewing raw footage to be greatly streamlined. Traditionally, with a photographic film-based methodology, at the end of each shoot day the exposed film would be shipped off to a lab for processing overnight, with prints or DVDs couriered back to the set the following morning. Key personnel would then view the output before the day’s shoot and ensure everything was as expected, or make arrangements to redo anything that was not.

For the most part, this process has worked well, though the turnaround was so tightly scheduled that any issues could mean the receipt of the footage could be delayed by a significant amount of time. Additionally, it was rarely possible to get access to processed footage before the next shooting day, so the possibility of seeing something the same day it was shot (and with the best chance of being able to reshoot to address problems) was remote.

With the advent of digital photography, such delays became a relic of film-based production. As soon as something is shot using a digital format, it’s available for viewing. Technically there might be some processing time required to decode a proprietary format or to otherwise copy or transcode footage to a format suitable for playback on specific devices, but such delays are comparatively insignificant, particularly where streamlined workflows have been established. Essentially once footage has been transferred from the camera and undergone whatever processing is needed, it can be displayed on a device. At that point, everyone can gather round and take a look. Traditionalists bemoan that this gives rise to less time shooting and more time spent in discussion in and around the “video village” viewing area. Whether this is indeed the case or not, there’s a marked benefit of cost and time versus waiting for film to be developed.

Figure 12.2 Traditional Dailies Processing

Figure 12.3 Digital Dailies

Even with a digital dailies process there’s room for improvement. The main issues with a typical digital dailies process are the lack of a formal way to track information and feedback and the dependence on being in a specific location at a specific time to be able to view them. Naturally, these are areas where the Cloud can help.

With a Cloud-based digital dailies process, footage is uploaded to the Cloud as part of the transfer or backup process and can then almost immediately be made available for playback to a number of different devices across a number of geographic locations. This can be done in a very informal way, for example, using a Cloud storage system like Dropbox to store and grant access to the raw files, but for greater control and possibilities a more dedicated system can be used. For example, Prime Focus Technologies’ Production Cloud (primefocustechnologies.com/dax-production-cloud) provides the means to upload footage to the Cloud, which can then be viewed via a browser, mobile device, or a dedicated set-top box. Footage uploaded is linked to corresponding scenes and takes, so it is readily searchable and organised. In addition, there’s a whole host of review features, such as annotation, with the ability to export these to various non-linear editing formats, which can be convenient for editors who need quick access to this information.

The main obstacle to a completely Cloud-based digital dailies process is that Internet access tends to be limited on shooting locations. The volume of data generated each shoot day can run into the terabytes, which can take a very long time to upload on slower connections, particularly if the connections are unreliable and suffer from frequent disconnects. This means that the main draw of using the system in the first place—the immediacy of being able to view the footage—is lost whilst waiting for transfers to complete.

Figure 12.4 Cloud-based Digital Dailies

In these situations, it’s likely that some combination of a traditional digital dailies process can be combined with a Cloud-based one. The traditional digital dailies process can be used to provide everyone on the set with quick access to the footage, and a Cloud-based approach can be done asynchronously, with people located remotely able to view the footage at a later date. Of course, in some shooting environments (such as at a television studio), there might be reliable and fast Internet access, in which case a Cloud-based approach might be both practical and suitable. Somewhat ironically, a Cloud-based approach might work well for shoots with photographic film, as the film processing lab might be able to offer Cloud-based dailies in tandem with processing the negative.

Box 12.3 Transcoding

One of the most prominent issues that occurs when attempting to play video on different devices is that each device might have its own requirements for the specific format the video must be in. One device might support MPEG-compressed video, whilst another supports only Window Media Video. Then there’s the need to try and deliver video that is appropriate to the hardware (such as the display resolution and audio capabilities), whilst maximising the overall quality and balancing the bandwidth of the connection to the device.

This can be particularly challenging due to the number of variables within the “transcoding” (taking media and changing the format so as to make it available on a particular device) process. For starters, there’s the compression format, container format, and image resolution to consider, which will largely be dependent on what it needs to be viewed on. Then there’s bit-rate, which controls the size of the resulting media by limiting how much information is stored, and then things like rate-factors, filters, and deblocking which can control the perceptual quality.

When there’s a single person, for example, a Digital Imaging Technician, who is responsible for taking footage and transcoding it, this can be a tedious process, one that is both time-consuming and complicated. As such, it’s best to target a limited set of output devices, for example, making one set of media that’s optimised for an iPhone and another more appropriate for a laptop, and then settle on a set of parameters that strike a good balance between turnaround time, size, and quality of the resulting files. These presets can then be reused throughout the production to make the process more automated and less of an obstacle.

This process is extremely limited as a result. It is undesirable to cater for different devices, as it impacts the overall turnaround time to actually do all the transcoding, as well as adding a period of experimentation to find suitable presets. Transcoding in the Cloud is a different matter. In the Cloud, transcoding can take advantage of a much larger pool of hardware, so transcoding for several different devices can be done in parallel. Furthermore, most Cloud transcoding services have created presets for numerous devices, so there’s less of a need for experimentation of different formats. You simply submit some footage and then select which devices you need to view it on and let the service take care of the rest.

Services such as Brightcove’s Zencoder (zencoder.com) allow you to upload video files to the Cloud and have them transcoded to various formats before transferring or downloading them from the service for use, which can be helpful in certain situations but is still limited by the time it takes to upload and download the files. Perhaps a better use for the technology is when it is combined with a dedicated Cloud-based review and approval system, in which case the files are being sent to the service which can then transcode files on demand, automatically making them available to a variety of devices.

Popular Review and Approval Services