What next?

For film and video productions that use the Cloud, the fantasy doesn’t need to end there. Many businesses are betting their futures on the Cloud, both in terms of their own technical infrastructure as well as in terms of the services they provide. As a result, there’s a massive financial investment in Cloud technology underway. Whilst some Cloud-based services will doubtless fail in some way, others will flourish, and users will reap the benefits of gradually reducing costs and ever more sophisticated technology. With that in mind, there are a few potential developments to look forward to in the coming years.

Faster Everything

Speed is something that can really hold back the Cloud. With greater utilisation of the Cloud, the bottleneck for the end-user increasingly becomes the bandwidth of their Internet connection. As demand for faster speeds increases, Internet Service Providers will likely find new ways to give their customers improvements to bandwidth, both in terms of home and office connections, as well as through cellular connection.

The next generation of cellular communication is estimated to allow for around 1 gigabit per second of data throughput, which is more than 3 times faster than the current 4G specification, though it has been theorised that the new system has the potential to be 800 times faster than that. As a bonus, 5G connections are likely to be more reliable, making mobile devices less dependent on WiFi connections.

Development continues on broadband Internet connections, as technologies such as “Fibre to the Cabinet” and “Fibre to the Premises” gain traction and promise greater speeds to homes and offices but require replacing legacy cabling and will take time to roll out everywhere. But new protocols like “G.fast” may also offer additional benefits over existing infrastructure in the interim.

With the availability of faster Internet connections, Cloud services will be able to provide more benefits, not just in being able to transfer files more quickly, but also being able to pack more functionality into applications that are served across the Internet. Simultaneously, advances in data compression and new web technology will also mean that fewer data will need to be transferred in the first place, again providing speed benefits. Polaris, a technology developed by MIT and Harvard researchers, reportedly reduces the time for web pages to load by up to 34%, will be released some time in 2016, at which point other sites will be free to make use of it.

More Services

As the Cloud gains popularity, more services that have previously ignored or avoided it will gradually succumb and offer their own Cloud-based services. Companies that are already invested in Cloud technology will continue to refine and iterate their products and may produce new products based on needs. All of this will result in new ways to do things and greater choice of how to do them.

Better Interoperability

Given the complexities and ever-changing nature of video and film productions, it’s unlikely that there’ll be a single service that will be able to provide a complete, end-to-end approach by providing everything the production might need from budgeting and scheduling all the way through to post-production and distribution, at least not any time soon. What does seem likely, however, is that there’ll be greater integration between different services, so a script breakdown done through one system can be easily and automatically read into another. Most Cloud-based services offer some form of API where appropriate, so it’s always possible that even if a particular service doesn’t directly integrate with another one, someone, somewhere could build and publish a third-party integration. With the rise of ad-hoc integration systems, it could become easier than ever to take two different Cloud-based services and simply plug them together.

Ubiquitous Access

Mobile devices are becoming more powerful, and as they do, people tend to use them where they’d previously been using desktop computers. Though many Cloud-based services have support for mobile devices, not all of them do and the support can be somewhat limited. Over time, we’ll likely see greater support, as well as new uses for mobile devices in the context of these services, for example, taking advantage of built-in cameras and location tracking. All of this will lead to people wanting to access different services whilst on the move, from different locations and at different times.

This may extend to other areas too. In early 2016 a new system dubbed “Screening Room”, that promised delivery of new movies to a set-top box in the home, on the day of their theatrical release, gained the backing of several prominent directors, many of whom had previously come out against such systems (the fact that Screening Room promises to pay significant royalties to theatres for each viewing might have helped).

Reduced Costs

As the technology gets more efficient and sees a greater number of people using it, the costs will reduce. Simultaneously, associated hardware costs will also drop, and there will be more competition between different systems, which should also serve to drive costs down. This should then make Cloud-based services more attractive than more traditional approaches in many cases, causing them to see even greater adoption.

More Power

All previous developments should mean that the services grow in terms of their feature set and capabilities. Ease of integration should allow different data processing services to be leased to other systems. For example, one company could set up a video transcription service that another company is able to leverage for its own service (such as digital dailies), meaning that its own customers gain all the benefits without the company having to commit considerable resources to researching and developing the technology themselves.

Google is doing just that with its Prediction API (cloud.google.com/prediction). Companies can use the API to buy “predictions” using Google’s own neural networks, about things like what a user is likely to do in a given day based on past interactions, or determine whether posted comments have a positive or negative tone. Similarly, Microsoft’s Project Oxford (projectoxford.ai) has a tantalising set of APIs in development, covering everything from face recognition to spell checking and video stabilisation. Potentially any company could leverage these and use them to enrich their own services.

Innovation

Even across unrelated fields, new approaches to solving problems can serve as inspiration to others or become established workflows. For example, x.ai is developing a Cloud-based “personal assistant” that can be copied on emails to help with scheduling meetings. The twist is that the personal assistant is a “web robot” that uses natural language routines, meaning participants can send messages in a completely conversational tone, without needing to use specific keywords, and the assistant will send replies and manage the calendar directly.

Developments like this can lead to many companies adopting similar approaches to their own systems. Imagine if, when you need to send a file to someone, instead of logging into your Cloud storage system and granting access and emailing the recipient a link, you could just send an email to a virtual assistant (or speak into a phone) and have them take care of it for you.

With an increasing amount of video being stored in the Cloud, sophisticated analysis becomes possible. Autodesk Video Lens (autodeskresearch.com/publications/videolens), for example, demonstrates this by analysing footage from numerous baseball games, and then allowing interesting footage to be surfaced based on a number of different parameters, such as finding video featuring the lowest pitches hit for a home run. What’s particularly interesting about this is that it’s indicative of a shift from finding things based on keywords and metadata to analysis of its content. It’s not a huge stretch to imagine that in a few years’ time, an editor might be able to search for a video of “close up of leading lady looking down” rather than “101AA-2B”.

Aggregation of large amounts of data will likely become important. The core concept of Project Portfolio Management, which is being able to analyse the progress of a number of projects at a strategic level, might extend to other aspects of the production process and be used to gain insight into processes that are efficient or cost-effective, or that translate to increased critical reception or box office sales.

Services might offer “benchmarking” features, whereby aspects of your process can be compared with those of other productions, potentially highlighting areas that could be improved in some way. For example, a service might be able to tell you that you’re shooting less usable footage on an average day than a similar-sized production or that you’re spending above average on catering at a particular location.

Information will become more context-aware. With an increased use of Cloud-based services comes an increase in data, which in turn leads to different things competing for attention. Getting notifications when someone uploads an important file is great, but a flood of notifications about people uploading files that are less important can lead to people becoming overwhelmed and just not using them at all. In the future we’ll hopefully see a move towards being notified about just the things you actually care about, as well as perhaps the various services being more intelligent about how and when they send you information or ask you to make choices.

The motion picture industry may have difficulty keeping up with the pace of developments in information technology, but the promise of a Cloud-powered future will mean they no longer have to.