Ask the experts - what's in store for 2018?

PETER COLLINS - head of drama workflow, The Farm Group

In the year ahead, several new technologies will achieve wider adoption. Consumers have taken well to UHD, and 2018 will bring further exploration into other aspects of the technology, as 22.2 and object-based audio systems become more viable. High Dynamic Range (HDR) content will also become more ubiquitous.

There will be several changes to fi le formats and delivery methods in 2018, due to the nature of UHD deliverables and the size of the respective data sets. Cloud storage will see a broader uptake as storage becomes even more of a premium.

AR will be an interesting topic in 2018 – it has the potential to enhance the traditional viewing experience with objects and media being placed in ‘real space’ alongside the traditional viewing window.

Camera sensors capturing higher than 4K will be popular, although it will be several years before up to 8K production pipelines will be employed, as the technology for monitoring, playback and display is not yet mature enough.

However, for reversioning and archive, these sensors may prove invaluable. With this, though, comes an impact on storage and processing requirements, as well as an increase in costs.

LUDO FEALY - co-founder, Nineteentwenty

Rather than attempt to predict what is coming in 2018, I’ll state what I would love to see happen.

The thing I would love to come to fruition is true camera-tracking information direct from the camera. A lot of tracking software can do a marvellous job, but there are occasions when you don’t have sufficient markers, or the lighting is low, or stuff is moving in front of the camera.

The metadata we can now get out of a camera is amazing: lens info, focal length, tilt.

My son’s Xbox knows where I’m standing in the room, so there has to be a way of achieving a similar ‘zero point’ for a camera and knowing where it has moved to from there.

When Flame first hit the VFX world, the ability to two-point track was a huge breakthrough. Now if you try to tell a director he has to lock off the camera, you’ll get laughed out of town. Boujou, PF Track and the built-in camera tracker within Nuke are fantastic, but it’s time we had another advancement in the ‘match move’ world, as it’s long overdue.

JEFF ROSICA - president, Avid

As we head into 2018, we’re facing the reality of full-scale media production in the cloud. This brings the opportunity to increase capacity and ease the financial burdens of content creation and distribution.

Deploying a full-scale, cloud-based workflow enables media organisations to grow viewership and brand affinity, connect with audiences in new ways, and fully protect their assets by operating in a secure environment.

It’s easy to scale resources as needed to address peaks in demand and tap into economies of scale across workgroups.

The flexibility of cloud services enables them to maximise the value of their assets by expanding to new outlets. Material can be repurposed to exploit new revenue streams by making content available everywhere consumers want to consume it.

It’s an exciting new landscape enabled by cloud-based technologies – scalable, agile and flexible infrastructure that has the power to change production processes industry-wide.

EMMANUELLE GARNAUD-GAMACHE - director, international development, Bcom

The VR market is still emerging, although a genuine ecosystem is falling into place and the technologies are becoming more mature. However, there is no fully immersive experience without perfectly spatialised sound. Progress has been made in the fi eld, with simpler-to-implement devices at relatively low cost.

For distribution, 5G is becoming a growing theme, although IP distribution remains the major trend in recent years. 

AI has already found a purpose in every conceivable audio-visual sector. One symptom of this trend was the start-up Valossa, a spin-off of the AI labs at University of Oulu in Finland, which created buzz with its ‘video recognition as a service’ portal. This makes it possible to generate an impressive quantity of data about people.

The HDR format continues to be a major issue for manufacturers: it lets them improve contrast, colour saturation and the image detail in HD and Ultra HD. New markets are cropping up for ‘gap fi ll’ technologies during the transition to all HDR.

DAF REES - deputy director of operations, Arena Television

Since the very first OB, capturing the procession following King George VI’s coronation in 1937, when the BBC sent a modified truck chassis, little has changed in the way we capture live events.

With the debate about suitability of IP in the live production space finally shifting towards a consensus of approval, or in some cases at least, begrudging acceptance, we’ll see more equipment come to market with direct IP connections, and facilities continue the migration from SDI to IP.

As people get to grips with IP, perhaps at last we’ll see a fundamental shift in the approach to outside broadcasting.

One area where we’ll see this shift emerge is a decentralised approach with different production elements being contributed from diverse geographical locations. This can only be achieved where suitable guaranteed bandwidth of appropriate latency exists, but that capacity is improving year-on-year.

However, more IP-based facilities will bring a new set of challenges, especially where OB units from competing companies exchange signals as a matter of course.

Traditionally, this has been achieved by laying copper cables from truck to truck to exchange baseband video and audio feeds.

Consideration will have to be given over the next 12 months to reaching an agreement for securely exchanging signals between unfamiliar, vendor-diverse IP ecosystems.

Unquestionably, HDR will continue to create a buzz into 2018. Producing HDR, wide colour gamut content is not an onerous challenge in and of itself, but for live productions that must maintain an SDR, standard colour gamut deliverable, the challenge of perfecting the workflow to enable satisfactory HDR and SDR output will continue.