The following is the second in a series of 10 blog posts in “Interplay Innovations”, part two of our Interplay blog series. In this series, we’ll discuss how the recent developments in Interplay Production 3.0 give modern workgroups the tools to overcome challenges in an era where media is created and consumed everywhere.
In the last entry, we discussed how the proliferation of file-based cameras has permanently changed our industry and created an enormous challenge for workflows of all genres. While cameras have become more portable and more rugged, offering ever increasing resolution in smaller form factors, they have also become much cheaper as market competition has intensified among manufacturers. Recording media and outboard recording devices have also become much better in recent years, offering longer recording times, dependability, and quality at lower costs and power consumption.
As a result of these factors, many production teams are returning from set or from the field with more and more footage. In fact, almost all of the facilities we visit tell us they are challenged by never before seen shooting ratios, much higher than in any past era. In particular, they have also told us that there has been an enormous overall increase in the number of multi-camera shoots, where several cameras are used to shoot the same action or are run continuously in the same general location as characters come and go. Today, even a quick scan of television channels and/or the web reveals countless multi-camera productions: scripted drama, talk shows, sitcoms, music concerts, award events, sports magazine, game/contest shows, cooking shows, travel/lifestyle shows, documentary, reality, interviews of all styles, and the list goes on.
For many of these style productions, multi-camera material can constitute between 50% and 90%+ of total footage shot. In turn, many workgroups have told us they need both wider access to and a greater ability to work with group clips, an asset type that synchronizes the video and audio of several camera angles to make working with multi-camera footage much more efficient. Specifically, the need to give access to producers, writers, loggers, coordinators, assistants, etc. to this grouped material is paramount. These staff members often help sift through and triage hours of footage by reviewing the framing of different camera angles, listening closely to all the recorded audio for essential story moments, adding log notes by dropping markers, taking inventory of talent releases, identifying clips best used for promotion or press, writing scripts or building a string up sequence based on what essential action was captured. All of these types of tasks are critical to accelerating schedule, reducing the load of high shooting ratios on the editorial staff, and ultimately granting them more time in a busy schedule for creativity.
Previously, these multi-camera workflows required many facilities to invest either in additional sets of costly workstations for support staff to use or in proxy systems that would flatten group clips, drastically reducing the ability to see if important action was actually caught on camera and therefore log it efficiently. To meet these varied needs head on and help workgroups crank through footage at a much faster pace, we decided to add powerful, yet simple-to-use multi-camera tools in our web- and mobile-based Interplay Central client. Now any of the previously mentioned staff members can work with group clips from any location using nothing more than a browser.
When a user navigates to a group clip, the new multi-camera tools in Interplay Central support the playback of nine cameras simultaneously as well as banking for up to 18 cameras. Users can switch between single angle or multi-angle views easily and can designate any angle as the ‘active angle’ either by clicking directly on it in the Media Pane or by selecting it from a drop menu from the lower left corner. Additionally, a new Audio Pane supports up to 24 audio tracks giving users the ability to monitor audio from any of the field cameras either in ‘Audio Follows Video’ mode or individually.
Markers and/or restrictions can be dropped on multi-camera footage by angle, enabling logging tasks for assets that will be relevant over several seasons or preventing the use of footage that has technical problems such as a company logo needing to be blurred, audio dropouts on a lavalier mic with a dying battery, or copyrighted music ambient to a scene that needs to be replaced. Users can edit group clips into basic sequences, change the ‘active angle’ on the fly during playback in the Sequence Pane, and leave specific script notes via markers. All of this functionality proves to be a great help to producers writing a script or wanting to identify key story moments by angle for the editorial team. They can send their rough sequences replete with marker notes to their editor, giving them a jump start on the heavy lifting of a multi-camera edit while still preserving creative access to all of the original camera angles and audio should the editor need it.
With the addition of these simple-to-use multi-camera tools, the Interplay Central client builds upon its companion relationship to Media Composer, allowing a wide range of staff to work in parallel and in support of the editorial team. In this way, workgroups can plow through the large volumes of footage being generated by today’s productions and work more efficiently with multi-camera footage, ranging from a typical 2 to 4 camera interview all the way up to a complex 18 camera reality contest shoot. And given the access Interplay Central provides via a browser, a producer, for example, can now have unprecedented access to review this footage from the field, while traveling from another office or simply from home. Flexible workflows like this are what push Interplay Production environments to new levels of creative collaboration, letting more members of staff contribute anywhere, anytime and enabling media enterprises to hit an operational top speed to meet deadlines more easily with better stories.
Stay tuned for our next entry where we will discuss the new Messages Pane in Interplay Central and how it serves to give workgroups a groundbreaking new way to share and communicate about assets.
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