By Dan Roberts
A huge amount of work is going on at the moment behind the scenes to come up with scenarios whereby we might continue to make TV and film content in a world still dealing with a pandemic. The ADs branch of BECTU has put together an extremely detailed document which is now receiving input from all other branches. Producers and studios are doing their own studies. All of this work will be brought together in a series of meetings chaired by the British Film Commission and British Film Institute.
The majority of this theorizing is currently focused on shooting. This is understandable, because it’s a much bigger nut to crack. Also, as ever, there is a natural order to these things; prep, shoot, edit.
But what actually are the implications for us in editorial?
WORKING REMOTELY – THE LO-FI PRESENT
Remote working is something we’ve been doing for years. Very often assistants will set off an export, make their way home, log in to their AVID via TeamViewer or AnyDesk and upload it for the powers that be. Or editors keep a local drive updated with all the project’s media so they can take it away and work from home for a few days on the workstation they have in the shed at the end of the garden (my own setup!) while the director is out of town for a few days. (The latter is dependent on whether your production is happy for you to have their media at home, something that certain production companies have been squeamish about for security reasons. However, I suspect they may be willing to waive their concerns in future! But it might be sensible to get a padlock for the shed!).
Broadband speeds have increased over the last decade to make it possible for editors to work from home during the whole shoot period, downloading many GB of rushes each day to copy to their local drive. These rushes can be hosted on an FTP site, or can be sent using MediaShuttle (Signiant) or Aspera (which are just sophisticated / secure pro versions of WeTransfer).
Until now, this has all been a little Heath Robinson. I personally have a small Lacie drive onto which I copy new media, then copying that media onto the big local drive in the shed. Any sfx or music I import, every now and then I send the new media to my assistant, and vice versa. Any media that’s missing on either machine, we send bins back and forth containing the affected master clips, locate the media, and send it. Then once the shoot is over, you move into town to be with the whole team, sharing the same project and media on an ISIS.
If going forward we’re going to be doing the whole shebang from home, including the fine cut, this is going to have to get a little more sophisticated.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS GOING FORWARD
Excuse my lack of technical expertise. Also please note that I am not plugging any particular solutions, I have no allegiance to any providers, I am just collating what others have kindly shared with me, this is not exhaustive, and I urge you and your producers to do your own research.
Logging in to remote workstations. I’ve already mentioned TeamViewer and AnyDesk. I don’t think this would be a workable solution to edit with, being laggy and a little clunky. But hey, they’re useful for emergencies.
‘Terradici’ is a more sophisticated version of the above, allowing you to log into a remote workstation. In theory it should be a lot less laggy because the only data which gets transferred between machines is in the form of pixels, and only those pixels which change over time get transferred, so it makes efficient use of your (possibly rural…) broadband connection. Terradici only works on PC at the mo, but apparently Amulet Hotkey makes it work on Mac.
AVID have had their own solution in development, called ‘Edit on Demand’, the arrival of which is imminent. You don’t even need a physical AVID workstation. It actually makes use of Terradici to log into an entirely remote cloud-based system which looks just like a NEXIS. Any number of users can log in to the same workspace, (although naturally each end user will need an AVID subscription), sharing the same project and media if desired. In this explanatory video they recommend you have an internet connection of 25Mb/s to have a really seamless experience. I supposedly have 36Mb/s at home, but when I run a speed test, in reality this is 14.7Mb/s up and 8.7Mb/s down… Looks like I’m going to be upgrading to ‘72’Mb/s… (Your broadband speed dictates how much data you can stream down your line, and therefore the quality of playback. The responsiveness of the system is actually going to be dictated by your ‘ping speed’ (a measure of how quickly packets of data can be sent back and forth). My ping speed when I ran that test was 19ms, or just under 5 frames…)
These sorts of solutions are always going to be software only (to get a video feed from the workstation would require a separate stream, and then you have the problem of maintaining synch with your audio). The time lag you’ll get when your internet is not good enough is also going to frustrate in my opinion. (These solutions might be great for online editors or colourists who have more complicated hardware and are working with huge files). And if your kids and all your neighbours are bingeing boxsets on Netflix….
A better solution is clearly going to be to have an AVID at home working with media and a project on local drives; whether this is provided by the production, or your own kit. I have a very simple setup, a Mac Mini running three screens and a set of speakers. In which case, how do we make this work more efficiently than what I described above?
Synching projects. Friends I have spoken to have had good results sharing projects on Dropbox. It’s not the same as sharing a project on a NEXIS, for example when you have a bin open it doesn’t show up as being locked, so conceivably multiple people could be working in the same bin concurrently. But with a little thought (assistants spending as little time as possible in the edit bins, not going hear the scene bins for that day’s rushes once handed over), and some discipline (making sure you close any bin that you’re not using), and good communication, it’s a good solution. As soon as you close a bin, it synchs to the other machine. And of course it’s free.
I spoke to Nick Long at Salon who have just finished developing a project-sharing solution along similar lines which does enable bin-locking, which would obviously make things a lot more foolproof.Synching media. Slightly more tricky… I’m imagining a situation where you have a master set of drives (either on the assistant’s machine or in some neutral location, perhaps a NEXIS in a facility) that each end user syncs to. You can do this using existing file-synching solutions like Syncovery, Resilio Sync, GoodSync, SyncThing or Media Shuttle. You would need to control the points at which the software actually runs, or only sync overnight, say, because if you were working while a sync was happening, the AVID would be constantly trying to rebuild media databases. Each person logging into the master drives would need to have their own partition they had read / write access to. This is all fraught with danger. Sync in the wrong direction on the wrong partition and you instantly lose a whole batch of media. I spoke to one assistant who only ever imported media on the NEXIS via AnyDesk, so the sync was only ever in one direction, from the NEXIS to the end users. Must be a tad annoying when having to recreate titles and renders endlessly.
One of the problems here is that the AVID media folder structure on an ISIS is different from that on local drives. So a good solution might be for the master set of drives to also be local rather than network.
In the future one can imagine a scenario whereby post houses or editing equipment hire companies provide a service to productions, managing their media for them, taking receipt of the transcoded rushes from the DIT, ingesting them and sending a notification to all the end users to sync. Again, Nick Long at Salon said his team were doing final testing on just such a solution.
COLLABORATING REMOTELY
Solutions already exist to enable us to work remotely with directors. It all depends how hands-on your director likes to be. I have worked with many directors who rarely came into the cutting rooms, preferring to give notes and leave me be. Obviously in this case you can send cuts via WeTransfer or MyAirBridge, or upload them to a hosting service such as Pix or MediaSilo and just talk to each other on the blower!
In the past I have used Cinesync. This enables you to play a quicktime at your end which updates another copy of the same quicktime they have at their end, so you can watch in sync whilst discussing on Skype / Facetime. Also, on Skype or Zoom it is possible to enable screen sharing, which may be a good enough lo-fi solution. One editor friend told me they just Facetime the director and point the laptop at their viewing monitor!
But what if your director is a little more hands-on?
Solutions already exist which will stream the output of your AVID over the interweb. These include Clearview, which I have also used to good effect on a show where my director was in the States. It requires a dedicated piece of hardware to be fitted to your AVID’s video output which converts it real-time to h264 and streams to the director. Evercast and Streambox also stream a video signal over the interweb and do not require such hardware (but these therefore suck up a lot more of your machine’s processing power). The bitrate of the video signal can be controlled to make allowances for less-than-perfect internet connections. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses and cost implications. These solutions also enable multiple participants, so you could when needed collaborate with producers, or do sound spotting sessions with your sound team, whatever.
But what if your director is REALLY hands-on?
You can obviously run these video-streaming solutions all day long, and go over each scene in the same amount of detail as you would if the director was there in the room with you. I recently worked with a director who was incredibly forensic and I am certain he would have found this extremely frustrating. It is inevitably going to be less efficient. Any face-to-face communication has the added advantage of body language. There will be miscommunication, there will be confusion. But needs must.
As for how you collaborate with your assistant(s). This is going to be less efficient. We’re going to have to check in more often. The danger will be that the rest of the team are included less in the edit. Say you give them something to cut. When you get it back, you won’t be able to just call them in from the next room to go through it, so the temptation might be to just recut it yourself. In which case, the next generation of editors gets less training…
OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
Physical health. Spending 10 hours a day at a desk has never been terribly good for you, but if we are to be deprived of a journey to and from work at each end of the day, we will inevitably move even less. I myself cycle at either end of my journey, which gives me a little boost of much needed endorphins. In a remote future we will have to carve out time in the day to escape from our machines. This has always been advised but in the future will become crucial.
Mental health. I personally love working at facilities, especially those with communal areas. Most editors are introverts and this setup enables you to calibrate just how much human interaction you have. When you wanna retreat into your cocoon and get some work done, you can. In the future, you may get precisely zero interaction. I know from working from home during shoots for months at a time that this is wearing. My kids are school-age and my wife works, so I’m home alone all day. Other people may have young kids who don’t understand that mummy or daddy have work to do. At the moment I’m homeschooling the kids, if I was trying to work at the same time, this would be unbelievably inefficient and massively stressful. In an industry which had a massive problem with mental health even before the current crisis (the Film & TV Charity’s recent survey found that 1 in every 2 workers in our industry had contemplated suicide. Yep, you read that right), this is a big worry.
Schedules. It’s going to be less efficient. Some time in every day is going to be taken up with administering the tech. Interacting with the rest of the team will be clunky. So we’re going to get less done in the same time. So in theory (!) schedules (and maybe team sizes) will have to reflect this.
Positives. It’s possible that the post community might be a little less London-centric in the future (as long as decent broadband gets rolled out beyond the M25…!). So maybe we won’t have to be crippled with huge mortgages / rent. I’m going to save on my train fare. Less need to travel will also be a good thing for the planet. And being able to have dinner with the family every night will be nice.
EMERGING FROM LOCKDOWN
When we do move back into town, (if & when?!), those solutions which are already being worked on by the rest of the industry will have to become part of our lives in post too. Facilities will need someone to take responsibility for hygiene, deep cleaning possibly daily. Social distancing measures. Masks worn in communal areas? Reporting procedures (anyone with symptoms would have to be isolated). Productions to instigate testing for all their workers? Who knows.
Reports of the death of the film and TV industry have been greatly exaggerated. We’re a community comprised of creative individuals, we’ll find creative solutions. But the way we work may never quite return to what it was before!
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