The 2023 NAB Show is just around the corner and with over 1000 exhibitors expected to occupy more than 575,000 net square feet of space at the show, choosing how to spend your time – and who to spend it with - is going to be a challenge for most attendees.
To help you narrow down your choices, Jigsaw24 Media’s Head of Innovation, Chris Bailey, and Technical Pre-Sales Consultant, Mike Fitchie, put their heads together to identify some of the current trends, emerging capabilities, and the next big thing across storage, video and audio post-production technology.
If we’re honest, whether it’s on-prem, in the cloud or somewhere between the two, storage has now got to the point where nearly all the products have the same reliability and similar price points. What differentiates the market leaders today are their orchestration capabilities – their answers to intelligently moving media between different repositories, keeping everything in sync across multiple locations and making media available throughout the production and content supply chain. The costs and logistics involved in these processes have, to date, been one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the adoption of cloud-based storage and the reasons why many picture-post clients are either moving out of the cloud or flirting with hybrid approaches instead.
But a couple of storage providers are tantalisingly close to solving these problems – and creating a host of other efficiencies in the process. Thanks to API integrations with workflow and scheduling software, massive inroads are being made into intelligently moving media to the storage appropriate for its stage in production or content delivery without human intervention. Now, camera crews can upload media directly from location into the cloud so that it automatically syncs with the facility and is made available in the appropriate edit bin, and archived footage can be ‘rehydrated’ days in advance of an online edit without prompting. NVMe over RDMA has the potential to deliver what can only be described as insane speeds for sharing projects from disk storage over networks, so what used to be a pipe dream could imminently become an affordable reality. These are just some of the storage developments that we will be exploring further at this year’s NAB show.
“NVMe over RDMA has the potential to deliver what can only be described as insane speeds for sharing projects from disk storage over networks, so what used to be a pipe dream could imminently become an affordable reality.”
At first glance it doesn’t seem like non-linear editing software can get much bigger, faster or better and the assumption might be that we can only expect incremental improvements from ‘the big three’ at NAB 2023 and for the rest of the year. The focus has now moved to enabling fully remote colour grading – currently only achievable by hodgepodging (to use the official technical term) a number of different colour, QC, test and measurement tools together. On that note, there have been some interesting developments in virtualised scopes recently – replacing what has always been a really expensive physical box that sits in your rack or edit suite with a plug-in that can run on a separate system.
Colour grading tools and workflows are also likely to be affected by advances in generative AI capabilities, and we expect to see at least one AI colour finishing tool at NAB. Using AI to set a technical grade would be a time-saving dream come true for most creative colourists, and these tools could potentially improve the quality of quick turnaround glossies without increasing post-production costs. With the ability to apply LUTs already available in some generative AI software, this is almost definitely an area that will see massive developments over the short term.
Generative AI could also be what drives the next step-change in the NLE space. While creative edits are likely to remain in the hands of human editors for the foreseeable future, it will be interesting to see how generative AI tools can be used to post-produce scripted content. With tools like ScriptSync already available, it’s easy to imagine how a script, editors notes and storyboards could be fed into a generative AI application along with the rushes to produce a first pass edit. But this is not something we’re expecting to see at this year’s NAB Show.
“Using AI to set a technical grade would be a time-saving dream come true for most creative colourists, and these tools could potentially improve the quality of quick turnaround glossies without increasing post-production costs.”
With remote audio workflows still in their infancy, we’re only starting to discover the possibilities around taking audio outside of the dubbing suite and virtualising audio workflows in the cloud. And, ironically, one of the biggest things holding audio workflows back at the moment is video – specifically, the ability to remote mix and review with picture in sync. This is currently achieved by cobbling multiple systems together, which can be both technically complicated and costly.
While we can deliver as many as 16 channels of synced audio and video to another site, the solution to multidirectional workflows is still proving elusive. Manufacturers in the outside broadcast, live, studio and post-production spaces are making interesting progress in this space, and we’ll explore how they’re pushing the boundaries of technical capability while maintaining quality and reliability at the 2023 NAB Show.
“While we can deliver as many as 16 channels of synced audio and video to another site, the solution to multidirectional workflows is still proving elusive.”
Whether we’re talking about storage, video or audio technology, one theme is constant throughout – integration. It’s the underlying principle behind every current post-production requirement, and in many cases, the only way to achieve the global workflows we now rely on. The days of going to a trade show and buying one or two boxes to solve your post-production challenges are long gone, now it’s about identifying a host of systems to create your own solution. It’s liberating, but it can also be overwhelming if you don’t have the time to meticulously investigate, research and test what’s available.
That’s why we’re making the Jigsaw24 Media team available at the 2023 NAB Show – to help you navigate the show floor, introduce you to the technologies that you may need but never have heard of, and to provide advice about how to put it all together.
Click here to arrange a meeting with them at the show, or get in touch on 03332 409 210 or by emailing media@Jigsaw24.com. We look forward to seeing you in Vegas!
Mike Fitchie - Head of Technical, M&E Wales
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