The post-production coordination requirements on a project require a vast amount of resources from VFX, post facilities, servicing vendors and studios. What if there was a method to link all of these respective workflows together resulting in a more efficient and streamlined interchange of materials, thus reducing the overheads associated with the post-production process.
The servicing facilities that service the versioning market often repeat processes already undertaken during post-production in order to create required metadata already in existence and completed by another facility elsewhere within the post pipeline. OpenTimeline in conjunction with existing advanced editorial and VFX sidecar related methodologies allows the binding of this metadata as an organic and ever-evolving component to be considered as a ‘hand-me-down’’ and act as a prerequisite for versioning purposes from a service or archival mezzanine master file format. Such metadata can be filtered to ensure that only the required metadata is utilized by the respective servicing requirement such as Censorship, Timed Text, Graphics Localisation, etc.
The media and entertainment industry is facing a surge in demand for content across a multitude of platforms along with an ever-increasing versioning count. Manufacturers and software publishers are under more pressure to supply swiss-army knife based solutions, yet still, yield to siloed based workflows. In order to guarantee the resource requirements to service the vast amount of content from finishing to versioning, theatrical to downstream, true automated based solutions that crossover to the different markets are needed, yet none really exist.
Leveraging the benefits of the OpenTimelineIO developed by Pixar R&D, one has the means to enable the control and interchange of all production metadata synergizing the VFX, Editorial and Finishing workflows of a show to allow a truly automated based post-production pipeline servicing the creation of downstream mezzanine masters and redefining the media supply chain in the process.