Disney Studios collaborated with Avid to transform the offline Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) editorial archive into a real-time editorial library accessible by current productions and marketing teams. The system is a prime example of implementing key elements of the MovieLabs 2030 Vision to deliver an innovative archive experience with a secure, cloud-based search capability that streamlines production and marketing workflows.

The MCU-EL (Marvel Cinematic Universe – Editorial Library) is built on a private cloud available to authorized Marvel Studios users around the globe. The solution customizes and extends existing applications to bring years of editorial footage, representing the vast Marvel Studios cinematic canon, into a searchable library for production users. The new editorial library turns what was a manual, multi-

participant, time-consuming offline search to find reusable assets into a self-service, real-time experience for users with zero manual work by editorial support personnel. It uses custom product extensions to Media Composer and other Avid products developed in a way that allows Avid to productize the solution for the entire industry.

As of this writing, the Marvel Cinematic Universe contains more than 30 different titles, all of which are part of the same universe of characters, themes, locations and materials. Historically, all the material, whether in the final version of the film or not, was sent to archive for potential future use. Editorial and marketing teams working on new titles, tasked with maintaining overall MCU continuity across a growing number of titles, regularly needed to reference or reuse editorial material from previous works.

Getting access to that archived material took up to two weeks, with involvement by production or marketing teams, editorial support teams, archivists and Marvel Studios’ internal Avid engineering support. Even with the process streamlined over time, it still required five working days and involved the production team, one or more editors, a post supervisor and one or two Avid engineers. After each request, all the works were discarded until the next request arrived.

Now a full week of work has been reduced to a self-service capability that is immediately available. Today the system is available to authorized internal teams through a web interface with no down time and no people required to support individual requests.

The MCU-EL:

– Makes all MCU historical materials available for use in new films and shows on a secure, real-time basis.

– Provides robust search and discovery of editorial library assets directly to authorized users looking to reuse archived materials.

– Automates the manual tasks required to source, prepare and deliver the archival assets.

– Maintains continuity and quality of Marvel Studios films by making better use of historical materials.

– Enables a non-proprietary capability that could be used by the whole industry to support franchise,

episodic and other kinds of productions that would benefit from access to reusable libraries.

– Deploys the solution with best-in-class security that meets demanding Marvel Studios standards.

By empowering editors to directly access the MCU-EL, Marvel Studios has sped up new production edits. The system has replaced reliance on group knowledge with a stable searchable solution that provides immediate search results.

The system makes massive volumes of historical material efficiently available to production and marketing teams at Marvel Studios, increasing their ability to maintain quality and continuity across the growing number of MCU titles. Ingesting and tagging a new title takes about one week, and 14 of the 30-plus Marvel Studios titles have been made available in the system so far in under a year of operation.

To build the MCU-EL, the team repurposed or extended existing Avid applications and services, taking advantage of Avid capabilities built for broadcast management of large news libraries. The team worked with Avid to adapt those tools to support the vast volume of clips, subclips and assets available in the MCU archive, as well as the complex web of relationships between them. The MCU-EL system allows people to access every sequence, source clip and subclip in the Marvel Studios archive through a web browser, ingest the material into a central repository, search it remotely, and deliver it back to storage. After finding and selecting media for reuse, an editor simply right-clicks “send to show,” and the media is placed in Media Composer project bins for the identified production.

The generic MCU-EL capability can be deployed to support other franchises and is available today inside Disney for deployment on other Disney franchises, such as Star Wars, etc.

MCU archive materials are stored centrally in an archival Avid Nexis shared storage system. Users browse and find materials using the standard Avid Media Central UI (exposed via a cloud UX interface). Retrieval requests trigger the system to build a remote library with the requested materials. A new capability, called Avid MediaCurrents, manages the transfer of assets and associated metadata from archival storage into the remote library, which then can be managed through Media Central Asset Management or transferred to Media Composer working bins through MediaCurrents. The solution maintains metadata preserving the relationships between source materials and subclips so that only the smaller subclips must be transferred from storage for editor search and discovery.

Avid engineers created the new code required for the solution so that Avid could make the generic capability available to all of its customers in the film and television ecosystem.

2030 Principles

The MCU-EL aligns with the MovieLabs 2030 Vision principles in multiple ways:

Principle 1

The MCU-EL demonstrates the benefits of moving assets from slow physical storage systems (e.g., tape) to rapid access media storage where files can be securely made available to downstream users and processes. This perpetual access to the entire library enables the ongoing curation of the files, rapid access via search and also unlocks new technology such as Artificial Intelligence-based indexing and optimizations of the library which were not easily achieved with offline libraries.

Principle 4

The MCU-EL is a perfect example of the intent of Principle 4 – moving from legacy archiving infrastructure to the power of ‘libraries’ of organized, searchable materials from previous Marvel Studios productions, going back more than ten years. The entire system has transformed Marvel Studios’ highly curated and secure offline repository into a cloud utility with access granted on a per-title basis to users in certain roles.

Principle 8

The system incorporates a metadata structure built on a comprehensive ontology that cross-references and interrelates assets to make them searchable for users in new and powerful ways. Assets are organized, described, and interrelated using the Disney Content Genome ontology, augmented by automated tagging using machine-learning. The system demonstrates the advantages of a creative and robust search capability with a standardized ontology and metadata structure. In addition, the system couples qualitative content data with technical data about asset formats, dates and times of capture, and relationships and linkages between assets, allowing efficient recovery and repurposing of the assets without extensive offline research.

Principle 10

The MCU-EL implements an entirely new self-service, real-time workflow that completely replaces a time-consuming and resource-intensive process that previously required multiple manual iterations to respond to user feedback. This demonstrates the intent behind Principle 10 – that new technologies can modify processes that took weeks and transform them into real-time interactions enabling creatives to make rapid decisions and iterate in real time.