By Randi Altman

The Hollywood Professional Association held its 2021 HPA Tech Retreat virtually over a two-week period last month. While those of us who usually attend missed being in beautiful Palm Springs and picking fresh grapefruits from the trees (Wait, what? Who would do that?), we found that the HPA’s virtual platform had a lot to offer. In addition to live and prerecorded panels, there were the show’s beloved Breakfast Roundtables, a show floor, private messaging that allowed for those in attendance to have conversations like they might have in person, and much more.

While panel topics were diverse — there were between 130 and 150 of them — it was hard not to walk away from the virtual event without thinking about the cloud … how it allowed for workflows to continue during the pandemic and will do so going forward.

The Tech Retreat closed with a two-day Supersession called The Found Lederhosen. They asked a series of filmmakers across the globe to make a short film under COVID conditions and to document how they did it. According to the HPA, “This not only illustrates a whole set of different workflows for producing with COVID-safe guidelines but also points to how remote collaboration can leave a lasting creative impact.” More on this later from MovieLabs’ Rich Berger.

The Supersession was one of many panels held during the event. One of those was the timely “Remote Post Production For Reality,” in which Key Code Media brought together reality television partners Avid, Adobe and StorageDNA to create its own remote reality post production workflow using remote, automation and creative tools on an actual scene for the upcoming season of Jersey Shore.

“In Reality TV, you face unique challenges with ingest, multicam, mixed file formats/codecs and a massive 700:1 shoot ratio. Now we’re all remote, and it’s not getting any easier. With remote reality TV post, the challenges become even more complex — cloud editing, cloud storage, egress charges, review/approval, and syncing on-prem and remote projects and media files,” explains Jeff Sengpiehl of Key Code Media.

During the panel Adobe previewed unreleased beta features for promo departments, Avid showed off unreleased features in the newly released Avid Symphony, and StorageDNA demo’d a unique workflow wherein editors can edit locally but have all the media synced with all other collaborating editors and the facility in real time. “No VPN. Not cloud editing. We call this CloudHybrid,” adds Sengpiehl.

The Creative Intent panel.Nigel Edwards is top left; Poppy Crum is top right.

One of the event’s audio post-based panels was “Is Creative Intent Wrecking the Intent of the Creative?” Nigel Edwards from The Farm in the UK says, in regards to the panel’s topic, that, “The public is bemused at the sound and vision ‘quality’ of some show, though it’s a creative choice rather than a technical fault.”

According to Edwards, one of the surprises that popped up during the chat was that panelist Poppy Crum, chief scientist at Dolby Laboratories, spoke about age-related hearing loss that starts to set in in early teens. “The masking that happens means dialog intelligibility becomes harder. Therefore, the older the mixer, the clearer the dialog should be, as the mixer will have to work harder to compensate for their own natural hearing loss. This does not appear to happen in the real world.”

One of Edwards’ big takeaways was that technology companies have “a far greater understanding of how we actually see and hear and how the brain interprets that information. Creatives need to learn this rather than working on gut instinct,” he says, adding that if they had had more time, the panel would have covered how monitoring levels affect the final mix balance and the viewers’ enjoyment.

Joaquin Lippincott

Another series of HPA Tech Retreat panels was called “Understanding the Cloud Media Workload.” It was a four-part discussion that gave an overview of cloud media workloads and covered the media supply chain, content creation and content distribution.

According to panelist Philippe Brodeur from Overcast, this conversation was timely because in the media and entertainment industry in 2020, “there is one space for media workloads that has thrived — cloud. The reasons are simple: Cloud supports remote workflows, and whether a production is ultimately successful or not, costs should not be fixed.”

The panel’s moderator, Joaquin Lippincott, CEO/founder at Metal Toad, felt the topic was timely because of the cloud’s “significant impact on the infrastructure used in the media and entertainment industry.”

He says one of the takeaways from the panel was how private businesses are trying to figure out what the cloud means and determine how much they will leverage the public cloud versus how much they are going to do themselves. The risks are significant, he says. Another takeaway was that “business leaders need to understand this rapid transformation calls for agility, flexibility and experimentation to understand what the technology is capable of and to create profitable business solutions. The business model has to adapt, and it’s uncharted territory.”

If they’d had more time, Brodeur says the panel would have talked more about pricing and the composability of cloud. “Pricing is why the cloud is winning.”

If asked to do a similar panel next year on the same topic, he says he would focus on microservices and composability — “why the incumbent software and hardware providers are getting trounced by the new service integrators.”

The “High Resolution and Beyond” session. Dylan Mathis is top right.

On the Sam Nicholson, ASC-moderated panel, called “High Resolution and Beyond,” the discussion revolved around different uses for 8K in Hollywood … and for NASA. Panelist Dylan Mathis from NASA came away from the panel thinking, “Just when you think there are enough pixels, there is a use case for more!”

What would he like to see next year on this panel’s topic? “It’s impressive to me that high-resolution LED panels are used as backgrounds for movies.  More examples of that would be interesting as well as using actual NASA 8K footage in this way.”

MovieLabs was involved in a number of talks during the Retreat. MovieLabs’ CTO Jim Helman presented “Software Defined Workflows,” which continues to expand the conversation around the concepts and components that will enable a completely interoperable cloud-based future as outlined in MovieLabs’ recent whitepaper “The Evolution of Software Defined Workflows.”

Spencer Stephens, MovieLabs’ senior VP of production technology and security, presented “Why Do We Need a Common Security Architecture?” which explains the concepts and architecture of a completely new approach to securing cloud-based assets and workflows.

Finally, Chris Vienneau, MovieLabs’ production technology specialist, gave a sneak peek of the organization’s early thoughts on how to visually depict workflows in “A Visual Language Primer.”

MovieLabs’ Mark Turner during the Supersession, Day 2.

In addition to their presence in other parts of the Retreat, MovieLabs directly partnered with HPA for the Day 2 Supersession “Live from the Cloud – Without a Net.” According to Rich Berger, the Supersession was “an audaciously ambitious live demonstration of a remote, untethered production — shooting a pickup shot where proxies, sound and original high-resolution files were sent wirelessly to the cloud with the expectation that the shot would be cut into a film and a trailer, with new visual effects, new sound effects, conformed, color corrected, mixed and delivered all through multiple cloud tools and providers in less than three hours while the audience watched live.”

Berger says the takeaway from this Supersession was: “For some production tasks, working in the cloud is real and here today. There are many vendors, tools and infrastructure providers that enable meaningful cloud-based capabilities across the entire production lifecycle. It was great to see so much excitement about cloud-enabled workflows. But for us, another key takeaway is to continue focusing on the work that we still need to do to better leverage the full potential of the cloud for production and to help bring the industry together to implement a more interoperable cloud ecosystem as outlined in our 2030 Vision. To fulfill that vision, we must start now.”

If you registered for the event but missed some of the goodness, you can find panels and chats on the HPA site for the next month or two, including the one I moderated for Sony Picture Studios talking about Tiburon VFX pull process. It is important to note that content is available only to registered attendees. Those who haven’t registered can still do so here.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years.