By Karen Moltenbrey

Sometimes innovation occurs as a natural progression; sometimes it results from necessity. When editing facilities went into lockdown due to the pandemic, post companies had to devise a way to continue working, albeit remotely.

Post facility Gorilla TV was in the process of testing remote editing when the virus hit, enabling them to extend their current cloud infrastructure so they could get their editors up and working in a very short period of time. Indeed, timing was everything in this instance.

Producer Kip Kroeger was in a similar situation. He already had some experience with a cloud-based workflow, as the post facility he had worked with in the past had already begun the migration in this direction. By the time the virus hit, he and the facility were well-prepared.

Gorilla

A large post production company based in Wales, Gorilla is a full-service post facility specializing mainly in broadcast media in addition to film work. Established in 1999, the post house occupies five floors at its headquarters in Cardiff Bay, Wales, and is equipped with approximately 100 Avid editing suites, five grading suites, 10 online suites and eight Avid Pro Tools dubbing studios with ADR/VO. There are around 60 staff and a large number of freelance users.

Ken Burnett working from home.

According to principal technologist Ken Burnett, Gorilla Group has been using remote storage on site through its own private cloud and had been examining a more expansive remote workflow for several months as part of a Welsh government incentive program. The outbreak of COVID-19 obviously escalated the process. “This is our own private cloud for our editors and producers who are working with us,” he says.

Fortunately for Gorilla, it had already purchased some of the hardware required to initiate a connection externally into the company’s network, including some Teradici PCoIP remote workstation cards and a Teradici PCoIP Zero Client (a thin client unit into which the screens and peripherals are plugged). Thus, the company was able to expand the remote services within a day — albeit a very long day, says Burnett.

“Everything I could get up and running was done within a day. Every suite that we have running now was ready within a week,” says Burnett, noting that over 60 edit suites are now remotely accessible, although that number was higher a few weeks prior, when some jobs were still active. “I am happy with 60.”

A lot of the infrastructure was already contained within the building, allowing for the quick expansion. “It was just the way we used it and the way we turned it around to work almost as a cloud facility,” says Burnett.

Gorilla’s Rob Evans working remotely

Gorilla is using its Avid Nexis central storage to store all the footage and sound files, and the editors and producers connect to clients attached to that. “They are connecting into systems within our building using Teradici cards that are inside the actual workstations within the building,” Burnett points out. A connection is made automatically via the Internet to the user’s PC on the other end.

Prior to COVID-19, in addition to the linked storage, Gorilla had set up one or two editing systems for remote access as part of a testing process. “To be honest, it was complete R&D at that point. There was no real need for it. It was just something we were looking into and thinking we may use one day,” Burnett says. That day came much sooner than expected.

According to Burnett, the most difficult part of the expansion process was finding PCoIP cards from Teradici or its retailer in the UK. “Not surprising, the second the pandemic hit, everyone suddenly needed them immediately,” he says. Gorilla managed to snag 15 quickly. That may not sound like many, but getting 15 editors up and running outside the building within the first day of the lockdown was a big deal, he notes.

Remote editing setup

“You could see it coming, so the main thing was getting hold of those cards, installing them inside the workstations and then enabling our firewall to receive those external connections,” says Burnett. “Everything else we pretty much had in place.”

Gorilla eventually used two different methods for the remote editing workflow. The main one involved PCoIP, hardware and software installed within the Gorilla facility and accessed by the remote clients using their own hardware. The other is an Avid cloud-based system. “Just before the pandemic hit, we did an entire program for Welsh broadcaster S4C called Maggi Noggi that used Avid Edit on Demand, finishing just as COVID struck,” Burnett notes. “It was crazy.”

For both methods, the workstations and software the editors use — Media Composer, Adobe After Effects, FilmLight Baselight Editions and Boris FX Sapphire — reside in Gorilla’s cloud; the editors themselves remote into the virtual machine and do the entire job from it using a home computer. Gorilla extended this capability to producers, who connect to the system by Windows Remote Desktop or VPN into the building and connect remotely to the systems allocated to them.

Gorilla post suite

According to Burnett, there are a number of productions that want to be in their own building and want two editors on shared storage. By the time the necessary equipment and cabling are installed, the cost to add the two editors is the same as adding 10. “Adding editors is a piece of cake. We can run those jobs literally from our building. ‘Sure, we can bring you two Media Composers. You can remote in,’” he says. “We can ingest any new media that comes in, and we can deal with any backups you might need. If you need us to process clips for viewing, we can do all that because it is all contained within our environment. Whereas if you are doing stand-alone in your own building, you are going to have to deal with all that because we do not have access to your storage or your systems. So, for clients with quick pop-up jobs of six or eight weeks, instead of installing a facility in their building, they can just remote into ours, and off they go.”

The biggest overall hurdle thus far has been bandwidth at the editors’ homes, or the lack thereof, especially when editors VPN into Gorilla’s building. “They may have fantastic bandwidth beforehand, but when they connect to the VPN, all of a sudden it drops significantly.” Moreover, the internet packages people have for their homes don’t necessarily support remote work.

Several projects were in the varying stages of post when the pandemic struck, and all of those were completed on schedule. In addition, Gorilla used the remote workflow for a number of other projects during the lockdown, including the series Our Finest Hours for BBC One/Tomas TV and Ross Kemp: Britain’s Volunteer Army for BBC One/Curve Media.

Our Finest Hours

The facility has also extended its remote workflow to color grading, requiring the streaming of high-quality images. “The technology is often the easy part, but complying with strict production security protocols is another challenge entirely,” says Burnett.

Even though some last-minute projects Gorilla receives are still delivered on tape or even via live line playout, the company has been “digital file-based” for years. And now, with the positive experience of a remote workflow, some of the editors are looking to continue the practice. And that’s OK with Burnett.

“This is going to be another service that we provide. Will it fit every production? Probably not. There are some productions where the producer needs to dive between six or seven suites and talk to all the editors one after the other, and remote workflows are not going to work in those cases. But for others, it’s absolutely brilliant.”

Producer Kip Kroeger

Fifteen years ago, Kip Kroeger landed in LA after he and a friend made a documentary that they subsequently sold to HBO called Ithuteng (Never Stop Learning). At that point, he began working his way up the post ladder, including a stint as a post PA on Scrubs, before producing, which he has done for the past several years now. In fact, it was while working on Scrubs that he first forged a working relationship with Ramy Katrib and the group at DigitalFilm Tree (DFT), with whom he has worked on and off since Scrubs. While Kroeger has worked with a number of other post houses over the years, he has also formed close ties with Level 3 Post, which, like DFT, has embraced a cloud workflow.

Kip Kroeger

One reason Kroeger likes working with DFT is that it enables its clients to work with non-DFT talent for color, mixing and so forth. “We aren’t forced into using a particular shop. And yet we still get to use their cloud setup. For instance, if there’s a colorist I want to use from Level 3, they will work with them. They will get on the phone with them, set up a workflow and be off to the races,” he explains.

It was about two years ago, while working on the show Whiskey Cavalier with DFT, that Kroeger first began using a cloud workflow. The series, which debuted in late February 2019, was filled with exotic locales. In fact, most of the series was filmed in Prague, which often doubled for other international locations.

The production initially used a dailies house in Prague, which subsequently shipped the files to DFT. Then DFT began experimenting with remote dailies, introducing Kroeger and the group to this setup. DFT, meanwhile, took the workflow a step further and built its own cloud, deploying cloud-connected remote dailies as well as color, VFX and editorial post systems around the globe. “That eradicated the need for promo pulls and pulls for visual effects,” he says. “We went from a lot of back and forth sitting in bays to suddenly the vendors having secure, controlled, yet full access to the files they need. It made our life of posting much easier. It reduced the amount of time we spend in the bays. It also saved us money.”

DigitalFilm Tree’s CTO/senior colorist Thomas Galyon

Alas, Whiskey Cavalier was cancelled after the first season, and Kroeger moved on, but he is back working with DFT on the dailies for the series Ted Lasso. It’s a new show debuting next month on Apple TV+ about a US American football coach who heads to the UK to manage a struggling soccer team. The series is mainly shot in London, and the dailies are handled using DFT’s cloud setup. It stars Jason Sudeikis.

When the pandemic hit, Kroeger’s team was relatively set up for the migration. “All our information existed in the cloud — all the full-res footage. And the vendors had access to it already,” he says. “We didn’t really miss a beat.” The really big change entailed setting up the Ted Lasso editors in their homes. “They send the shots to us to review at home, and we give notes, as opposed to sitting in a bay with them,” says Kroeger.

In fact, spending less time in the editing bays is something Kroeger and his team don’t necessarily miss. “When I was a post supervisor, that was incessant and tedious. You would have to go in with a long list of visual effects and would have to pull all those shots and send them off,” he says. “Then, you’d be two frames short on something and would have to repull those and do it all again. You’re spending hours doing this stuff that’s gone completely now, which has been beautiful. No doubt, one of the biggest advantages [to the cloud workflow] has been time savings. We are now able to use the extra time to focus and deal with many of the other issues that come up in post.”

Kroeger recalls that on Whiskey Cavalier, he used two major VFX houses, and the switch from one to the other was seamless once the cloud setup was instituted. In one instance, the group needed one of the vendors to step in and take over an episode intended for the other company, and it was able to access the files without missing a beat.

Ted Lasso

As Kroeger notes, using the cloud setup has greatly simplified things, negating the need for “that extra running around.” For Ted Lasso, the production office is set up in London, and the dailies are pulled from there to the cloud for whoever needs them, and it is done immediately. The cloud eliminates the need to deliver cards to a post house during the lunch break and at the end of the day – one more thing production would have to work into the schedule. In this cloud setup, the cards were dropped off at the production office, making it more efficient for production and resulted in getting dailies into post more quickly.

As Kroeger points out, more and more is being expected from post production to get shows done. But teams are not getting any bigger. “So any way we can find to streamline or automate or simplify the mundane tasks frees us up and allows us to focus on the creative stuff and on the head-scratching problems so we can do our jobs better,” he states.

Main Image: Maggi Noggi

Karen Moltenbrey is a veteran writer covering visual effects and post production.