The Future of Production Amplified: Defining a New Production Ecosystem with MovieLabs

As part of our series, “The Future of Production Amplified,” NAB Amplify content partner Jennifer Wolfe chats with Mark Turner, Program Director of Production Technology at MovieLabs, about the MovieLabs 2030 Vision Initiative and what it means for the future of motion picture production.

Turner believes that the current production ecosystem is plagued by inefficiencies, with one of the biggest being the constant movement of media. “I don’t think that’s a revelation,” he says. “We move media way too much. We’ll often move media to applications or to people who have to do a task, and that takes time. It introduces the chance of loss of media, loss of metadata. There’s certainly a risk of security breaches.”

Understanding that cloud-based media is more than storing massive video and audio files is another key point Turner makes. “But actually it’s all parts of the production,” he explains. “It isn’t just the big video files; it’s the script, it’s the metadata that’s attached to every shot. It’s editing, it’s post-production workflows, it’s subbing and dubbing. All of those things need to happen in the cloud if we are going to remove this inefficiency that we have today,” he says.

“And if we can’t make this process more efficient, we will never be able to scale the amount of productions that we can cope with. There’s simply no way to keep doing it with the old hundred-year method that we’ve been using since we started with cinema and shipping film around the place.”

In Part 1 of this exclusive Q&A, Turner provides an overview of the MovieLabs 2030 Vision initiative and explains why he prefers the term “multi-cloud production” to describe our current ecosystem, which often employs multiple cloud platforms — public and private — for a single project. He also discusses why the movement of media assets is one of the biggest problems he’s seeing with current production workflows, and how Marvel Studios developed the script for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in the cloud using the ProductionPro SaaS platform to centralize and coordinate assets across multiple production departments.

Watch Part 1 below:

In Part 2, Turner tackles security, explaining why it’s such a massive challenge for studios and the larger production ecosystem, and how it forms a foundational part of the 2030 Vision. He also talks about the need for security to “step out of the way” so assets an be shared among vendors, and outlines the Common Security Architecture for Production, or CSAP, which uses a “Zero Trust” approach to managing assets and workflows.

Watch Part 2 below:

In Part 3, Turner dives into software-defined workflows, which enable flexible, dynamic workflows that embrace change and can be modified mid-stream to make productions dramatically more efficient. “Right now, any change in a workflow is highly disruptive,” he says. “We want workflows to be able to adapt in real time, and that does open up some new challenges, but a huge amount of opportunity.” He also discusses how Skywalker Sound’s Coda platform leverages the cloud to automate soundtrack mastering, breaking down multiple processes into “microservices” to output deliverables in minutes rather than days.

Watch Part 3 below:

Connect with Mark Turner on LinkedIn, and learn more about the MovieLabs 2030 Vision initiative at movielabs.com. You can also follow MovieLabs on LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.