In this final part of our blog series on the current gaps between where are now and realizing the 2030 Vision, we’ll address the last two sections of the original whitepaper and look specifically at gaps around, Security and Identity, and Software-Defined Workflows. As with previous blogs in this series (see Parts 1 and 2) we’ll include both the gap as we see it, an example as it applies in a real workflow, and the broader implications of the gap.

So let’s get started with…

19. Inconsistent and inefficient management of identity and access policies across the industry and between organizations.

    Example: A producer wants to invite two studio executives, a director and an editor, into a production cloud service but the team has 3 different identity management systems. There’s no common way to identify the correct people to provide access to critical files or to provision that access.

    This is an issue addressed in the original 2030 Vision, which called for a common industry-wide Production User ID (or PUID) to identify individuals who will be working on a production. While there are ways today to stitch together different identify management and access control solutions between different organizations, they are point to point, require considerable software or configuration expertise, and are not “plug and play.”

20. Difficulty in securing shared multi-cloud workflows and infrastructure.

    Example: A production includes assets spread across a dozen different cloud infrastructures, each of which is under control of a different organization, and yet all need a consistent and studio-approved level of security.

    MovieLabs believes the current ”perimeter” security model is not sufficient to cope with the complex multi-organizational, multi-infrastructure systems that will be commonplace in the 2030 Vision. Instead, we believe the industry needs to pivot to a more modern ”zero-trust” approach to security, where the stance changes from ”try to prevent intruders” to every access to an asset or service is authenticated and checked for authorization. To that end, we’ve developed the Common Security Architecture for Production which is based on a Zero Trust Foundation, take a look at this blog to learn more.

21. Reliance on file paths/locations instead of identifiers.

    Example: A vendor requires a number of assets to do their work (e.g., a list of VFX plates to pull or a list of clips) that today tend to be copied as a file tree structure or zipped together to be shared along with a manifest of the files.

    In a world where multiple applications, users and organizations can be simultaneously pulling on assets, it becomes challenging for applications to rely on file names, locations, and hierarchies. MovieLabs instead is recommending unique identifiers for all assets that can be resolved via a service to specify where a specific file is actually stored. This intermediate step provides an abstraction layer and allows all applications to be able to find and access all assets. For more information, see Through the Looking Glass.

22. Reliance on email for notifications and manual processing of workflow tasks.

    Example: A vendor is required to do a task on a video asset and is sent an email, a PDF attachment containing a work order, a link to a proxy video file for the work to be done, and a separate link to a cloud location where the RAW files are. It takes several hours/days for the vendor to extract the required work, download, QC, and store the media assets, and then assign the task on an internal platform to someone who can do the work. The entire process is reversed to send the completed work back to the production/studio.

    By having non-common systems to send workflow requests, asset references and assign work to individual people, we have created an inherently inefficient industry. In the scenario above, a more efficient system would be for the end user to receive an automated notification from a production management system that includes a definition of the task to be done and links to the cloud location of the proxies and RAW files, with all access permissions already assigned so they can start their work. Of course, our industry is uniquely distributed between organizations that handle very nuanced tasks in the completion of a professional media project. This complicates the flow of work and work orders, but there are new software systems that can enable seamless, secure, and automated generation of tasks. We can strip weeks out of major production schedules simply by being more efficient in handoffs between departments, vendors and systems.

23. Monolithic systems and the lack of API-first solutions inhibit our progress towards interoperable modern application stacks.

    Example: A studio would like to migrate their asset management and creative applications to a cloud workflow that includes workflow automation, but the legacy nature of their software means that many tasks need to be done through a GUI and that it needs to be hosted on servers and virtual machines that mimic the 24/7 nature of their on-premises hardware.

    Modern applications are designed as a series of micro-services which are assembled and called dynamically depending on the process, which enables considerable scaling and also lighter weight applications that can deploy on a range of compute instances (e.g., on workstations, virtual machines or even behind browsers). While the pandemic proved we can have creative tasks running remotely or from the cloud a lot of those processes were ”brute forced” with remote access or cloud VMs running legacy software and are not the intended end goal of a ”cloud native” software stack for media and entertainment. We recognize this is an enormous gap to fix and will take beyond the 2030 timeframe to move all of the most vital applications/services to modern software platforms. However we need the next-generation of software systems to enable open APIs and deploy in modern containers to accelerate the interoperable and dynamic future that is possible within the 2030 Vision.

24. Many workflows include unnecessarily time consuming and manual steps.

    Example: A director can’t remotely view a final color session in real time from her location, so she needs to wait for a full render of the sequence, for it to be uploaded to a file share, for an email with the link to be sent, and then for her to download it and find a monitor that matches the one that was used for the grade.

    We could write so many examples here. There’s just way too little automation and way too much time wasted in resolving confusions, writing metadata, reading it back, clarifying intent, sending emails, making calls etc. Many of the technologies exist to fix these issues, but we need to redevelop many of our control plane functions to adopt to a more efficient system which requires investment in time, staff, and development. But those that do the work will come out leaner, faster and more competitive at the end of the process. We recommend that all participants in the ecosystem take honest internal efficiency audits to look for opportunities to improve and prioritize the most urgent issues to fix.

Phew!  So, there we have it. For anyone that believes the 2030 Vision is “doable” today, there are 24 reasons why MovieLabs disagrees. Don’t consider this post a negative, we still have time to resolve these issues, and it’s worth being honest about the great progress completed but also what’s still to do.

Of course, there’s no point making a list of things to do without a meaningful commitment to cross them off. MovieLabs and the studios can’t do this alone, so we’re laying down the gauntlet to the industry – help us, to help us all. MovieLabs will be working to close those gaps that we can affect, and we’ll be publishing our progress on this blog and on LinkedIn. We’re asking you to do the same – share what your organization is doing with us by contacting info@movielabs.com and use #2030Vision in your posts.

There are three specific calls to action from this blog for everyone in the technical community:

1. The implementation gaps listed in all parts of this blog are the easiest to close – the industry has a solution we just need the commitment and investment to implement and adopt what we already have. These are ones we can rally around now, and MovieLabs has already created useful technologies like the Common Security Architecture for Production, the Ontology for Media Creation, and the Visual Language.
2. For those technical gaps where the industry needs to design new solutions, sometimes individual companies can pick these ideas up and run with them, develop their own products, and have some confidence that if when they build them customers will come. Some technical gaps can only be closed by industry players coming together, with appropriate collaboration models, to create solutions that enable change, competition, and innovation. There are existing forums to do that work including SMPTE and the Academy Software Foundation, and MovieLabs hosts working groups as well.
3. And though not many issues are in the Change Management category right now, we still need to work together to share and educate how these technologies can be combined to make the creative world more efficient.

We’re more than 3 years into our Odyssey towards 2030. Join us as we battle through the monsters of apathy, slay the cyclops of single mindedness, and emerge victorious in the calm and efficient seas of ProductionLandia. We look forward to the journey where heroes will be made.

-Mark “Odysseus” Turner

In Part 1 of this blog series we looked at the Gaps in Interoperability, Operational Support and Change Management that are impeding our journey to the 2030 Vision’s destination (the mythical place we call “ProductionLandia”). In these latter parts we’ll examine the gaps we have identified that are specific to each of the Principles of the 2030 Vision. For ease of reference, the Gaps below are numbered starting from 9 (because we had 1-8 in Part 1 of the blog). For each Gap we list the Principle, a workflow example of the problem, and the implications for the Gap.

In this post we’ll look just at the gaps around the first 5 Principles of the 2030 Vision which address a new cloud foundation.

9. Limitations of sufficient bandwidth and performance, plus auto recovery from variability in cloud connectivity.

   Example: Major productions can generate terabytes of captured data per day during production and getting it to the cloud to be processed is the first step.

   Even though there are studio and post facilities with large internet connections, there are still many more locations, especially remote or overseas ones, where the bandwidth is not large enough, the throughput not guaranteed or predictable enough, such as to hobble cloud-based productions at the outset. Some of the benefits in cloud-based production involve the rapid access for teams to manipulate assets as soon as they are created and for that we need big pipes into the cloud(s), that are both reliable and self-healing. Automatic management of those links and data transfers is vital as they will be used for all media storage and processing.

10. Lack of universal direct camera, audio, and on-set data straight to the cloud.

    Example: Some new cameras are now supporting automated upload of proxies or even RAW material direct to cloud buckets. But for the 2030 Vision to be realized we need a consistent, multi-device on-set environment to be able to upload all capture data in parallel to the cloud(s) including all cameras, both new and legacy.

    We’re seeing great momentum with camera to cloud in certain use cases (with limited support from newer camera models) sending files to specific cloud platforms or SaaS environments. But we’ve got some way to go before it’s as simple and easy to deploy a camera-to-cloud environment as is it to rent cameras, memory cards/hard drives, and a DIT cart today. We also need support for multiple clouds (including private clouds) and or SaaS platforms so that the choice of camera-to-cloud environment is not a deciding factor that locks downstream services into a specific infrastructure choice. We’ve also included in the gap that it’s not just ”camera to cloud” but “capture to cloud” that we need, which includes on-set audio and other data streams that may be relevant to later production stages including lighting, lenses, and IOT devices. All of that needs to be securely and reliably delivered to redundant cloud locations before physical media storage on set can be wiped.

11. Latency between “single source of truth in cloud” and multiple edge-based users.

    Example: A show is shooting in Eastern Europe, posting in New York, with producers in LA and VFX companies in India. Which cloud region should they store the media assets in?

    As an industry we tend to talk about “the cloud” as a singular thing or place, but in reality of course it is not – it’s made up of private data centers, and various data centers which hyperscale cloud providers tend to arrange into different “availability zones” or “regions” which must be declared when storing media. As media production is a global business the example above is very real, it leads to the question – where should we store the media and when should we duplicate it for performance and/or resiliency? This is also one of the reasons why we believe multi-cloud systems need to be supported because it’s also possible that the assets for a production are scattered across different availability zones, cloud accounts (depending on which vendor has “edit rights” on the assets at any one time), and cloud providers (public, private and hybrid infrastructures). The gap here is that currently decisions need to be made, potentially involving IT systems teams and custom software integrations, about where to store assets to ensure they are available, at very low latency (sub 25 milliseconds round trip – see Is the Cloud Ready to Support Millions of Remote Creative Workers? for more details) for the creative users who need to get to them. By 2030 we’d expect some “intelligent caching’” systems or other technologies that would understand, or even predict, where certain assets need to be for users and stage them close enough for usage before they are needed. This is one of the reasons why we reiterate that we expect, and encourage, media assets to be distributed across cloud service providers and regions and merely ”act” as a single storage entity even though they may be quite disparate. This is also implies that applications need to be able to operate across all cloud providers because they may not be able to predict or control where assets are in the cloud.

12. Lack of visibility of the most efficient resource utilization within the cloud , especially before the resources are committed.

    Example: When a production today wants to rent an editorial system, it can accurately predict the cost, and map it straight to their budget. But with the cloud equivalent it’s very hard to get an upfront budget because the costs for cloud resources rely on predicting usage, which is hard to know including hours of usage, amount of storage required, data egress, etc.

    Creative teams take on a lot when committing to a show, usually with a fixed budget and timeline. It’s hard to ask them to commit to unknown costs, especially for variables which are hard to control at the outset – could you predict how many takes for a specific scene? How many times a file will be accessed or downloaded? Or how many times a database queried? Even if they could accurately predict usage, most cloud billing is done in arrears, and therefore the costs are not usually known until after the fact, and consequently it’s easy to overrun costs and budgets without even knowing it.

    Similarly, creative teams would also benefit from greater education and transparency concerning the most efficient ways to use cloud products. Efficient usage will decrease costs and enhance output and long-term usage.

    For cloud computing systems to become as ubiquitous as the physical equivalent, providers need to find ways to match the predictability and efficient use of current on-premises hardware, but with the flexibility to burst and stretch when required and authorized to do so.

13. Too few cloud-aware/cloud-native apps, which necessitates a continued reliance on moving files (into clouds, between regions, between clouds, out of clouds).

    Example: An editor wants to use a cloud SaaS platform for cutting their next show, but the assets are stored in another cloud, the dailies system providing reference clips is on a third, and the other post vendors are using a private cloud.

    We’re making great progress with getting individual applications and processes to move to the cloud but we’re in a classic ”halfway” stage where it’s potentially more expensive and time consuming to have some applications/assets operating in the cloud and some not. That requires moving assets into and out of a specific cloud to take advantage of its capabilities and if certain applications or processes are available only in one cloud then moving those assets specifically to that cloud, which is the the sort of “assets chasing tasks” from the offline world that this principle was designed to avoid in the cloud world. We need to keep pushing forward with modern applications that are multi-cloud native and can migrate seamlessly between clouds to support assets stored in multiple locations. We understand this is not a small task or one that will be quick to resolve. In addition, many creative artists used Mac OS and that is not broadly available in cloud instances and in a way that can be virtualized to run on myriad cloud compute types.

14. Audio post-production workflows (e.g., mixing, editing) are not natively running in the cloud.

    Example: A mixer wants to remotely work on a mix with 9.1.6 surround sound channels that are all stored in the cloud. However most cloud based apps only support 5.1 today, and the audio and video channels are streamed separately so the sync between the audio and the video can be “soft” in a way that it can be hard to know if the audio is truly playing back in sync.

    The industry has made great strides in developing technologies to enable final color (up to 12 bit) to be graded in the cloud, but now similar attention needs to be paid to the audio side of the workflows. Audio artists can be dealing with thousands, or even tens of thousands of small files and they have unique challenges which need to be resolved to enable all production tasks to be completed in the cloud without downloading assets to work remotely. The audio/video sync and channel count challenges above are just illustrative of the clear need for investment and support of both audio and video cloud workflows simultaneously to get to our “ProductionLandia” where both can be happening concurrently on the same cloud asset pool.

15. Lack of communication between cross-organizational systems (AKA “too many silos”) and inability to support cross-organizational workflows and access.

    Example: A director uses a cloud-based review and approval system to provide notes and feedback on sequences, but today that system is not connected to the workflow management tools used by her editorial department and VFX vendors, so the notes need to be manually translated into work orders and media packages.

    As discussed above we’re in a transition phase to the cloud, and as such we have some systems that may be able to receive communication (messages, security permission requests) and commands (API calls), whereas other systems are unaware of modern application and control plane systems. Until we have standard systems for communicating (both routing and common payloads for messages and notifications) and a way for applications to interoperate between systems controlling different parts of the workflow, then we’ll have ongoing issues with cross-organizational inefficiencies. See the MovieLabs Interoperability Paper for much more on how to enable cross-torganizational interop.

16. No common way to describe each studio’s archival policy for managing long term assets.

    Example: Storage service companies and MAM vendors need to customize their products to adapt to each different content owner’s respective policies and rules for how archival assets are selected and should be preserved.

    The selection of which assets need to be archived and the level of security robustness, access controls, and resilience are all determined by studio archivists depending on the type of asset. As we look to the future of archives we see a role for a common and agreed way of describing those policies so any software storage system, asset management or automation platform could read the policies and report compliance against them. Doing so will simplify the onboarding of new systems with confidence.

17. Challenges of measuring fixity across storage infrastructures.

    Example: Each studio runs a checksum against an asset before uploading it to long term storage. Even though storage services and systems run their own checks for fixity those checksums or other mechanisms are likely different than the studios’ and not exposed to end clients. So instead, the studio needs to run their own checks for digital degradation by occasionally pulling that file back out of storage and re-running the fixity check.

    As there’s no commonality between fixity systems used in major public clouds, private clouds, and storage systems, the burden of checking that a file is still bit-perfect falls on the customer to incur the time, cost, and inconvenience of pulling the file out of storage, rehashing it, and comparing to the original recorded hash. This process is an impediment to public cloud storage and the efficiencies it offers for the (very) long term storage it offers for archival assets.

18. Proprietary formats need to be archived for many essence and metadata file types.

    Example: A studio would like to maintain original camera files (OCF) in perpetuity as the original photography captured on set, but the camera file format is proprietary, and tools may not be available in 10, 20, or 100 years’ time. The studio needs to decide if it should store the assets anyway or transcode them to another format for the archive.

    The myriad of proprietary files and formats in our industry contain critical information for applications to preserve creative intent, history, or provenance, but that proprietary data becomes a problem if it is necessary to open the file in years or decades, perhaps after the software is not even available. We have a few current and emerging examples in some areas of public specifications and standards, and open source software that can enable perpetual access, but the industry has been slow to appreciate the legacy challenges in preserving access to this critical data in the archive.

In the final part of this blog series, we’ll address the gaps remaining within the Principles covering Security and Identity and Software-Defined Workflows… Stay Tuned…

It’s mid-2023, we’re about 4 years into our odyssey towards “ProductionLandia” – an aspirational place where video creation workflows are interoperable, efficient, secure-by-nature and seamlessly extensible. It’s the destination. The 2030 Vision is our roadmap to get there. Each year at MovieLabs we check the industry’s progress towards this goal, adjusting focus areas, and generally providing navigation services to ensure we’re all going to arrive in port in ProductionLandia at the same time and with a suite of tools, services and vendors that work seamlessly together. As part of that process, we take a critical look at where we are collectively as an M&E ecosystem – and what work still needs to be done – we call this “Gap Analysis”.

Before we leap into the recent successes and the remaining gaps, let’s not bury the lead – while there has been tremendous progress, we have not yet achieved the 2030 Vision (that’s not negative, we have a lot of work to do and it’s a long process). So, despite some bold marketing claims from some industry players, there’s a lot more in the original 2030 Vision white paper than lifting and shifting some creative processes to the cloud, the occasional use of virtual machines for a task or a couple of applications seamlessly passing a workflow process between each other. The 2030 Vision describes a paradigm shift that starts with a secure cloud foundation, and also reinvents our workflows to be composable and more flexible, removing the inefficiencies of the past, and includes the change management that is necessary to give our creative colleagues the opportunity to try, practice and trust using these new technologies on their productions. The 2030 Vision requires an evolution in the industry’s approach to infrastructure, security, applications, services and collaboration and that was always going to be a big challenge. There’s still much to be done to achieve dynamic and interoperable software-defined workflows built with cloud-native applications and services that securely span multi-cloud infrastructures.

Status Check

But even though we are not there yet, we’re actually making amazing progress based on where we started (albeit with a global pandemic to give a kick of urgency to our journey!). So many major companies including cloud services companies, creative application tool companies, creative service vendors and other industry organizations have now backed the 2030 Vision; it is no longer just the strategy of the major Hollywood studios but has truly become the industry’s “Vision.” The momentum is truly behind the vision now, and it’s building – as is evident in the 2030 Showcase program that we launched in 2022 to highlight and share 10 great case studies where companies large and small are demonstrating Principles of the Vision that are delivering value today.

We’ve also seen the industry respond to our previous blogs on gaps including what was missing around remote desktops for creative applications, software-defined workflows  and cloud infrastructures. We can now see great progress with camera to cloud capture, automated VFX turnovers, final color pipelines now technically possible in the cloud, amazing progress on real-time rendering and iteration via virtual production, creative collaboration tools and more applications opening their APIs to enable new and unpredictable innovation.

Mind the Gaps

So, in this two-part Blog, let’s look at what’s still missing. Where should the industry now focus its attention to keep us moving and accelerate innovation and the collective benefits of a more efficient content creation ecosystem? We refer to these challenges as “gaps” between where we are today and where we need to be in “ProductionLandia.” When we succeed in delivering the 2030 Vision, we’ll have closed all of these gaps. As we analyze where we are in 2023 we see these gaps falling into the 3 key categories from the original vision (Cloud Foundations, Security and Identity, Software-Defined Workflows), plus 3 underlying ones that bind them altogether:

In this Part 1 of the Blog we’ll look at the gaps related to these areas. In Part 2 we’ll look at the gaps we view as most critical for achieving each of the principles of the vision, but let’s start with those binding challenges that link them all.

It’s worth noting that some gaps involve fundamental technologies (a solution doesn’t exist or a new standard, or open source project is required) some are implementation focused (e.g., technology exists but needs to be implemented/adopted by multiple companies across the industry to be effective – our cloud security model CSAP  is an example here where a solution is now ready to be implemented) and some are change management gaps (e.g., we have a viable solution that is implemented but we need training and support to effect the change). We’ve steered clear of gaps that are purely economic in nature as MovieLabs does not get involved in those areas. It’s probably also worth noting that some of these gaps and solutions are highly related, so we need to close some to support closing others.

Interoperability Gaps

1. Handoffs between tasks, teams and organizations still require large scale exports/imports of essence and metadata files, often via an intermediary format. Example: Generation of proxy video files for review/approval of specific editorial sequences. These handovers are often manual, introducing the potential for errors, omissions of key files, security vulnerabilities and delays. See note¹.
2. We still have too many custom point-to-point implementations rather than off-the-shelf integrations that can be simply configured and deployed with ease. Example: An Asset Management System currently requires many custom integrations throughout the workflow, which makes changing it out for an alternative a huge migration project. Customization of software solutions adds complexity and delay and makes interoperability considerably harder to create and maintain.
3. Lack of open, interoperable formats and data models. Example: Many applications create and manage their own sequence timeline for tracking edits and adjustments instead of rallying around open equivalents like OpenTimelineIO for interchange. For many use cases, closing this gap requires the development of new formats, data models, and their implementation.”.
4. Lack of standard interfaces for workflow control and automation. Example: A workflow management software cannot easily automate multiple tasks in a workflow by initiating applications or specific microservices and orchestrate their outputs to form an output for a new process. Although we have automation systems in some parts of the workflow the lack of standard interfaces again means that implementors frequently have to write custom connectors to get applications and processes to talk to each other.
5. Failure to maintain metadata and a lack of common metadata exchange across components of the larger workflow. Example: Passing camera and lens metadata from on-set to post-production systems for use in VFX workflows. Where no common metadata standards exist, or have not been implemented, systems rarely pass on data they do not need for their specific task as they have no obligation to do so, or don’t know which target system may need it. A more holistic system design however would enable non-adjacent systems to be able to find and retrieve metadata and essence from upstream processes and to expose data to downstream processes, even if they do not know what it may be needed for.

Operational Support

6. Our workflows, implementations and infrastructures are complex and typically cross between boundaries of any one organization, system or platform. Example: A studio shares both essence and metadata with external vendors to host on their own infrastructure tenants but also less structured elements such as work orders (definitions of tasks), context, permissions and privileges with their vendors. Therefore, there is a need for systems integrators and implementors to take the component pieces of a workflow and to design, configure, host, and extend them into complete ecosystems. These cloud-based and modern software components will be very familiar to IT systems integrators, but they need the skills and understanding in our media pipelines to know how to implement and monetize them in a way which will work in our industry. We therefore have a mismatch gap between those that understand cloud-based IT infrastructures and software, and those that understand the complex media assets and processes that need to operate on those infrastructures. There are few companies to chose from that have the correct mixture of skills to understand both cloud and software systems as well as media workflow systems, and we’ll need a lot more of them to support the industry wide migration.
7. We also need systems that match our current support models. Example: A major movie production can be simultaneously operating across multiple countries and time zones in various states of production and any down system can cause backlogs in the smooth operations. The media industry can work some unusual and long hours, at strange times of the day and across the world – demanding a support environment that can support it with specialists that understand the challenges of media workflows and not just open an IT ticket that will be resolved when the weekday support comes in at 9am on Monday. In the new 2030 world, these problems are compounded by the shared nature of the systems – so it may be hard for a studio or production to understand which vendor is responsible if (when) there are workflow problems – who do you call when applications and assets seamlessly span infrastructures? How do you diagnose problems?

Change Management

8. Too few creatives have tried and successfully deployed new ‘2030 workflows’ to be able to share and train others. Example: Parts of the workflow like Dailies have migrated successfully to the cloud, but we’re yet to see a major production running from ”camera to master” in the cloud – who will be the first to try it? Change Management comprises many steps before new processes are considered “just the way we do things.” There are many steps but the main ones we need to get through are:
   • Educating and socializing the various stakeholders about the benefits of the 2030 vision, for their specific areas of interest
   • Involving creatives early in the process of developing new 2030 workflows
   • Then demonstrating value of new 2030 workflows to creatives with tests, PoCs, limited trials and full productions
   • Measuring cost/time savings and documenting them
   • Sharing learnings with others across the industry to build confidence.

Shortly, we’ll add a Part II to this blog which will add to the list of gaps with those that are most applicable to each of the 10 Principles of the Vision. In the meantime, there’re eight gaps here which the industry can start thinking about, and do please let us know if you think you already have solutions to these challenges!

[1] The Ontology for Media Creation (OMC) can assist in common payloads for some of these files/systems.