Broadband Networks As Production Tools For Audiovisual Media

Peter Krieg
The production process of motion pictures (and in many ways also of TV programs) since the beginnings of this industry has been organized in a peculiar way: Apart from the major studios which employed large constant teams, most collaborators in a film project came together just for the realisation of this project and dispersed afterwards. This structure has kept the film industry very flexible, but has also contributed to the rise of but a few true movie production sites like Hollywood, where talent and craft could find enough jobs over time to be able to settle there permanently. In many ways, this form of organisation today strongly reminds us of the "virtual corporation" that is rapidly becoming the business model of the future infobahn - economy. When such diverse talents and crafts as in a motion picture production come together for such a relatively short period of time, communication is probably the major task in the process of transforming this diverse group into a critical mass of creativity... It is for this reason that modern communication technologies have always been adapted quickly in film production. Therfore it is no surprise that broadband communication networks are rapidly being used in this field. Let me describe shortly some of the actual and anticipated uses:

1 Image transport


In Germany, TV stations and post production facilities have already experimented with an experimental broadband optical fibre network called VBN - "Vermitteltes Breitband Netz" or Operator assisted broadband network. Because of high costs is use was limited and this limited use in turn did not cover the cost - so German Telekom recently ended the experiment. Currently, ATM trials are being set up to transport video sequences between TV stations and production facilities.

2 Video document sharing


This application will in future be one of the most attractive in media production. It will allow several people in different places to work cooperatively on a common video or sound sequence. This is especially important for a director working with his editor, or a special effect designer cooperating with the camera crew involved in live action shooting. When Steven Spielberg shot "Schindler's List" in Poland, he spend some of his evenings to work with the L.A. editor of "Jurassic Park" on the editing of this film. To achieve this, the video sequences where transmitted over satellite and cable so Spielberg and his editor could speak to each other and both view the same sequences simultaneously on their screens. With ATM becoming a standard and affordable network, such cooperations will become daily business in production and post production.

3 Rendering over networks


Rendering is the computing process that turns 3D animation models into more or less realistic images. This process involves very computer intensive techniques like ray tracing, shading as well as the computation of movements, surfaces, textures and high resolution objects. With the advent of new 3D hardware and software that will soon turn even an average PC into a graphics workstation, and the rising demand for high qualitiy, photo-realistic synthetic images, rendering will become a very popular high performance computer application. Broadband networks will allow to return rendered images over the net in near real time.

4 Virtual studio


A virtual studio is currently being defined mostly as a blue box set with various backgrounds coming off a real time 3D animation computer. But a virtual studio can also be defined as an array of different devices in different locations linked together via broadband networks. Such a studio could be configurated for special jobs or to combine the best offers for a specific task. The virtual studio sites of the network-future will be located at sites with high investment incentives and low labor costs. They will be strictly infrastructure service providers offering hardware and software access to highly specialised providers of creative services and content producers. In this network-oriented business model the heavy-duty infrastructure is separated from the application. A new type of infrastructure facilities like the High Tech Center Babelsberg are currently developed along this strategy.

5 Bottlenecks


In order to realise the potential of broadband networks for media production some currently existing bottlenecks have to be opened. These are technical and economical. On the technical side one of the major obstacles is the lack of lossless compression techniques. For many applications, i.e. the transfer of 3 D animation, lossless compression is necessary because the images often have to be combined with other computer images and full transparency of the data structure may be involved. Also in the area of production data losses are to be avoided in general - a rule that does not necessarily apply to distribution. Another bottleneck is cost. Today the transfer of a 300 GB D1 data cartridge from London to LA by courier service takes about 16 hours, representing a data rate of 5 KB /sec. Send two cartridges and you double that rate at a very low price of less than US$ 100 for the total package... To compete here the price for ATM transfers has to be reduced drastically from today's anticipated price structures. The telcos base their pricing on the cost of a normal voice call - and if a broadband line can carry the equivalent of 1000 voice calls, they consider the coast of 1000 voice calls as a justified. This philosophy is probably the single most important hindrance for future broadband applications - but hopefully with the end of the telecom monopolies it will give way to a different and more realistic approach.

6 Conclusion


The availability of affordable broadband networks will change not only the way media are distributed and used, they will probably first of all change the ways in which they are being produced. Professional network service providers will offer easy to use frontends and will automatically route the user to the studios and devices that are most effective and economical for his task. We can expect media production and post production to develop radically new business and operational models: Affordable low-end workstation and portable devices (by then more powerful than today's high end work stations, of course) will be used to do the major part of the creative process - be it script visualisation, editing, 3D and 2D animation, interactive authoring or sound design, while high end mastering and high performance audiovisual computer centers will be accessed over the networks to finish the job in every quality, resolution and format desired. Broadband networks will thus become major tools of tomorrow's media production process - a development that most likely will preceed the public and consumer oriented applications like interactive TV or Video-on-demand.