Signiant’s Digital Media Galaxy

It’s been 19 years since the last Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and this year’s NAB was the 19th straight for me. In 1989, I vividly remember being sequestered in a hotel room (sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?) doing non-stop hour after hour demos of the Avid/1 Media Composer with 250:1 compressed images in a 160×90 playback screen and then, after doing demos from 8AM to 8PM, watching “…Last Crusade” on VOD (back then, that would be called Pay-Per-View).

Having just attended my 19th NAB, it is interesting to note how much has changed and how the M&E industry is adopting IT-centric approaches. What were those early Avid systems doing? Replacing 3/4” tape-to-tape cuts-only edit systems for offline editing. The landscape today? A variety of digital nonlinear editing systems (DNLEs), all of which can accomplish finished, uncompressed HD programming (provided the hardware, I/O, etc. can support the data rates).

It was also clear that file-based workflows, integrating with other applications, and digital media distribution are all factors that are entering into the equation of solutions for the M&E industry.

Last week, I participated on a Digital Hollywood Panel, which was titled “Revolutionized Digital Workflow Experience – Understanding How IT, Broadcast and Entertainment Production Merge”. This was moderated by Joel Ordesky, and was an excellent example of the themes that are characterizing the M&E industry. Adoption of file-based workflows, digital media distribution, and how adept organizations must spin up new workflows at a moment’s notice. Further, the interconnections between and among business-related systems will fuel knowledge demand to learn more about web-services implementations and service oriented architectures.

How to accomplish more with less is a resounding business reality. But reality for the M&E industry lies in the hands of the consumer, who is no longer waiting for content to be programmed at a certain time and certain date. The complexity of being able to provide multiple content formats at multiple resolutions, and to do it globally is not trivial. Intelligent systems that programmatically move content through its lifecycle will ultimately change the entire landscape of what we now know as “the edit suite” or the “post production facility” or the “broadcast news operation”.