Slides for my talk about automation in post-production of entertainment television, the though behind the steps and examples from our Telestream Vantage experience.

1. Automation in Post-Production:
Fighting the Progress Bar
Boris Polyak
Head of video editing facility
Red Square LLC, for NATEXPO 2016

2. Post-production of entertainment television
• Entertainment is not news, nor sports, nor cinema
• Strict deadline, like in the news
• Lots of cameras, like in sports
• Emotional complex storytelling through video editing, like in movies
• Stuck with the same computer hardware and editing software
• Extra challenges, same tools
• Each show requires its own workflow

3. Parallel workflows take less time
Ingest
Profiles
editing
Story editing
Video
editing
Sound
sweetening
To
tape
Ingest
Profiles
editing
Story editing
Video
editing
Sound
sweetening
To
tape

4. Indivisible workflow steps —three kinds
• Creative tasks
• The story is created here, with decisions made by humans
• Could not be automated (yet)
• Software and hardware should not interfere with decision making
• Technical tasks
• Do not involve decision making
• Should be eliminated if possible, or at least automated
• Software and hardware should not turn creative tasks in technical tasks
• Examples: multicamera track synchronization
• Progress bar meditation
• Should be replaced with automation

5. The progress bar meditation

6. Automation in video editing
• Automating progress bars:
• Makes tasks parallel and takes them out of the project critical path
• Lowers the possibility of errors and overall length of project
• Increases the relative share of creative tasks
• More time for creative tasks might lead to better product quality
• The longest progress bars, because digital video is so “heavy”:
• Copying from storage to storage
• Transcoding

7. Methods of automation
• One step: copy or transcode
• Several steps: copy, then transcode, then copy
• Workflow automation, workflow orchestration:
• Branching
• Decision making: if – then – else
• Use and generate variables for decisions:
• File size, file name, file location
• Metadata
• Content analysis: video length, frame size, loudness,
color space, aspect ratio, length

8. Telestream Vantage
• Transcoding into all professional codecs and containers
• Decoding everything that is supported by DirectShow
• Copying to every possible destination
• Local, SAN, NAS, SFTP, FTPS, WebDAV, S3, Aspera
• Nexio, GrassValley AMP, Avid MediaStream
• Video analysis
• Size, field dominance, codec, bit depth, color space, metadata
• Letterboxing, pillarboxing, loudness analysis and correction
• Integrated with auto-QC such as Vidchecker, InterraSystem Baton
• Decision making based on analysis results

9. Transcode, move, notify

10. Decide what to do based on the frame size

11. Take several different actions based on the file name

12. From our experience
• Small automations can solve big issues that didn’t look big
• Any automation should make as many decisions as possible
• Document, explain, repeat — humans need that
• The simpler the interface, the better
• Drop folders
• Premiere Pro panel
• МАМ integration should be easy
• Monitoring and high availability become important fast
• Feedback from the system matters
(even though it is the less obtuse progress bar, yes)

13. Job Status View provides online monitoring for Vantage tasks

14. Post-production automation goals
• Increasing time spent on creative tasks
• Reducing downtime and error rate
• Computers are better at some technical decisions
• Partial automation is better than no automation
• Taking tasks out of critical path
• Long tasks automation
• Transcoding
• Copying from storage to storage