M+E Daily

Production and work have been changed significantly by the COVID-19 pandemic and, while remote production relies more than ever on a large and growing number of tools, the next phase is to centralise and integrate those tools to reduce tool fatigue and make it even easier for teams to work together wherever they are, according to 5th Kind and Dolby.

5th Kind and Dolby have responded by creating versatile products that bring teams together and facilitate communications.

5th Kind collaborated with Dolby on LIVE Rooms, an all-in-one tool representing the next evolution of entertainment collaboration, Don Terry, 5^th Kind chief revenue officer, said July 21 during the breakout session “Next Gen Tools: Improving Productivity for Creatives” at the July 21 inaugural, all-virtual Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES) event.

“This is something that a lot of our clients are leveraging today for being able to stream from set [and] being able to stream from any location to multiple folks,” said Terry, who moderated the session.

LIVE Rooms includes Dolby Video Conferencing with noise cancellation and the ability to share your desktop and chat, “all watermarked on the fly,” he said. Other standout features include latency under 1 second.

“This is the evolution of what happened last year as we all locked down,” according to Steve Cronan, 5th Kind CEO and CTO. LIVE Rooms helps to address the issue of what the future of work is and brings a “real-time framework to this space,” he said, adding: “It’s just providing more value to our users as a more integrated ecosystem.”

The Dolby technology used in LIVE Rooms “has been around for a number of years,” for conferencing phones initially, according to Rich Holmes, product lead – media at Dolby.io. But the technology is “really well-applied in this use case” by 5^th Kind, he said.

The tool overload

Pointing to the large number of collaboration tools organisations can pick from today, Terry said: “The good news is there are a lot of tools that folks can leverage. The bad news is there’s a lot of tools that folks can leverage.”

During the pandemic, “we saw an explosion of usage of different tools” and they were “becoming a lot more difficult to manage,” Cronan said. “There’s a lot more overlap happening between these tools,” he explained, adding: “The security and compliance becomes a lot more complicated. The integration overhead increases.”

5^th Kind looked into how to “unify a lot of these different silos” and decided to partner with “a lot of best-of-breed products in this ecosystem,” including Dolby, Cronan said, adding it is “helping studios move towards that dream unified scenario.”

The importance of quality and resilience

One issue when switching between video conferencing platforms has been the quality difference between them, according to Holmes, who noted users must hover over the mute button in some scenarios, which hurts the experience. Dolby wants to get “to an environment where people don’t have to hover [over] the mute button and we can have this natural conversation,” he said.

“We’re also seeing that resilience is important,” Holmes said, noting: “There’s nothing worse than getting on a call and one of the talkers starts dropping in and out.” You lose the continuity of conversation, he said. What added to the challenge is there are now so many more people on a video conferencing call than there were before, with groups of 15-20 common.

Cronan predicted that “pretty much every software product’s going to have some form of conferencing at some point.” He also predicted that everybody’s going to benefit from the investments everybody’s making now.

Remaining limitations and challenges

“Any time in a live streaming situation or video conferencing, bandwidth is going to be a factor,” according to Cronan.

“Probably one of the biggest hurdles to, I think,  is the evolution of technology on set.  This challenge of sometimes you’re connected and sometimes you’re not, and you have to build technologies to do both and, therefore, both suffer,” he said with a laugh.

“At this point, I think the lines are blurring” between virtual and remote productions, Holmes said.

“You need to use bits of virtual technology and bits of remote technology on more digital projects and also you don’t really necessarily always know what you’re going to use at the start of the project,” according to Holmes. He explained: “You need a consistent environment that you can build… a hybrid environment where you’ve got all of these things available to you. I think that’s really the key to making the flexibility and creating the right work environment. I don’t think it matters what we call it.”

Predicting where we’ll be in one year

Asked to predict where we will be a year from now, Cronan said: “I think the future of what is video conferencing and what is remote collaboration will continue to evolve. I think more products will become integrated and more pipelines become automated and connected.”

Meanwhile, “on the business side of the fence, there’s a lot of interesting discussions happening around how to make this happen for the studios and break down some of those walls and those silos that we’ve had,” according to Cronan.

“I really hope we can start unifying some of these departments a little bit more,” Cronan said, adding: “Holistically, I really hope that these solutions are making peoples’ lives easier and [they’re] able to have more time with their kids and [getting] all the other benefits that come from being in a digital collaboration world.”

Meanwhile, “from a company perspective, [Dolby is] really looking at how can we make this technology more accessible for more use cases, and how to apply it to those different use cases because we’re still in the first layer of adoption outside of just the basic video conferencing,” Holmes said.

Dolby is looking into what technologies may be needed to “build on top” of this technology and augment it with, Holmes added. “Those are the things that are super interesting and I think will start emerging over this next 12 to 18 months, and that’s because they were being thought about during this COVID period.”

Beyond that, Holmes said: “I think Steve’s right. There’s just going to be more. We’re just going to get more and more of it. Nobody’s rushing to go back into offices. Nobody’s rushing to go back to the old way. They’re all looking at this as an opportunity to do things differently and enable more in their life and more flexibility in their life and, from a personal perspective, it’s made a vast difference to the flexibility of what I can do, and I think I’m way more effective at doing my job because I’ve got some flexibility there and I’m not worried about trying to just cram it in a workday. I can flexibly work across the world.”

Conferencing with people on the other side of the world is much easier now also, Holmes noted, arguing global teams have actually “come closer together” via remote work.

The Entertainment Evolution Symposium event was produced by the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), Pepperdine’s Graziadio Business School, and MESA. The event was sponsored by Whip Media, PacketFabric, 5th Kind, Qumulo, EIDR, Klio and the Trusted Partner Network.