LIVING WITHOUT THE WHEEL!

LIVING WITHOUT THE WHEEL!

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Thursday, 27th January 2011

Ed Pugh reviews Martyn Suker's presentation at the Performance Academy, Newcastle College

Just suppose you were filming the Blue Planet and there appeared to be a rather limited amount of material, you could perhaps forgive the script supervisor for listing the shot as 'Another bloody fish!' From how we shot-list, shoot, edit and deliver, the production process is changing 'big time' and in Martyn Suker's fascinating and enlightening talk we were told of a radical shift away from the way we've worked for many years. The end of tape is near and Megabytes and Metadata will be the currency. It's already happening and for the last few years, whilst based in the Natural History Unit in Bristol, Martyn has been looking into how that area can adapt to the new technologies. As Alistair Fothergill, Series Producer of Planet Earth remarked after working with this new way of production, the shift change is like 'Living without the Wheel'

Martyn now works for Siemens Business Services (who took over BBC Technology), and he showed how staff in Bristol have to take a trailer of tapes from the BBC building to the Edit across the road. He also showed the girl in BBC Birmingham who had to put on roller skates to get between the tape machine and the edit machine a long way down the corridor! In the Multi-Platform environment and with convergence between Broadcast and IT mixed with increasing costs and decreasing revenues, we have to look at updating infrastructures, taking costs out, streamlining workflows W basically organising differently. Programme makers will have to adapt as they think about it being shot in HD, put on the web, put on media players, DVDs, podcasting, mobiles etc etc. Martyn explained that there were currently 14 different tape formats (excluding the HD ones), plus there are multiple format viewing facilities. Logging is arduous and often information is not retained past the edit stage. He highlighted that we needed tapeless production as it is often difficult to find what you want, tapes go missing and tapes (even in the smaller sizes) use a lot of space. Plus Sony for one will phase out digiBeta over the next few years.

Digital production of course has been around for a long time W he thought about 10 years in the BBC. But the technology was poor for most of that time, W now it's capable and much has been learnt about how to make the process work. Digital production is about joining up through each stage of shooting, viewing, logging, editing, finishing. It will improve information gathering and storage. He illustrated this by showing one tape librarian with a room full of tapes in their hundreds storing 1000 hours, and another one with 3 times the amount of hours on a data panel measuring the size of a 42" plasma screen. He believes that the content producer will benefit in several ways W by entering the info once and reusing it many times, automated post production reporting, less reworking, no missing tapes or info, maintaining quality on lower budget shows. Also it would be quicker to air as some of the present process (in factual programming for example) can take 70 steps. This can be reduced to 38, plus there are efficiencies in 25 of those.

Having attended a recent RTS Midlands talk in Birmingham where BBC Director General Mark Thompson talked animatedly about the future being about on demand and the 'interactive media player' (where the public will be able to access the last seven days of BBC programme material in a 'use it or lose it' formula) how we make programmes (and perhaps more importantly how we catalogue, archive and access those programmes) will be increasingly crucial.

Martyn Suker wrapped up his talk by saying that the process change will take longer than expected, return on investment will not be instant and not to under-estimate the 'change management' issues. He highlighted the fact that all media sectors will increasingly turn to digitised production processes driven by cost savings and potential revenue growth. As a programme maker himself, his final reassuring words were that Talent and Creativity make good programmes and that Technology should enable and not dictate.

By Ed Pugh

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