“As recent events have illustrated, the media industry’s need for more sophisticated remote collaboration capabilities in virtually every content creation category has never been greater. With that need comes more urgency regarding the development of interoperable multi-cloud tools across the production chain. And to achieve that goal, many experts believe the only logical path to travel is one involving a significant evolution of remote workflow concepts. To that end, the pursuit of what is increasingly being referred to as ‘software-defined workflows’ is now well underway.”
Source: Michael Goldman, SMPTE blog
AT A GLANCE:
Writing for the SMPTE blog, Michael Goldman delves into the newest white paper from MovieLabs, an independent industry non-profit consortium that includes five of the major Hollywood film studios. The white paper, titled “The Evolution of Production Workflows — Empowering Creative Processes with Software-Defined Workflows,” is part of the group’s “2030 Vision” initiative promoting the idea of open and interoperative software-defined workflow methodologies. It establishes new guidelines on software-defined workflows, charting a framework that allows software to understand and communicate information about specific workflows, which ultimately makes them more nimble and adaptive. The paper also presents an approach for building interoperable tools for automation in a range of areas, including asset movement, collaboration, compute and rendering orchestration, cost calculation, personnel scheduling, and project dashboards.
“In order to deploy workflows in the cloud that are less brittle and more easily reconfigured than today’s, you need to build up toward interoperability,” MovieLabs CTO Jim Helman tells Goldman. “The most foundational element of that is to realize that you can’t have common APIs, common interfaces, if you don’t even agree on what things are, what the data model is. So we set out to discuss how we could work out a common set of ontologies for production that would be useful to everyone. We are coming at this from the position of trying to get more flexible and better workflows to support creative work.”
Head over to the SMPTE blog to read the full story.
