The last decade’s “democratisation of filmmaking” is a truly wonderful thing. It has enabled more people to create via a lower barrier of entry, resulting in multimedia experiences that would never have seen the light of day several years earlier.
How did it happen?
The introduction of file-based workflows together with drastic quality improvements in digital video has revolutionised video production; affordable cameras, equipment and software mean affordable filmmaking; and the explosion of online video has led to a huge increase in video production worldwide.
And there’s more: NLEs and other post-production software can now run adequately on an entry-level PC or Mac and can produce video in television or even cinema quality; cloud platforms have become commodities; and platforms like Frankie, Frame.io and Wipster make web-based collaboration a reality no matter your level of experience.
And yet, despite these exciting innovations, the realities of media asset management (MAM) in the production process have not changed much at all.
The content revolution
Part of the problem is the sheer amount of content we produce. With the advent of mainstream 4K and even affordable cameras capturing footage at more than 1 000 megabits per second, the mass of content captured today is beyond anything capable in previous years. Just think of the brand-new Panasonic GH5 moving up its in-camera bitrate to 400MBit from the GH4’s 100, or the DJI Inspire 2 capable of recording an incredible 4200MBit 5.2 K RAW.
Furthermore, with the availability of cheap cameras that enable more perspectives of a shot – GoPro, drones and so on – comes an increase in output.
With that amount of pure data, media asset management and organisation remains a huge challenge—and one that, even in 2017, hasn’t been solved. It somewhat sours the democratisation of filmmaking that has us all so excited.
Disk space is a critical resource, especially when using expensive SSD storage for the editing process. For example: Three hours of 4K footage shot in ProRes HQ requires roughly one terabyte of disk space. Due to this, filmmakers need to be painfully efficient with storage—in many cases, being selective with material from longer takes before the edit is necessary, if filmmakers don’t want to run out of disk space or drive up archive and production costs.
Heterogeneous material in terms of file formats, codecs, colour handling (RAW, S-Log, V-Log, LUTs etc.) and metadata have also become the norm, so production processes have to be built in a way to accommodate that, and in many cases need to work around compatibility issues. The metadata world in particular is still very fragmented, with lots of mutually incompatible standards and no improvement in sight.
So, although the potential for video producers to explore their craft has increased in the past decade, their lives as far as material organisation is concerned has not kept pace with those developments. Building a production workflow for a given environment still requires work, experience, tools and almost always tough trade-offs.
The MAM environment
The term ‘media asset management’ covers a very broad area. Many professionals in the content production industry associate it with complicated, heavy-weight MAMs or PAMs that feel more like a database, and are not exactly known for their flexibility. They also don’t leave much choice when it comes to designing for workflows that are fit for purpose.
These systems are almost exclusively used at bigger organisations such as television networks or major production houses—they do not address the needs of the hundreds of thousands of video professionals working at small businesses or as freelance. There are a number of tools with a narrower scope, such as logging and/or offloading footage from camera media, but those, due to their narrow scope, also only address a fraction of the typical workflow needs of content producers.
This situation created a kind of breeding ground; one where the ideas that led to the design and development of Kyno began to take shape.
With Kyno, we wanted to take a fundamentally different approach to MAM. We started by looking closely at how professionals work today. We used our findings to build the tool that would support these workflows. One of the key observations was that there is not just one correct workflow, but a huge variety of approaches that work very well depending on requirements, environment, skill and, not least of all, personal preference.
Those differences can be the kind of camera or NLE used, and whether these are homogeneous or heterogeneous. Many people organise their work using semantic folder structures, others prefer tags or file naming conventions. Some people transcode all their footage before edit, some use material directly off the cards.
Kyno was built as a take on MAM that does not prescribe a certain workflow, but rather offers the building blocks for all these different workflows in one integrated, easy-to-use user interface.
These are, most notably, a media file browser that builds a database on the fly; a professional media player for screening and logging; a powerful yet very simple transcoding engine; batch renaming functionality; and NLE integration. Kyno users combine this functionality with ease, and constantly surprise us with new ideas about how they go about it.
Although Kyno is not branded as a MAM, it does for many people what they would typically expect from a MAM. The integrated powerful metadata filtering capabilities are available without any ingest step or previous definition of a catalogue or database. Combined with extensive logging functionality users get the MAM-like functionality they need.
Where does that leave us in 2017?
The last decade’s worth of innovations are far too empowering to be entirely negated by the challenges imposed by diversity and quality, but the challenges are there nevertheless.
We need to think about how to overcome them to further empower creativity, enabling even more budding filmmakers to more easily achieve their vision. We need tools that can free the minds of video professionals from the technical nitty-gritty, and turn the focus to the creative process. Judging by the attitude in the creative community, that support would be more welcome today than ever before. Tools like Kyno aim to nurture, develop and grow that creative process, with functionality designed for the workflows of today.
By Robert Krüger, managing partner, Lesspain Software
