Realizing Collaborative Film and Television Workflows

Abstract

In film and television production and post-production, tasks are often outsourced to specialist providers. The complexity of doing this is one reason that the benefits promised through completely tapeless working has yet to be fully realized. This paper presents the approach of the U.K.-funded Multiple User Post-Production IT Services (MUPPITS) project in tackling this problem. The significant challenges to the media creation industry that led to the formation of the project are examined, and an architecture that will help overcome these challenges is proposed. This architecture makes use of collaborative middleware techniques that were originally created for other industries. Two specific scenarios for this approach are outlined, namely digital dailies and post-production rendering The project's work on developing demonstrators for these scenarios is also described.