hi thanks for the reply.
thousands may be more than we will see in reality, but it is a possibility depending on how a project or two currently in testing turn out.
i will keep the answer as short as i can, but its going to be a meandering stream of consciousness dump. sorry i don’t have time at the moment to try to lay out a well organized response to this, but love the input and critical analysis.
your assumptions are mostly correct
We do have vfx work on some films which is done both in house and through contracts with VFX houses, with the numbers expected to climb for this. We also have fully 3d animated films.
mostly we do rec709 and sRGB, but also hope to use this same system for our RGB print deliveries. yes we master our catalog and all print images in RGB. this is another long story, but it provides us an opportunity to unify the video and print pipelines.
our franchisees often want the source content to reuse for who knows what delivery platforms.
we also expect to be starting to support rec2020 as we move to HDR and UHD deliveries and need to get good at doing this well before its a common need so we are prepared when the requirements start for that.
for us the long term value could be high, and the company for sure thinks long term. if it takes us a few years to get good at this and to find suppliers who can support us that is totally fine.
the key factors for me are we want consistency, certainty, flexibility, long term value more than we want cheap and fast.
but i dont see ACES really as adding complexity as much as its just a different workflow for most folks and they need to learn a more professional way to work, and i am fine with that.
the auditing comes in that i am looking for a way to check the consistency of these deliveries before we put them in our archive with all the source material and project files. just like i check the file naming rules are followed i am looking to see if our color rules have been followed.
we are working toward a single color pipeline for our media production, both for video and print.
we often dont know all the delivery platforms until after a film is completed and then requests come in… can you deliver this for TVC, can we deliver this to you tube, can we use this for print now… etc.
we are also working to be able to share assets, deliveries, source etc between many production companies using many different cameras and ensure our ability to match color is predictable.
we are also working to ensure we are archiving useful material for both reuse and posterity.
my current approach for us is that versatility to support flexibility provides a lot of value to ensure we can leverage the work however people around the brand would like.
a bit longer version.
the story gets more complicated the more you get into it. for example, when a film is made almost no one around the business is aware its all super tactical and no strategy (this is just the nature of the business) a small team funds and produces a film and there is no central awareness or approval of this content they are completely independent. then the film is finished and distributed to and from franchise markets globally (mostly to, not as much from) and once distributed they are public and many people globally see alternate use opportunities and having every film produced to a different standard and with different source types ensures the answers to these questions are always super complex and usually people give up and just don’t use the material and then go produce their own content from scratch rather than just using something that exists. i am working to build a system where finished and archived projects are in a consistent format and answers to questions of reuse and re purpose are predictable.
A second deeper issue is the technical competence issue you touched on. while this may seem a more complex way to handle color, the consistency and unified guidance of a standard ACES delivery allows me to manage one set of rules with almost zero decisions to be made by the teams who are making the films. (until recently we were only keeping MP4 files as our “masters”, everyone thought that was fine) If the skill level of the production folks was a lot higher they could be relied on to make smart decisions independently, however that has not been demonstrated satisfactorily as of yet, so we have a strict set of rules we know will support any future need within reason.
a third challenge is that we have some volume production products that have to color match perfectly and could be produced at multiple studios and shot on various cameras.
delivering different types of files and different color spaces from different cameras for 20-50 films per day would be a nightmare in post. these are almost always short 1 minute films about product functions and the art / brand requirements are very very strict about color and consistency, but the volumes are too high to do this all in one spot by one team, and we dont want a system where a new supplier would have to invest in all new camera systems to support us, we want to keep the flexibility to work with multiple camera systems,
imagine working with 30 jr producers and every film is their first film and imagine they are each making 25 films a year and wont learn any of the technical aspects of this, and are hiring whoever they want as a production team. our goal is to ensure that in that model if the rules are provided to these “producers” and the production companies they decide to hire and they are followed we can have consistency in our deliveries.
and i am the cat herder working to see how well we can make all this work
i am sure some of this isn’t super clear, but this is my stream of consciousness dump of some of the challenges.