Three big tech themes for post-production in 2024

I don’t think anyone in the media and entertainment industry was sorry to see the back of 2023. After battling increases in inflation and the cost of living and enduring strikes that saw the industry practically come to standstill, it’s hard to imagine that 2024 could be anything but an improvement on the last twelve months.

When it comes to technology, there are plenty of reasons for broadcast and post facilities to be optimistic. Recent developments in cloud workflows and AI capabilities (amongst others) mean we’ve never had so many tools at our disposal, and workflow requests that were out of reach as recently as a few years ago can now easily be achieved in a variety of different ways. But an abundance of choice can also be debilitating. With so many options available, where should you focus your attention? These are the three tech themes that I believe will have the biggest impact on post-production in 2024.

Hybrid and multi-cloud orchestration

We’ve talked about the cloud and how we can start bringing our workflows and workloads into the cloud for years and years, but we’re quickly discovering that not every cloud platform is equal – they all have their own benefits and downfalls. For example: Microsoft Azure is ideal for IT infrastructure; AWS is more media-focused and Google Cloud has incredible CPU power at a competitive price. And that’s before you take hyperconverged infrastructure and private clouds into consideration. If you amalgamate these together with your on-prem hardware, you can build amazing workflows - but it also presents a lot of questions about data locality and how you connect everything via your IP transport and networking. How do you access all the data in different environments from wherever you need it? Do you work directly from the cloud? Do you use proxies? How do you get media from one place to another quickly and simply without having to install and open lots of applications on the other end? One of the biggest challenges broadcast and post facilities will face in 2024 is how to integrate and orchestrate these different platforms in a way that is both efficient and cost effective.

Getting the most out of AI

AI in post isn’t anything new (ScriptSync was launched in 2007 and Media Composer’s PhraseFind came out in 2011) but these applications were based on automated responses triggered by operator input. By contrast, generative AI applications are capable of creating entirely new metadata from images, video and audio files. In 2023 we used multiple language models to open up new markets and monetise assets, automatically added metadata to content in MAMs and triggered the next stage in a workflow once a task had been completed. Now, we’re starting to see text-based editing, AI powered rotoscoping and even technical grades completed by generative AI applications. The next step will be for AI applications to proactively assist with the edit, for example: to identify patterns in the editor’s behaviour and pre-empt tasks, like applying the same LUT to shots from the same source or suggesting a cutaway based on the audio in a clip.

In addition to navigating the ethics of responsible AI use, the challenge in 2024 is not to get carried away by the AI hype. Every vendor in the industry has some AI application or integration in their pipeline, but these tools will only be valuable if they enhance your creative process or increase your workflow efficiency – and if they’re able to maintain that AI generated metadata throughout the workflow and applications. Any AI system is also only as good as the data it’s trained on. For this reason, I predict an increasing movement towards on-prem, self-hosted, application-based tools that are trained on specific datasets. Not only will these AI applications deliver more valuable results than publicly hosted systems, ultimately creating better workflow efficiency, but they’ll also make it easier for post houses to manage their top priority in 2024 – security.

Trust no-one

It’s not an overstatement to say that security is probably the most important thing in our industry in 2024. This should come as no surprise because security affects every part of our workflow. While the question of orchestrating media across a multi-cloud and on-prem infrastructure may be complicated, managing the security of your data across every one of these end points (and in between) makes it even more so. And I’m not sure that anyone completely understands the security implications of using publicly hosted AI systems for media workflows yet. While multi-factor authentication and zero-trust policies aren’t new to the industry, we’ve got some work to do in implementing a single sign-on experience across multiple platforms and one thing is for sure - the days of starting the edit now and worrying about security later are over.

Happy New Year!

Chris Bailey is head of innovation at Jigsaw24 Media.

Top image: Chris Bailey presenting his 2024 predictions to London’s post community at a recent event at Jigsaw24 Media’s HQ