Rapid Video Production: How Vertical Integration Transforms Creator Workflows
The future of content production could be centered around vertically integrated workflows.
As a creative professional with 10+ years of experience in media workflows, I have gained insight into the many details involved in creating feature films, advertisements, YouTube videos, and other forms of digital media. This is my space for sharing creative workflow ideas and developments. Thank you for joining me in the Creative Workflow Lab.
Today, I want to dive into what I think will be the future of creative workflows: vertically integrated real-time production. Not completely live like a sports event that would be broadcasted with no delay. However, I think all types of creative workflows are going to start taking cues from live production. It’s already happening! In 2022, Instagram and TikTok are the most obvious examples of real-time production tools that are vertically integrated. What if the vertically integrated production tools were independent of the distribution ecosystems and applied to large-scale professional productions?
In five years, the new standard could be a three-day production schedule for a 40 min episode of a large-scale TV show. I think that show could have the same quality you might expect from an HBO show in 2022 that had a long production schedule with a hefty budget. So, what do I mean by a vertically integrated production workflow? That means the writing, pre-production, performance capture, editing, VFX, audio mixing, and final rendering process might all happen within a unified set of tools. This unified technology will enable you to produce high-quality content quickly. Even the music could be generated in real-time as a collaboration between AI and human creatives. AI will become (and already is in many ways) an integral part of the entire process. Generative AI tools are already streamlining traditional production workflows. I have more posts focused on AI-generated content tools coming soon.
Vertically integrated workflows, assisted by AI, will essentially collapse the entire production workflow. Your cameras will be connected to your post-production software. You’ll be live streaming the footage back to the post-production studio and then it's being edited immediately by either humans or AI. Or both at the same time! There's wasted time in media production spent in the ingest and backup process, then importing and cataloging the clips, syncing, grouping scenes, and finally the real editing process begins. That could be streamlined with vertically integrated production tools. No matter if it's a feature film or a commercial or a YouTube video, your team can start work on post-production right as the footage is being captured.
This kind of real-time workflow is standard in industries like sports broadcasting. Games are captured, edited, and delivered with only a few seconds of delay. There are technology bottlenecks getting that kind of workflow into a feature film production – or even a YouTube production. It’s only a matter of time until we have these tools widely available.
AI is already deeply integrated into Adobe software including Premiere Pro. You can auto-transcribe audio and generate captions in seconds, easily sync up the video and audio, and so many other features that leverage the power of AI. I think some creatives are scared of this future because they are thinking “Oh, is this going to threaten my job?” and I understand why! It’s a serious concern and I’m sure there will be negative outcomes of generative AI. It’s my hope that the positives will outweigh the negatives.
AI will enable creators to create more content and scale up their workflows. I believe AI will soon advance to the point where it's doing 90% of post-production work, and that work can happen almost instantly. Then humans will go in and tweak it, see the reasoning of the AI, and regenerate again until it’s deemed as completed. You can create one streamlined process that gets content delivered at a rapid pace while still keeping high-quality output.
I wonder what company will tackle this first. For it to be vertically integrated, you'll have to have deep integration with the camera and the software for post-production. And in 2022, that ecosystem is very fragmented. Cameras are produced by different camera companies and creators have preferences on what camera they like to use. So, there might have to be some kind of module that would integrate with existing cameras and then transmit the footage back to the editing software.
Apple, Google, and Samsung already enable vertically integrated production with their devices and app ecosystems. Smartphones are now the default way of capturing images, audio, and video. Yet, many creative professionals still need to use cinema cameras. If Adobe made a camera, maybe they would partner with Canon or Sony to manufacture it. There might be multiple versions: a cinema-quality version and then a consumer-grade version that would stream the footage back to Adobe’s editing software, which then immediately starts editing the footage using AI.
Over the next few years, I expect vertically integrated workflows* will continue to transform media production. What do you think? Let me know on Twitter.
*With the power of AI, more on that soon!
P.S. - Looking for a creative director? Let's work together: https://shanleo.com
Bonus AI-generated image for reading to the end! :)
