Film and Video Production in the Cloud

Jack James currently works for Autodesk, helping UK film productions work with the cloud-based production tracking software Shotgun, and has worked widely in cloud production for film and video. He has previously published two books with Focal Press, Digital Intermediates for Film & Video (2005) and Fix it in Post (2009).

- Chapter 1 Silver screens and silver linings Introduction - Chapter 2 What Is the "Cloud"? Origin of the term; different types of "clouds" - Chapter 3 Film & Video Production in the Cloud Practical and theoretical benefits of cloud computing in a production context: efficiency, connectedness, access, going mobile - Chapter 4 Cloud Storage Benefits vs local storage: encryption, cost-effective, easy, robust, sync. Drawbacks: transmission speeds, internet connection required, security concerns, lack of immediacy. Dropbox, box, google drive, iCloud, Amazon S3. - Chapter 5 Cloud Computing Rendering; heavy number-crunching. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - Chapter 6 Collaboration and Communication Software as a service; online project management solutions; cloud-based video-conferencing. Google docs & spreadsheets, Asana, Basecamp, Shotgun, Adobe Creative Cloud, Autodesk A360, Avid Media Composer Cloud - Chapter 7 Production Outlining; scheduling - Chapter 8 Planning Importing data into a single place; logging metadata; synchronisation; logging information as it occurs; best practices for structuring metadata; being prepared for data to transform; versioning - Chapter 9 Finance Sending & receiving digital assets; best practices for organising digital assets - Chapter 10 Tracking Progress reporting; dashboarding (summarising large amounts of data); benchmarking (comparing one production to others) - Chapter 11 Asset Management Streaming playback; review sessions; annotation; getting feedback to the right people - Chapter 12 Review and Approval Sharing metadata with third-parties & vendors; long-term storage benefits; reusable assets for episodic content; Amazon Glacier, Vimeo, YouTube, Pix - Chapter 13 Distribution and Archive Watermarking; access restriction; trusting the cloud providers - Chapter 14 Security Considerations Crowd-voting; crowdfunding; crowdsourcing labour. Ethical considerations. Kickstarter, Amazon Mechanical Turk. - Chapter 15 Automation Access to better tools; more ubiquitous access; faster speeds; reduced costs - Chapter 16 Crowdsourcing -Chapter 17 Potential Index