Distributed audio-visual content development

Abstract

In the recent years the importance of the European audio-visual industry has become apparent and actions have been initiated to strengthen its actors, especially in film making and video production. European companies in the sector assess ways to improve their performance and productivity and become more competitive against American and Asian companies. Most such companies have heavily invested in modern digital technologies and often very powerful HPC systems are found even in small production facilities across Europe. Until today, though, little effort has been used to implement activities other than production/post-production and even less, to integrate the whole cycle of content development and creation within a networked collaborative environment. This resulted in an inconsistency in the efficiency of the content creation cycle as the benefits of HPC were exploited solely in the production phases and the benefits of HPN were exploited only as a means to transfer portions of work to be performed at a remote site, while intermediate phases were still undertaken with conventional, inefficient ways. This paper reports the experience of the DAVID project in establishing a way to interact and collaborate also during the pre-production phases. Several benefits have been demonstrated, such as reduction of the overall production cost, increased productivity, as well as increased ability to execute complex, multi-company productions in shorter times and lower budgets.

The work presented in this paper is supported by the EC ESPRIT 4^th Framework Program on HPCN, PST activity No. 24810 DAViD (Distributed Audio-Visual Content Development).