As with working on any creative project, creating productions for TV, film, and video can be highly rewarding and enjoyable work, although there are many challenges and stressful situations that can arise when working to tight deadlines across various locations with different groups of people.
With enough challenges that come from the daily activities of working in a creative industry, the last thing you want is for these issues to be compounded with further IT issues that may impact your ability to produce work and interrupt the creative flow.
What are the main technology-based issues facing TV, film, and video production businesses and what are the best ways to mitigate or avoid these problems?
Frequent Technology Issues for Filmmaking Businesses
There are a number of common IT-related challenges that would typically impact a production house and their work in creating TV, film and video content.
File Storage
When producing video files, especially in higher resolutions such as 8 K and 12 K, massive amounts of storage space are needed and production houses that use a traditional setup with hard drives and servers storing all the data will quickly find that these devices fill up quite quickly and production will effectively cease while backup storage options are found.
One hour of 8 K filming would take up to 7.29 TB of file storage space. To get one hour of usable footage for the final cut there could be four or five times as much raw footage that would need to be recorded and ultimately stored somewhere.
There’s no point making the best video clip the world has ever seen if you have nowhere to save it or keep the data.
Data Transfer
Another serious issue for film production businesses is data transfer and this encompasses a range of problems, including
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Large file sizes need to be downloaded and transferred between editors and various team members
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Sharing work and collaboration between different parties on location, in offices or working remotely can be a real headache
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Issues can arise with network connections and uploading times needed to transfer and process large video format files
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Having the correct version of edited work can be troublesome with various teams chipping in and altering files—various layers of edits and audio may generate multiple versions of the same content that all need to be saved somewhere and sent to the right people in the right place
Security Concerns Over Intellectual Property
Today’s world of online streaming services and digital media has democratised filmmaking to a degree and now more than ever there is an increasing chance that any independent film-maker could be sitting on assets worth several million if their intellectual property or film they created is the next big blockbuster.
For this reason, it is highly important that even smaller and medium-sized filmmakers protect their digital assets and valuable data.
With highly valuable files being frequently transferred over the internet from one party to another, there is a high chance that these digital assets could be sent to the wrong recipient, or a hacker or malicious actor somehow intercepting the transaction and stealing important data.
There are several reasons why filmmaking businesses may be targeted in this way.
Content may be leaked ahead of time—there is a big demand for sneak previews of upcoming productions and audiences are not particularly interested these days if it was obtained lawfully. Getting hold of unreleased footage can be profitable for those who sell the data or use it to generate monetised views on their social media platforms.
For creative industries however leaked content is hugely damaging, especially if the big plot twist at the end of the production has already been revealed prior to its release, ruining the impact of the work.
Intellectual property may be stolen, copied, or reproduced—perhaps one of the worst eventualities for a production house is the whole film in its entirety being stolen for malicious purposes. With the full production being transferred back and forth as one master file, it can be relatively simple for a hacker to place themselves in between two legitimate parties and gain unauthorised access to the data.
The content can then be sold to the highest bidder or have the creative ideas and storylines stolen and used by rival productions.
High-performance Computational Power Needed
For most manipulations and editing work in video format, you need high-end computers with enough memory and top-of-the-range graphics processors for things like visual effects and other post-production processes.
Having the hardware in itself to run high-end editing applications can be costly and there is the further logistical challenge of having all the computing power that is needed in the right location.
Solving All Issues for Filmmaking Businesses | Lyon Tech
At Lyon Tech, we provide cutting-edge solutions to manage all technical issues that plague filmmaking industries.
Our services are specifically catered to the needs of production houses, filmmakers and other creative industries and we have years of experience and industry knowledge in this sector, helping filmmaking businesses to achieve their true potential and enhance their creative ability.
At Lyon Tech, we have the most sophisticated solutions to some of the most common problems facing creative industries.
File storage is no longer an issue for production houses who utilise Lyon Tech solutions—we provide unlimited data storage through remote datacentres. This means that frantically looking around for storage devices to save work can be a thing of the past. With Lyon Tech solutions, increasing storage is as simple as selecting which option you want.
Lack of hardware, such as graphics processors and high-performance CPUs, is solved through our Workstations as a Service and virtual graphics processors that give film editors all the graphics and processing power needed at their fingertips, allowing them to run the most complex memory-hungry applications with ease from their own devices.
Data Transfers and Collaboration with large files can be streamlined and practical through the use of cloud storage solutions, virtual desktop interfaces and virtual workstations. With these technologies in place, it is possible for film editors to do any task from any location. They would log into a mirror image replica of the company’s system through Desktop as a Service with all their applications and personalised customisations available. With Virtual Workstations, they can also access high-end graphics engines and top-end processing platforms remotely. By using cloud storage and data transfer, it is then possible to share the work or collaborate with teams remotely in any location.
Any security concerns over intellectual property theft or unauthorised access to data can be effectively mitigated with Lyon Tech Cybersecurity Services. We provide a suite of defensive measures to offer peace of mind for filmmaking businesses that include
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Live security operation monitoring
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Vulnerability management and risk assessment
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Intrusion detection systems
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24/7 help desk support
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Rapid response cybersecurity teams that can be deployed instantly to contain any threat
Contact Lyon Tech
If you are in the creative industry and are having any issues from a technical point of view or are looking to streamline and enhance your processes, get in touch with our industry experts today.
At Lyon Tech, we cater our services specifically to those in filmmaking and post-production businesses, providing a range of solutions for most of the frequent issues that would typically present a problem for those in creative industries and especially those producing video content.
Whether you have concerns with data storage or transfers of large files, security risks, or accessing high-end performance from remote locations, we can take you through the range of options that would be most suitable for your business.
At Lyon Tech, we help filmmaking businesses enhance their creative scope by removing the technical barriers that would normally impede their work—once these obstructions have been dealt with, imagination is the only limit.
