“Paradigms of the market are changing on all levels: Business models applied for decades are changing and so is user behavior.”

This was the guideline for last weeks technology conference “Changing the Picture” at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam. New technologies concerning film productions were introduced and broadly discussed: http://www.changingthepicture.de/index.php?id=2

Something everybody agreed on: From a technological point of view film industry is still years behind compared to other industries. This becomes rather obvious having a look at the information workflow between script and final editing. Paper, double listing, versioning insanity, isolated departments working past each other.

This was exactly what we were talking about on the panel “Tech tools rocking production workflow”. Four experts – four tools, which make working on a film production easier. CeltX, ProductionMinds, Strawberry and of course us from easySCOTT (find the whole panel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlFGO4KbF1A).

Fair enough: So there are some nice tools for every step in production already. But still they are not used extensively. Why? Our conclusion: Lacking interoperability. Though using the software, single departments still work isolated, simply digitally instead of analogously. This is no real advancement.

So it’s up to us as developers to connect our tools more elegantly and first of all: live. To put an end to all versioning problems. However, it’s no solution to wait until there’s the one tool available that can handle it all. It’s better to use the already existing specialized solutions and make them talk to each other.

How? Well, there are three options:

A) Information exchange via common file formats like Final Draft or XML. People are already on it, but still it’s lacking elegance and causing trouble from first changes on.

B) Gather up all important tools and build direct API connections. It works but causes lots of work for both sides.

C) Invent some kind of cloud-based metadata encyclopedia to smoothly translate all information of every tool into the language of another one.

Transfer Media, who organized “Changing the Picture” is currently working on the latter one. It’s an exiting project we are supporting gladly. We are happy about all the attention given to metadata management recently. Thanks for two inspiring days!