M+E Connections

At the May 7 EIDR Annual Participant Meeting in Culver City, Calif., Mark Turner, program director of production technology for MovieLabs, provided an update on the state of the MovieLabs 2030 vision.

In 2019, studios put their heads together around the cloud, security, and emerging technologies “and it was clear the studios were in different places, and if the studios are in different places, it’s hard for the vendor community to keep up,” Turner said.

That resulted in the publication of a 10-year vision for the industry and, while not so much a prediction of the future of media and entertainment, it’s definitely served as a guidepost for where Hollywood wants to be.

“The whole industry went ‘Thank God for that, that’s what we needed,’” Turner said. “This is what we want, and we’ve got 10 years of roadmap to work on it.”

Five years on, and the industry is still using the 2030 vision paper, trying to figure out the fundamental inefficiencies in the industry that weren’t addressed with the shift from analog to digital, or the adoption of non-linear editing.

“You can do some things [today, outlined in the 2030 vision] no doubt about it,” Turner said. “But what we were talking about [when it published] was wholesale changes to the industry, and we’re a long way from that.”

For example, every production line remains different, and that is inefficient, Turner said. Content still gets made, but looking at how it’s produced, there are better ways to do things identified all the time. “This isn’t just about movies … the 2030 vision was meant to apply to broadcast content, YouTube videos, films,” Turner said. “It’s efficiency for everyone.”

The overarching idea behind the MovieLabs 2030 vision in the entertainment sector is identifying forward-looking strategies that drive innovation, and reshape content creation, distribution, and audience engagement.

EIDR fits into the MovieLabs vision — after all, it was a team at MovieLabs that got EIDR off the ground — perfectly. “Agreeing on a way of doing things, best practices, is part … of the framework, an agreed way that we’re all going to do this,” Turner said. “We’re all in for that. The 2030 vision is [all for] interoperability, because that’s one of our big problems.” The media and entertainment world would be better served if more things like EIDR existed … think one agreed-upon file format for video.

“That’s what we’re trying to fix, so we can create software-defined workflows,” Turner said.

To listed to the full EIDR APM MovieLabs 2030 discussion, click here.