Video has become the way we relate to other people: friends, colleagues, and even strangers, sometimes through home video for pure entertainment.
Stephen Tallamy*
This year, we were forced to make changes on a scale that was inconceivable just a few months ago. Everyone accepts that this is the greatest unintentional transformation of a generation and yet somehow it seems to be the right direction for humanity, with scarcer traffic providing us with clearer skies and an unreserved acceptance that it is okay to work from home as just two out of hundreds of examples.
Right now, it may seem like the world has come to a halt, but for content producers, artists, and production specialists, overcoming the challenges has led to moving forward.
The video has been the outstanding success of the quarantine so far. For some time now, video has "escaped" from the refined and exclusive world of streaming, into the home and office. Social media and the ubiquity of video capture on smartphones have led to video production being part of everyday life. It is a trend that was already strong, but that has exploded with the quarantine. Video has become the way we relate to other people: friends, colleagues, and even strangers, sometimes through home video for pure entertainment.
Education has also embraced video not only as a means to achieve continuity, but to test new ways to educate students and students, and some universities are turning to a completely online service that will also be available in the future.
This has been a huge transition in thinking and focus for educators, but cloud technology was in place and ready for the challenge.
Students' attention spans are not the same with video. New types of teaching and different interactions with viewers will be needed. But there are many ways this can happen. Once students have basic video production facilities at home, they will be able to participate in the video sharing experience, contributing their own segments, which can range from the practical (this is how I baked this cake) to the intellectual (I made a Vox pop of some local people to see what they thought about this topic).
All of this will lead to a proliferation of video, and it will be essential that any participating organization has the means to manage and select a mountain of video content.
This video-centric approach is at a basic level right now, but we've already seen that people are used to lighting, sound, and décor to suit home video production. The more adventurous are exploring how to edit videos to achieve more than just a "talking head in a frame" look at their contributions. If you've ever tried talking to a camera, you'll know the benefits of cutting multiple shots and cutting the "ums" and "you know."
The reality of the "New Normal" for video will be hybrid solutions. The cloud and its almost limitless adaptability is what has allowed us to quickly move to remote work and remote learning, but for a long time there will still be video and IT equipment on-premises. But this is a natural state. The new world of video will find its own balance of resources.
We've been fortunate in this crisis that video technology has been moving in the right direction anyway. We have been building this physical and virtual infrastructure for a long time. But we didn't expect to have to rely on it so quickly.
And we are already seeing new types of creativity discovered and nurtured by new circumstances. Traditional media have had to look for new sources of content as they face the harsh reality that they can't create content the traditional way. As it has always done, the natural response to restriction and restriction is to innovate to get around it.
Very quickly we have seen new types of television programming, where interviewers talk to their guests remotely. Gone are the sleek games, replaced by casual bookshelves and houseplants. As the weeks go by, we've seen an improvement in quality as ad-hoc show creators get lights, better audio, and even large-scale green screens or giant TV screens for animated backgrounds.
The more the world moves toward virtual production, the more it can do remotely. At some point, you can imagine that actors' homes are equipped with performance capture platforms, so they can perform and interact with other artists, without having to be on set with them.
Meanwhile, broadcasters facing a huge shortage of new material have turned to their archives. Organizations with modern media management systems can easily search for content and quickly create new programs based on existing content. Here's a good lesson to learn in the future: Organize and index your content for when you need to extract maximum value from it.
We will continue to learn from the current situation, but what we know now is that there is no point in being shy about cloud-like technologies, because at some point they are not only "nice to have", but essential. We have just gone through such a change and will not be back. Instead, day by day, we have been building a more resilient future.
Nowadays, it can seem rough and somewhat ad hoc. But we're more accustomed than ever to an impressive rate of change, and that will inevitably mean that our efforts to keep things going today will lead to a much more refined future, with new artistic freedoms and reliance on cloud technologies that have been so instrumental in helping us get through this.
Stephen Tallamy is Chief Technology Officer of EditShare.
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