Three key trends we’ll see in 2022 are that content will remain king, teams that effectively work and collaborate remotely will win the content race, and we’ll continue to see the benefits of shared storage with built-in solutions for production.
Content will reign – still, and always
In an age where a new iPhone 13 shoots ProRes and HDR video anywhere, and with more outlets for content than ever, anyone with a story to tell and work to share can find an audience. In 2022, teams will find it easier than ever to digitize content trapped on analog formats, and refresh and monetize content that’s not been organized or accessible. The payoff will be enormous – ranging from universities digitizing rare archives to share with educators and interested public, to standing up entirely new brands of user-contributed content around a theme or topic, to corporations embracing rich media communication in all forms of outreach at an accelerated pace. There are more tools and possibilities for content to find a new audience and spur much deeper, more immediate engagement and traction.
Working and collaborating remotely is a feature – not a bug
This past year and a half has been a testament to the ingenuity and resolve of creative teams everywhere. As the demand for content ramped to historic levels, these teams delivered, and they did so in surprising ways that highlight the best practices we’ll continue to use – whether we can all be in the office together or not. From blending on-site and remote editors and producers with the best of cloud delivered capabilities, teams are learning to follow the content and build workflows needed to deliver content efficiently. This is not a myopic workaround. Teams that have figured out how to not only build these highly efficient workflows, but to also keep building their shared ‘content pipeline’, will be the ones to win the content race.
We’ll keep pushing content to the edge
An exciting development we’ll see in the new year is the impact of having truly useful shared storage with built-in solutions in surprising places, especially for remote location and on-set content production. The old joke about ‘fix it in post’ is dead when you can fix it in realtime. With shared storage, editing teams can ensure content is not only immediately saved on disk, but also ingested into shared storage. Automated proxy and daily production and sharing can happen instantly instead of waiting to get back to the facility. Editors can do rough cuts quickly to see how a sequence is developing, fix it quickly and swap out entire digital scenes for virtual production. In short, creatives can see more of a finished production earlier, have additional choices and options, and dramatically cut down on the time needed to re-shoot or fix something after the fact.
Skip Levens is Product Marketing Director for Quantum (www.quantum.com).