I had an interesting chat at the Digital Cinema Summit yesterday with Christian Wilson, manager of HBO Studios West. Christian and I last spoke in August 2006 when I penned an article about HBO’s workflow for remote-editing and collaboration on the mini-series Rome–shot in Rome, and edited in Los Angeles over a highly secure VPN network. Christian points out that, like many other technology advances, in less than two years, that type of workflow, including ultra-high security, which is extremely important to networks like HBO, has advanced greatly.

HBO can now share high-resolution, exact-source frame rate and image sized files and make final decisions about those images long-distance using improved versions of the Rome-style workflow, he says. Among the shows being produced remotely in this manner by HBO right now are Generation Kill, which is being shot in South Africa, and Pacific, which is being shot in Australia. In both cases, the backbone is high-speed data transfer via the Sohonet private network system, with secure encrypted files managed by Aspera high-speed file transfer software, among other bells and whistles.

Wilson, by the way, recommends those interested in this kind of workflow check out the Aspera booth at NAB (SU15509), which I intend to do this week. He calls Aspera one of those companies that is quietly, almost off the radar, helping to change the industry by providing secure ways to move large media files with what he calls “military grade encryption.” Wilson calls the concept “FTP, but faster and more secure. It’s like a big pneumatic tube.”

He adds that the concept, very important to networks like HBO, is to make the user experience for such tools physically easy for the creative team to utilize, while being “almost Draconian” in terms of security.

Wilson and I also chatted about the future of a data-centric workflow world as it impacts broadcasters since, after all, physical media, not data, has been the preferred method of working in broadcast traditionally. One thought-provoking suggestion he had is that networks and production companies will eventually need to add a new player to their pre-production/workflow planning teams–the data archivist. While the term implies someone who enters the picture long after the project is put together, Wilson suggests the opposite will need to be true eventually. Instead, he says, since broadcasters need to commit to data workflows early in the process, they will also need to consider how that data will be protected, harvested, archived, transferred, backed up, and maintained early in the same process. Therefore, data archiving discussions need to start happening at the same time that production discussions get serious. Times, apparently, are changing …

–MG