Mark L. Pederson
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This is a great post by Curtis - I highly recommend you read this if you are in the post business -
http://boxoffice.com/blogs/mike-curtis/
http://boxoffice.com/blogs/mike-curtis/
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Little Mammals Amongst the Dinosaurs’ Feet
- Thread starter Mark L. Pederson
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Babu Kantamneni
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It was good.Long winded but thorough.He should be writing damn chapters in text books or teach at universities!
Gavin Greenwalt
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I thought it was mostly accurate (being a medium sized mammal myself) but missed some critical points.
- Large post houses are already hiring low wage mammals for lots and lots of tasks *in house* to keep their costs down.
- As technology advances (and this has been "prophesied" for years now) you can "do at home" what "ILM does" but the thing has been, ILM has A) continued to innovate in programming and tools that are completely proprietary and B) Does things a lot *lot* faster than a mammal. Mammals may be nimble and 'quick' but even a 'slow' moving brontosaurus is moving faster with less steps. As mammals start to be able to do more things, the big houses will be able to get it done 2, 3, 4 times as fast thanks to talent and always cutting edge hardware. (We have 30 render nodes, Zoic has 1100, guess which one can finish a project faster?) I have never seen my render times over the years go down. The moment some optimization is made or computers are made faster the more bling gets thrown at them.
- Speed of execution is a 1:1 ratio (all other things being equal) to the quality you can produce. Most small mammals aren't specialists who only do one thing. As a result they're survivors in the long run, but will never be as proficient as a dedicated X, Y, Z individual. Great for VFX supervisors but very poor for Assembly Line post. As everybody gets faster hardware the Big post houses will still be able to do it twice as fast and as a result push through twice as many jobs per day and continue demanding their high prices.
- I think a better comparison would be the big post houses are the sharks who can eat anything and do anything no matter what they're asked to do and the small boutiques and home operations are the pilot fish and Remoras respectively. Even if all the work gets outsourced dozens of places, you need someone conducting the choir who has an overall view of the entire operation and assembles the product in one place. We've worked with big studios and it's invaluable to send a proxy to be on the phone all day relaying what they need, when they need it, what we can do to help, where the project is at, etc, etc. A one or two man operation will have a really really hard time staying in communication and up to date. When you're out of touch (even with IM and email) things can start to go wrong very quickly.
- Post workflows I believe will always (except for the really simple stuff:aka reality TV programming work) be complicated in some regard because the best work will be always be done on beta and bleeding edge gear which is inherently buggy/confusing/difficult. You could do it in house. But the reason most post houses charge as much as they do is because that's how much *it costs*! You could take it in house... but then you have to buy and maintain a renderfarm, install that fiber network etc etc etc at which point you are a post house.
I use Atmosphere as an example of this. Originally Zoic did all of Battlestar Gallactica's VFX. Then the inhouse guys started getting more and more shots until they were handling a significant load of all the shots (once the pipeline had been ironed out by Zoic). So Atmosphere had to hire more artists, buy more systems, get more organized... and now is a full fledged VFX company.... so now they have overhead and expenses again so guess what... they're doing commercials and what not in down time.
I think we're going to see an explosion in the number of post houses as more people can afford the 'quick and cheap' work without needing custom tools, large pipeline management, tight deadlines etc... We for instance created photorealistic fish for an HP Sales video. You would never have done that even 5 years ago where it would have had to have been done by ILM or Digital Domain or Weta just because the technology wasn't there to get it done affordably. That's not really eating away at the big post houses, that's creating new profitable markets that haven't been previously exploited that's pilot fish work, cleaning up the stuff that's not really worth the hastle of the sharks. Atmosphere is an example of a Remora (working as a parasite/proxy for a big studio doing rotowork, small shops, effectively being the 'overflow' work bucket.) turning into a pilot fish (picking up small week long spots) turning into a shark and becoming a vendor in of themselves.
Of course I've been looking at it from a VFX post standpoint where Mike is mostly approaching it from an editorial view. And that's why I mostly agree with him. Editorial is inherently very few people with high end gear. (Editor/2-3 Assistants and a Colorist/Telecine operator) times 3 or 4 plus 5 or 6 motion graphics guys to fill it out. Honestly though I think that's an incredibly efficient arrangement and balance. I'm not convinced that any in house project is sufficiently large and demanding to keep your employees busy. It sounds to me like you would only need part time in house guys... in which case then you have artist moving between multiple systems and charging the higher "work is uncertain tommorow" freelancer rates.
- Large post houses are already hiring low wage mammals for lots and lots of tasks *in house* to keep their costs down.
- As technology advances (and this has been "prophesied" for years now) you can "do at home" what "ILM does" but the thing has been, ILM has A) continued to innovate in programming and tools that are completely proprietary and B) Does things a lot *lot* faster than a mammal. Mammals may be nimble and 'quick' but even a 'slow' moving brontosaurus is moving faster with less steps. As mammals start to be able to do more things, the big houses will be able to get it done 2, 3, 4 times as fast thanks to talent and always cutting edge hardware. (We have 30 render nodes, Zoic has 1100, guess which one can finish a project faster?) I have never seen my render times over the years go down. The moment some optimization is made or computers are made faster the more bling gets thrown at them.
- Speed of execution is a 1:1 ratio (all other things being equal) to the quality you can produce. Most small mammals aren't specialists who only do one thing. As a result they're survivors in the long run, but will never be as proficient as a dedicated X, Y, Z individual. Great for VFX supervisors but very poor for Assembly Line post. As everybody gets faster hardware the Big post houses will still be able to do it twice as fast and as a result push through twice as many jobs per day and continue demanding their high prices.
- I think a better comparison would be the big post houses are the sharks who can eat anything and do anything no matter what they're asked to do and the small boutiques and home operations are the pilot fish and Remoras respectively. Even if all the work gets outsourced dozens of places, you need someone conducting the choir who has an overall view of the entire operation and assembles the product in one place. We've worked with big studios and it's invaluable to send a proxy to be on the phone all day relaying what they need, when they need it, what we can do to help, where the project is at, etc, etc. A one or two man operation will have a really really hard time staying in communication and up to date. When you're out of touch (even with IM and email) things can start to go wrong very quickly.
- Post workflows I believe will always (except for the really simple stuff:aka reality TV programming work) be complicated in some regard because the best work will be always be done on beta and bleeding edge gear which is inherently buggy/confusing/difficult. You could do it in house. But the reason most post houses charge as much as they do is because that's how much *it costs*! You could take it in house... but then you have to buy and maintain a renderfarm, install that fiber network etc etc etc at which point you are a post house.
I use Atmosphere as an example of this. Originally Zoic did all of Battlestar Gallactica's VFX. Then the inhouse guys started getting more and more shots until they were handling a significant load of all the shots (once the pipeline had been ironed out by Zoic). So Atmosphere had to hire more artists, buy more systems, get more organized... and now is a full fledged VFX company.... so now they have overhead and expenses again so guess what... they're doing commercials and what not in down time.
I think we're going to see an explosion in the number of post houses as more people can afford the 'quick and cheap' work without needing custom tools, large pipeline management, tight deadlines etc... We for instance created photorealistic fish for an HP Sales video. You would never have done that even 5 years ago where it would have had to have been done by ILM or Digital Domain or Weta just because the technology wasn't there to get it done affordably. That's not really eating away at the big post houses, that's creating new profitable markets that haven't been previously exploited that's pilot fish work, cleaning up the stuff that's not really worth the hastle of the sharks. Atmosphere is an example of a Remora (working as a parasite/proxy for a big studio doing rotowork, small shops, effectively being the 'overflow' work bucket.) turning into a pilot fish (picking up small week long spots) turning into a shark and becoming a vendor in of themselves.
Of course I've been looking at it from a VFX post standpoint where Mike is mostly approaching it from an editorial view. And that's why I mostly agree with him. Editorial is inherently very few people with high end gear. (Editor/2-3 Assistants and a Colorist/Telecine operator) times 3 or 4 plus 5 or 6 motion graphics guys to fill it out. Honestly though I think that's an incredibly efficient arrangement and balance. I'm not convinced that any in house project is sufficiently large and demanding to keep your employees busy. It sounds to me like you would only need part time in house guys... in which case then you have artist moving between multiple systems and charging the higher "work is uncertain tommorow" freelancer rates.