How the Cloud Scales Productions Beyond REMI

By Francis Zane

Like everything else in the modern world, video production is being changed by today’s faster and more ubiquitous networks, increasingly moving from on-site to remote production to become more efficient. And there is a straightforward way to do that: take the existing production tools and workflows, move them to networked servers, and provide remote access to them. This approach has definite advantages—it mirrors the existing workflows, tools, and interfaces, so it is easy to onboard existing video production crews.

However, as we looked at how to make video production more accessible, we wanted to reach not only video experts but also people from digital and social teams who wanted to leverage video content in new ways. With that, we shifted our model from “Remote Production” to “Cloud Production”. This change meant that instead of mirroring the existing workflows 1-1, we think of the full state of the production—what inputs, outputs, layouts, and assets are being prepped—as a live “Google Doc” with real-time collaboration. Each participant in the workflow, from directors to commentators to producers, can update that shared “document” through an interface tailored to their respective tasks, and those updates then drive the video being produced.

By really embracing the cloud model, Kiswe is able to support a much more flexible way of staffing the production. At the larger end, you can still have one person per task, each operating through their own interface. However, at the smaller end, this approach easily scales down to even a single caster/producer making a one-man show simply by adapting the user interface presented to him or her. Likewise, a team can add/drop people to the crew, shift roles from one person to another, and so on, all within a single production. Additionally, cloud production enables workflows that are much more accessible to non-traditional commentators such as social media influencers and infinitely scalable compared to remote production.

In the end, video production tools exist to help creators speak to their audience most effectively. By removing constraints on that process, we can enable them to create more stories—ones that connect to specific languages, fan communities, topics of interest, among others—than otherwise would have been told.

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