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British HITS: Better Data Management Keeps Virtual Productions On Time and On Budget

Virtual productions rely heavily on 3D assets and, when a company is shooting in volume, the assets being rendered in real-time must be just right. The process of getting those assets pixel perfect starts early and involves many versions, artists and even different organizations.

Gerhard Krüger, professional services consultant at Perforce, said during the session “Better Data Management to Keep Virtual Productions on Time & on Budget” at the Nov. 15 British Hollywood Innovation & Transformation Summit (HITS) event in London.

During the session, he explained how the Perforce Versioning & Collaboration Suite can not only help in the early stages of a virtual production but also when shooting in volume, while keeping a production on track and on budget.

“We actually made our mark in the game development space, and it might be an odd combination as to why we are now” making movies too, he conceded. But he noted that, in the game space, huge amounts of data are transferred and digital assets are being created in the process.

“Perforce, since the early 90s, has been working in the game development space, so we’ve sort of grown up working with the Unreal Engine, producing games,” he pointed out.

So “version control – that is where we started,” he said, adding: “Really what version control is is all these assets and if we talk about assets, we are talking about files that you create and … change those files and then have an increment or a version of that file.” And then if there was a mistake made and you want to change that scene that maybe was a bit too red, or you decided to go for the evening shot and then later on decided to go back to the day shot, “that’s a version of the same thing,” he noted.

What is ultimately crucial is the ability to take assets and version it almost instantly and have it available on platforms including Unreal for artisan designers creating the content and giving them that “ability to very easily switch, but also make sure that the data is secure, it’s stored properly and versioned properly,” he explained. “So that’s really the nutshell of what versioning is.”

At the end of the day, “we are duplicating data so the problems that you’ve heard about, the amount of data we are generating, we are duplicating the same thing multiple times and, with a versioning engine, we can actually lessen that load,” he said.

Game engines are, today, even being used in vehicles, he went on to say.

What Perforce does is make it easy for artisan designers to work with these asset, he said. “If you come from the game space, we have a lot of very technical people that understand how these things work.”

The company has now created a product called HelixDam that “actually sits on top of our version control engine and its sole purpose is to make it easy for artisan designers to find the assets and also see assets that are coming directly from the content creation and various artists and designers,” he said.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is used to “kind of perform a taxonomy on [an] item, effectively categorizing and organizing our assets for us,” he noted. “So if I’m looking for a limestone rock, I can type in the word limestone. The system will return every single asset ever created that matches that AI tag,” he said.

“If I’m looking for a Mars, a weapon, a gun, whatever, I can be very generic, or I can say I’m looking specifically for an AK 47, and the system would find that for you in the system, and it uses both AI tags and manually [creates] tags within the system to actually do that for you,” he said.

To download the presentation, click here.

To view the entire session, click here.

The British Hollywood Innovation & Transformation Summit, held in conjunction with the EIDR Annual Participant Meeting, was sponsored by Whip Media, GeoComply, Perforce, Signiant, and EIDR, was programmed under the guidance of the content advisors of the Hollywood IT Society, and was produced by MESA and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS).