HPA Retreat Vindicates Lumberjack approach

At the recent Hollywood Post Alliance Retreat, the panel ‘Professional Forecast: Cloudy but Clearing’ strongly supported the idea of capturing metadata (log notes) at the time of acquisition. This is exactly our goal with Lumberjack.

The panel included moderator Seth Hallen of Testronic Labs and panelists Al Kovalick, Media Systems Consulting; Robert Jenkins, COO, CloudSigma; Mark Lemmons, COO, T3Media; Sean Tajkowski, Tajkowski Group; and Steve Anastasi, Warner Bros. Technical Operations, and the subject was how “the cloud” would affect the production industry (implied “in ‘Hollywood'”). I’m quoting from Debra Kaufmann’s excellent summary of the retreat at CreativeCOW.net.

Tajkowski noted the merging, and inter-dependence, of the data and the motion picture industries. But all that data has created a looming crisis. “Although digital acquisition saves a lot of money on the front end (i.e., acquisition),” said Anastasi, “It is about to cost a lot more on the backend, with regard to storage and archiving. The studios are about to get a bill and will be shocked.

”Capturing metadata at the time of acquisition and following it all the way to the archive is a critical challenge to the industry, he continued. “Whoever comes up with that standard to keep those assets alive and searchable for many years to come will make a lot of money,” he said. “Without metadata, we can dump all kinds of files into the cloud, but if we can’t find them, what is it worth?”

Capturing metadata at the source means you do not have to capture it later (at considerable extra time and expense). Capturing metadata at the source means it is available for every step down the production chain: from location, to editorial, to distribution and to archiving and asset management. This is why we believe so strongly in the Lumberjack approach.

If anyone is interested, we started a private beta of Lumberjack this week through to the end of May (when we expect to release it to the public).  If you have a current reality or documentary project you can test with, and Final Cut Pro X, and want to beta test, contact me.