Flow Capture (formerly Moxion) offers various solutions to help you evaluate and review assets live and remotely. One of these is Flow Capture Rooms, which allows multiple parties to access different production assets at once within Rooms, helping your production and workflows run faster and more smoothly. This is especially true for unedited footage that hasn’t yet gone through the post-production stage, otherwise known as “digital dailies.” If you’re working on a film or TV project, there are many production stages Rooms can help streamline. These include analyzing unfinished script drafts, scenes, cuts, songs, and promotional still images.
So how do Rooms work? And what do they mean for the future of the film and TV industry? Here’s a detailed breakdown of what Flow Capture Rooms can add to your production and workflow processes.
First and foremost, these Rooms allow production teams and multiple other people working on the same project to access and evaluate different assets simultaneously. Review sessions using Flow Capture (formerly Moxion) Rooms are done live within Flow Capture—there’s no need to leave the workspace or access these sessions through any third-party app. Virtually any media you upload to Flow Capture can be viewed within these Rooms. Participants can also interact with one another and collaborate live using video chat, audio, and/or text.
Rooms are also simple to set up. You upload each asset you want to review before inviting members into the live Room. You can also live stream directly from your creative software or desktop to edit assets in real-time. Individual participants or entire teams can be added before starting the review session. If you have pre-existing Rooms already, you can easily update, re-open, and tweak them whenever necessary—whether those Rooms have just been saved as drafts or if they’ve already closed after hosting previous sessions.
Aaron Morton, the President of the New Zealand Cinematographers Society, boasts a resume that includes television series like Black Mirror, Orphan Black, Spartacus, and most recently The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. He credits Flow Capture for streamlining various elements of the production process and speaks to the ease of its use in his latest projects.
"Having a system like Flow Capture that's so user-friendly and set up so well has made this event a little bit easier to get through. But it's a funny one because for me, systems like Flow Capture are really just about me watching at the end of the day, what I already watched during the day,” he says.
"That's the thing most useful to me, to sit after the dust has settled a few hours later, to check whether I've made the right choices through the day. It's a chance to debrief myself, how I lit something or handled some shots. That's really the core of how I use it, rather than being heavily involved in the distribution of things to producers to edits or getting approvals on cuts or casting or review. That review process is a big one, but it's something I'm not often involved in."
Flow Capture (formerly Moxion) Rooms have four distinct purposes for users: creating the rooms, hosting the review session, editing assets, or participating as a reviewer. Each offers excellent functionality, and a wide range of assets can be analyzed. And when assets can be analyzed quicker, your workflows become more streamlined.
For example, when reviewing a video asset, you and your teammates can leave comments and annotations at any point during the review, and the comment appears at the specific time code. Comments might include feedback on the asset or suggestions for improving it. Once a user leaves a comment, the asset will be paused for them, but not their colleagues, allowing them not to disrupt others’ viewing while they can take as much time to write as they need. After the review, comments can be securely exported into various formats, including PDF, for future reference.
Flow Capture Rooms offer a host of benefits for your production team. For one, you can use these Rooms to view and assess multiple assets at once. Secondly, assets viewed within the Room are sorted in the form of Playlists keeping things organized. Any reviewed assets are then stored in preparation for your live session. Team members can pull assets from literally any folder involved in your production when making playlists. Lastly, participants can stream assets and cuts from their desktop and creative software interface in real time for a "virtual" over-the-shoulder review, just as if they were in an editing bay.
Interpersonal communication is also easy to facilitate, as you can chat with your colleagues via chat or video within Flow Capture. The accessibility of these Rooms facilitates enhanced collaboration and improves communication between you and your colleagues. Best of all, Flow Capture's (formerly Moxion) cloud infrastructure ensures Rooms can be accessed from the comfort of your own home across multiple devices.
Chris Teague, a cinematographer who’s worked on TV shows like GLOW, Russian Doll, and Broad City, considers Flow Capture an excellent platform for viewing dailies (aka the raw footage of a film or TV show during production), and credits the platform for the quality of those dailies relative to Flow Capture's competitors.
"For dailies, I used an iPad with Flow Capture, which is perhaps the best dailies viewing platform I’ve ever worked with,” he says. “I feel like the color is more accurate than other platforms, which is extremely useful for checking out contrast and shadow level. Too many times with dailies, you get blacks washed out and highlights blown, and you can’t judge anything critical."
Flow Capture's device agnosticism has proven particularly convenient given how remote work continues to become increasingly normalized. Barrie M. Osborne, a producer and production manager for films like The Matrix, The Meg, Mulan, Pete’s Dragon, and most notably, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, praises Flow Capture's ability to connect production staff members from opposite corners of the globe and ensure quality control is being fully maintained by all parties involved.
“[Flow Capture is] invaluable to ensure the remote units were capturing the director’s vision and production values so essential to any film. We were able to receive video assist footage by the end of each shooting day from 2nd and scenic units shooting in remote regions of China while 1U was shooting in New Zealand."
First, we have to think about how tools like these can be a boon for the future of the film and TV industry. Because of the open, collaborative nature of Flow Capture (formerly Moxion) Rooms, creative teams can streamline workflows and further improve cross-department communication.
From a technological advancement standpoint, Flow Capture Rooms also act as a "virtual studio" for you and the team—making virtual collaboration even easier as if you're all together in the same room. The proliferation of remote/cloud-based workflows has been sped up exponentially by the COVID-19 pandemic and has helped teams work together despite physical distance. With film and TV studios worldwide increasingly pivoting to having teams based remotely, the "virtual studio" has gone from a concept to a reality.
Your assets will also not need as many iterations as they usually would. You can now analyze assets in the moment without needing to go through any of the time-consuming rigmarole of compressing and uploading assets first. Rather than waiting for supervisor feedback, making the necessary adjustments, and re-compressing/re-uploading your asset, you can bring it into the Room, exchange feedback, and make real-time changes as you view it together. There's no need to physically be in the same room as your boss in these scenarios.!
Even if you’re working on what you hope will become a major blockbuster film, Flow Capture Rooms allow you to communicate in real-time with your colleagues even if you’re physically on opposite ends of your production setup. Osborne attests to this, as he says Flow Capture helped speed up the production process while he was working on The Meg.
“We frequently had one unit out on the Hauraki Gulf and another at our studio base where we were filming on either of the purpose-built water tanks,” he tells us. “Flow Capture enabled us to instantly confirm continuity and secure director approval notes.”
As for Aaron Morton and other cinematographers like him, Flow Capture provides high-quality images for production staff on both ends of a Flow Capture Room to view and analyze. “The images are very true to what we see while we're shooting, which is as much as you can ask for, really,” he says. “You don’t really want your work being misrepresented—that can end badly. And it's your images that are being judged each day. So, yes, it's important.”
For artists, reviewers, and other users of these tools, using these Rooms to your advantage is an excellent way to improve upon the assets you've already compiled. Since feedback can be exchanged in real-time during reviews, it's easier to ensure your assets and content are of the highest possible quality.
As one of the remote production space’s biggest innovators, Flow Capture has a world of potential for further growth as it continues expanding into the future. Flow Capture Rooms are evidence of this potential and of Flow Capture's commitment to developing world-class tools for the industry. The ability to share, review, and analyze any aspect of your production workflow in real-time with your colleagues is a must-have for your upcoming projects—and Flow Capture's continued growth will help this feature become even more detailed, sophisticated, and easy to use. Whether your teammates are VFX artists, scriptwriters, camera operators, video editors, or otherwise, there are plenty of ways for each member of your post-production team to benefit from Flow Capture (formerly Moxion) Rooms!
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