Post sector reacts to coronavirus challenges
This is an excerpt from this article in Broadcast Magazine.
Zeb Chadfield, founder and CEO, The Finish Line
What has been the impact of coronavirus on your business?
We are built for pop-up and remote post-production so the main difference is a lot of our system installs are happening at the houses of our staff instead of the offices of our clients. Our HQ is also not client-facing so we can easily limit and manage the people coming in and out with all the standard rules in place for washing hands and disinfecting surfaces. Aside from a few minor tweaks it has been business as usual for us so far.
How are you enabling remote working?
All our administrative staff, like post producers and management, typically work remotely so they have all been told to do so. Our QC and delivery team is currently still running from HQ but alternating their time in the office to minimise the amount of people we have there at a time. We run systems for accelerated upload and automated ingest in the cloud as well as virtualised workstations with shared storage and bin locking for any projects that are ongoing, so luckily we can continue to run as a completely cloud based and distributed post-production company.
What has coronavirus meant for forward bookings?
A number of bookings that were ready to go and shoot outside of the UK have been put on a temporary hold. It may be that a lot of them find partners to work with already located in the locations that they want to shoot then data will be uploaded to us for processing. We have also heard of a number of production companies looking to create formats with minimal travel requirements and to make more of content that is already shot. We have also had more clients coming to us that aren’t able to be serviced by the traditional facilities. Some jobs will go, some new work will come in but it’s probably safe to say that we will all be watching a lot of user-generated-content clip shows in the coming months.
At the end of the day, everyone in the television industry will be getting creative and coming up with new formats and ideas. I only have one request and that is for Disney+ to bring the launch day forward a bit so we can start watching The Mandalorian now.
