The show must go on, and necessity is the mother of invention, despite the fact that the video production industry was brought to its knees by the COVID-19 Pandemic. An interview studio in a box was created by studiobox. A FedEx delivery person delivered a case for the interview. They open it, plug it in and call the production team to let them know they're good to go. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we looked at the company's vision for the future of video production and the software it is developing to control it all.
Ian Smith, co-founder of StudioBox, said in an interview that they control every aspect of the shoot from one computer, with one operator.
The software is doing the work of a few people. It is good for interviews. Smith says that CEOs and top-level executives want to do internal communication while looking and sounding great. This box can be used to replace an interview crew.
When Amazon revived the Kids in the Hall TV series, the team got its first taste of fire.
I was very happy to get that call when I was a kid. The segments were spread out all over the world and needed to be funny. We got that shoot done with a lot of ease after sending boxes to each of them. It was appreciated because no crew members were in the house. The crews were able to get high-quality content if they had used our boxes.
In a sturdy case, the current-gen StudioBox has everything you need in one place: light, camera, audio, and a number of sockets. The image is from Hajekamps.
The company doesn't want to be in the business of video production, so they created a software suite that makes it possible for film crews to create high-quality content remotely. The next version of the software will support more cameras, starting with Sony and Canon. The company wants to have the power of production in the hands of its software.
The team showed off their software at the Consumer Electronics Show. It's possible to have someone zoom in, someone else adjust the lighting, and a fourth adjust the audio, all from the comfort of their wherever-the-hell-people-work-from-these-days home.
There are a lot of possibilities, but we don't know the business model yet. You can give different permission to different crew members with seats-based pricing tiers. You might be paying for those seats if I have a cinematography and audio guy here at the same time. Smith doesn't commit to anything specific yet, but he can imagine tiers in terms of how much bandwidth you're going to use. We have a lot of testing to do over the next three months to figure out the pricing structure but we would love to do a subscription model. A lot of people who don't want to own the gear but want to take advantage of the cost savings of a box
In the film and TV world, collaborative editing and post-production is a well-worn path, but the production has seen less innovation over the years.
E ditors can use virtual machines and other tools to work together. Max Ostrove is one of the co-founding members of StudioBox. Real-time video collaboration from anywhere in the world has never been done. A person runs a camera on a film set. I would be lighting up the room. We are talking as we dial in. This is the first time a piece of software is talking to all of these things at the same time.
Ali El-Shayeb, the founder of Nugget.ai, was hired by the company to be its Chief Technology Officer. The ultimate goal of StudioBox is to create a fully artificial intelligence-driven production workflows.
What we were excited about was the artificial intelligence. The cameras and audio are also automation. Ostrove says that artificial intelligence is getting better at isolating the sound of my voice even though the mics are 10 feet away. One of the benefits of working with Dolby.io is that we can use their enhanced audioAPI. We were able to apply pop filters virtually.
The goal is to make it easier for the artificial intelligence to set up and create high quality video content.
El-Shayeb says that they are using artificial intelligence to stream content in real time and to adjust it as they stream it. There are a lot of data points that we are going to be following. They are contributors to features that are used to build a data pipeline. What is unique about what we are doing is that all of this happens in the cloud. This is not a solution within the area. It is possible to stream all those data points and do all those computations in real-time. Making my voice sound better is one of the things that can be done.
There are a lot of sliders in the company's software. We are looking at a video setup that is controlled by them and they suggest that if he has his way, the robot overlords will be able to help or replace an operator.
Even with the best will in the world, internet connection can be unreliable, but the company has gone a fair way out of its way to make sure that recording can continue even if there is no internet.
Ostrove says that controlling actual hardware is unique due to the fact that an operator can record on the camera. If the internet goes down for a while, the remote viewers might see a loss of resolution, but that won't affect the camera at all, and the final result still looks great.
We had to shoot at a hospital because we couldn't get the up and down speeds in time. Smith said that the upload speed turned out to be 0.1 Mbit. That isn't enough for a high quality video production. You can watch the video. I'm very proud of it. It is very sanitary. In a pinch, you can run this entire thing locally. We've accomplished that.
The company is looking for partners and customers at the show. The software will be available in the spring.
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