COVID-19 Pandemic It brought video production to its knees, but the show must go on, and necessity is the mother of invention. Studiobox jumped in the back and created an interview her studio inside the box. The interviewee is shown a rugged case delivered by her friendly FedEx courier. They open it up, plug it in, call the production team and tell them it’s ready. At his CES in Las Vegas today, we took a closer look at the company’s vision for the future of video production and the software they’re developing to control it all.
“We are here in Las Vegas, controlling every aspect of the shoot. All camera settings (zoom, pan and tilt, lighting, audio) are all controlled from one computer by one operator. Ian Smith, co-founder of StudioBox, explained in an interview. At CES 2023 he with TechCrunch at the company’s booth as part of the Dolby.io demo space.
“Basically, the software does the work of a crew of about six people. Imagine wanting to have internal communication in a better way,” explains Smith. “I truly believe that this box can replace the interview crew.”
During the pandemic, the team was baptized with fire when Amazon decided to reboot the Kids in the Hall TV series.
“I grew up watching that sketch comedy show, and I was so, so, so happy to get that call. We had to do a comedy segment,” says Smith. “We just sent each of them a box and the shoot was completed very easily. Interviewees appreciated that very much because the crew was not stomping on the house. Here’s an example where the crew might have had to use Zoom, we were able to get very high quality content using our box.”
The current generation StudioBox has everything you need in one place. Lights, cameras, audio and numerous sockets for connecting more sound and video sources are all housed in a sturdy case. image creditBy Haje Kamps / TechCrunch.
From hardware to software
However, the company doesn’t want to be in the video production business and has spent most of the pandemic creating a software suite that would make this capability available to film crews who want to create high-quality content remotely. Currently, the company uses BlackMagic cameras and preconfigured boxes, but the next iteration of the software will support more cameras, starting with Sony and Canon. From there, the company wants the solution to be completely hardware agnostic, putting productivity entirely in the hands of software.
The software is still in development, but what the team showed off at CES was very impressive. Can be controlled remotely by any number of crew members. Someone zooms, someone else adjusts the exposure, a third adjusts the lighting, a fourth tweaks the audio, etc., all comfortably.
“We still don’t fully understand the business model. The cinematographer and the sound guy could be here, controlling each of their controls at the same time, and also imagine the layers in terms of how much bandwidth to use for the desired quality “We’ll have to do a lot of testing over the next three months to understand the pricing structure, but we’d love to have a subscription model where you get the box and the software all as a subscription package.” A lot of people don’t necessarily want to own gear, but they do want to take advantage of the cost savings of having a box.”
co-production
Co-editing and post-production are well-worn avenues in the world of film and television, but production itself has seen little innovation over the years.
“EEditors can collaborate from anywhere, take advantage of virtual machines, and collaborate using tools like DaVinci and Frame.io. No one really did anything to create content for production,” says Max Ostrove, one of his co-founders at StudioBox. “No one has ever done real-time video collaboration from anywhere in the world using remote access to equipment. We’re having a conversation while dialing in. This is the first time a single piece of software has communicated with all of these things at once.”
The company hired Ali El-Shayeb, who previously founded Nugget.ai, to lead StudioBox’s technology as CTO. He leverages his AI background, and StudioBox’s ultimate goal is to create an entirely AI-driven production workflow for him.
“Part of our plans for the future and what we were excited about is the AI. Lights, cameras and even audio automation. All technologies are getting better and better because they are becoming more and more decoupled.” island I will explain. “This is one of the benefits of working with Dolby.io. You can actually take advantage of Dolby.io’s enhanced audio API. was made.”
The ultimate goal is to enable AI to dramatically save time in setting up and creating high-quality video content.
“We are now using Dolby’s API to stream content in real time using AI to optimize content while streaming,” El-Shayeb explains. “We have hundreds of data points that we plan to track in the background. They all contribute to the capabilities we use to build scalable data pipelines for production. What’s really unique about the thing is that all of this is happening in the cloud, it’s not a local solution, you’re running it in real time, streaming all those data points, doing all the calculations and , it just allows you to optimize everything.
El-Shayeb points to the abundance of sliders in the company’s software. They control every aspect of the video settings we watch, and if he gets his way, the AI robot overlord moves a slider to suggest whether to help or replace the operator. .
cloud + local
Even with the best will in the world, internet connections can be unstable.
“I think one of the things that makes controlling the actual hardware unique is that the operator can trigger recording on the camera.” Ostrobe says. “If While the internet may be temporarily disconnected and a drop in resolution may be seen by remote viewers, the camera is completely unaffected and the end result still looks perfect. “
“We shot in a hospital where we didn’t know up-down speed beforehand. explained that it was found that Not good enough for Zoom calls, let alone high quality video production. “I mean, you can see the footage. It’s such an honor. It’s so pretty. You can also do all of this locally, without internet at all, in a pinch. have accomplished.”
The company is looking for an initial round of customers, partners and institutional investors at CES. The software suite will be available this spring.
