Tapping foot syndrome – we all have it. As a society we just don’t know how to wait anymore. Impatience boils at the first sign of a delay of any kind: a train, a slow barista, crap Wi-Fi. Anything less than ‘now’ is not acceptable.
Technology is to blame: it’s all become so damn efficient. Automated workflows, cloud services and instant communication bouncing around the globe. Its all go go go; there’s no time for pausing, no staring out the window having some thinking time while you are feeding pages through a fax machine or hand writing your job sheets. Click – and it’s done.
When you sit down and reflect on what technology has done to the workplace over the last two decades, it’s quite remarkable. When I joined the workforce it was exactly as I described above: faxes, job sheets, phone calls, letters. Our video tapes were recorded onto glorified cassette tapes with labels we created on a typewriter. Swearing was a regular occurrence when you made that one mistake after ten minutes of typing the contents. But that’s what Tippex was for – and we used a lot.
As technology has evolved in our day to day lives, expectations of what can be achieved have changed too. Everyone understands technology a lot more. Now we can all be filmmakers, editors, photographers, journalists.
Not only do we expect more from ourselves and our colleagues, but our clients are demanding it from us too. Video post production terminology used to be a foreign language, but now that the vocabulary and basic skills are more accessible our clients now expect their suppliers to deliver a much more efficient process.
The post production timeline used to be a well planned and lengthy affair. It had to be. Everything had to be planned and booked well in advance. Video had to be played out down lines at a set pre booked time, or delivered on tape. If you were sending tapes you had to build days, sometimes weeks into the process. Tapes often got stuck in some airport due to bad weather, or stranded in customs en route to foreign stations. Clients either had to be physically present to approve films, or VHS tapes needed to be biked or posted for approvals. Days had to be built into schedules for approvals alone.
But now, it’s a click of a button. You can send a video to Australia an hour before it’s due to be on air. You can email an approval file and receive client comments before you’ve even had a sip of your tea. It’s remarkable to think how far we’ve come in such a short space of time.
It feels like we have reached a golden age where everything just works. Technology has become second nature. We understand what it is capable of and are using it to our advantage. It’s made the world a smaller place.
To take for example our new venture, CaptionHub.
We’ve created a cloud tool that allows linguists and production teams to work collaboratively from anywhere on the planet.
Who would have imagined even just a couple of years ago that you could have one single film and countless translators adding captions directly onto the video, all being viewed in real time? This is a process that has eliminated days off the traditional and more manual way of working.
In post production we're finally reaping the benefits of the extraordinary advances that connectivity and technology has allowed. The time between ‘I want' to 'I've got it' really is 'now'.
See CaptionHub in action and realise the time really is “now”