HOW HOLLYWOOD’S VISUAL EFFECTS ARTISTS CAN WORK FROM HOME AND BLOCK THE HACKERS

Takeaway:  

Using WebRTC technology Hollywood Studios can Work From Home (WFH) with complete confidence and security, and deliver studio quality movie content. This is a UNIQUE Breakthrough in Movie Production. 

Hollywood’s fear of piracy during post production editing over the internet may now be unfounded. Not only can production and post production editing now be done by editors, visual effects artists and others when "Sheltered in Home" and geographically located away from the studio complexes, with consumer grade computers and normal internet connections, it can now do it SECURELY.  

——————-

 Backstory: Crammed in a room

 On March 20, 2020, Stacy Perman, writing for the Los Angeles Times reported that a 12 strong team of visual effects artists were crammed, cheek by jowl, into a 500 square foot room while COVID19 was wreaking havoc outside and the rest of Hollywood had gone home to Shelter In Place and Work From Home or had been furloughed.

 Why did this happen? 

The visual effects artists were in their own version of lockdown, imposed by the studio, to protect the secret content of a blockbuster movie they were working on. These artists, digital compositors, were required to work on site because of a genuine fear of content being stolen if it was processed in any other way than on the strictly controlled and secure devices and networks of the studios special effects and production departments. Yet they were deeply concerned about the proximity threat of COVID19.

Was the lockdown of staff logical?

 Movie piracy has been rampant. A 2020 report by DataProt reported that 126.7 billion viewings worth of US produced content is pirated every year and, in the movie industry, the annual global revenue loss from digital piracy has reached nearly $100bn.

 While these losses are mainly the result of pirating released movie and TV content, the effect of pirating of “to be” released movies - or in production movie content - can be devastating to the studio. When the Expendables 3 premiered in 2015 there had already been 70 million illegal viewings costing $100million in lost revenues.

 Add to this the recollection of the infamous Sony hack and you understand why the Studio bosses are paranoid. On November 24, 2014, a hacker group which identified itself by the name "Guardians of Peace" leaked a release of confidential data from the film studio of Sony Pictures film studio. The data included personal information about Sony Pictures employees and their families, emails between employees, information about executive salaries at the company, copies of then-unreleased Sony films, plans for future Sony films, scripts for certain films, and other information

Hollywood has gone digital

You also need to remember that today Hollywood has gone digital. Augmented reality and special effects are an integral part of movie making; digital filmmaking is the de facto production method.

 If amateurs can get their hands on ‘screeners’ (the pre-release movie copies for marketing purposes) then hackers will try to get into the digital film production process. Today cyber security is a critical part of the film studios arsenal to protect its property.

In this piracy threatened, hacker threatened, environment, it is logical that studio bosses were not in the mood to entertain Work From Home and Shelter in Place for those producing upcoming secret movie content.

But this fear of loss can now be removed …

 The production and post production process in today’s digital movie world is enabled by teams of producers, editors, designers, special effects artists and others working on studio wide, secure, networked servers, computers, cameras, and devices, “air-gapped” from the internet. If you need to replicate any part of this environment outside the studio, you require production quality and impenetrable security. In a Work From Home situation the device and connections being used by the “At Home” editor has to be as secure as the studio equivalent.

Web Real Time Communications is a technology that can be used for real time streaming, and which has created an environment which meets what a Senior Executive of one of the top five Hollywood Studios described as the only Work From Home solution he would countenance. He says that “Whether in the studio or WFH, post-production and validation of content requires the same requirements:

1. Movie Production quality,
2. Interactive latency for team to collaborate in real time, and
3. Affordable price, particularly when everybody will need to have the solution at home.

Let’s dive a little deeper

 WFH, using the normal internet and consumer computing devices (laptops / desktops/tablets) would send media from (say) the visual effects artist, to the editor - located in another WFH location, over the public internet. Normally, it can be assumed that the media is protected while in transit over the public internet by transport encryption. But media has to transit through platform suppliers’ and Internet Service Providers’ (ISPs) servers. The risk in this approach is that it is possible to access media when it passes through the servers. The studio must trust the platform provider, and (possibly) the ISPs to secure their servers, and not to be legally forced to provide access to them. Studios do not perceive this as an acceptable risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception

So, to provide some security in the media delivery process, studios use content protection measures like DRM, which in turn is based on an additional layer of encryption. However DRM only secures the media delivery process and is not end - to - end encrypted.  (https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/)

 The solution - add more protection

When you use secure Web Real Time Communications - provided by such suppliers as Privus - peace of mind is brought to Hollywood studios and allowing ALL staff to Shelter in Place and Work From Home with total security.

 Conclusion

Using secure WebRTC from suppliers such as Privus Hollywood Studio bosses (And movie producers anywhere) can be confident that their staff who are Working From Home, while Sheltering In Place during Covid, can operate in a totally secure and impenetrable environment safe from leaks and hackers. 

The team in the studio reported by Stacy Perman can now go home...

-------------------- 

 Bill Lewis - [email protected]

keywords

#Hollywood, #Millicast #End-to-end-encryption #Covid #WorkFromHome #ShelterInPlace #Movieprodution #remoteediting

HOW HOLLYWOOD’S VISUAL EFFECTS ARTISTS CAN WORK    FROM HOME AND BLOCK THE HACKERS

.

——————-

Crammed in a room

On March 20, 2020, Stacy Perman, writing for the Los Angeles Times reported that a 12 strong team of visual effects artists were crammed, cheek by jowl, into a 500 square foot room while COVID19 was wreaking havoc outside and the rest of Hollywood had gone home to Shelter In Place and Work From Home or had been furloughed.

Why did this happen? 

The visual effects artists were in their own version of lockdown, imposed by the studio, to protect the secret content of a blockbuster movie they were working on. These artists, digital compositors, were required to work on site because of a genuine fear of content being stolen if it was processed in any other way than on the strictly controlled and secure devices and networks of the studios special effects and production departments. Yet they were deeply concerned about the proximity threat of COVID19.

Was the lockdown of staff logical?

Movie piracy has been rampant. A 2020 report] by DataProt reported that 126,7 billion viewings worth of US produced content are pirated every year and the annual global revenue loss from digital piracy has reached nearly $100bn in the movie industry.

While these losses are mainly the result of pirating released movie and TV content, the effect of pirating of “to be” released movies - or in production movie content - can be devastating to the studio. When the Expendables 3 premiered in 2015 there had already been 70 million illegal viewings costing $100million in lost revenues.

Add to this the recollection of the infamous Sony hack and you understand why the Studio bosses are paranoid. On November 24, 2014, a hacker group which identified itself by the name "Guardians of Peace" leaked a release of confidential data from the film studio Sony Pictures. The data included personal information about Sony Pictures employees and their families, emails between employees, information about executive salaries at the company, copies of then-unreleased Sony films, plans for future Sony films, scripts for certain films, and other information

You also need to remember that today Hollywood has gone digital. Augmented reality and special effects are an integral part of movie making; digital filmmaking is the de facto production method.

If amateurs can get their hands on ‘screeners’ (the pre-release movie copies for marketing purposes) then hackers will try to get into the digital film production process. Today cyber security is a critical part of the film studios arsenal to protect its property.

In this piracy threatened, hacker threatened, environment, it is logical that studio bosses were not in the mood to entertain Work From Home and Shelter in Place for those producing upcoming secret movie content.

But this fear of loss can now be removed …

The production and post production process in today’s digital movie world is enabled by teams of producers, editors, designers, special effects artists and others working on studio wide, secure, networked servers, computers, cameras, and devices, “air-gapped” from the internet. If you need to replicate any part of this environment outside the studio, you require production quality and impenetrable security. In a Work From Home situation the device and connections being used by the “At Home” editor has to be as secure as the studio equivalent.

CoSMo Software, a software company who are specialists in real time streaming, has created an environment which meets what a Senior Executive of one of the top 5 Hollywood Studios described as the only Work From Home solution he would countenance. He says that “Whether in the studio or WFH, post-production and validation of content requires the same requirements:

1. Movie Production quality,

2. Interactive latency for team to collaborate in real time, 

3. Affordable price, particularly when everybody will need to have the solution at home, and

CoSMo’s real time movie editing solution “Millicast Studio” - named after their real time streaming platform Millicast - meets all requirements and is being adopted by several Hollywood studios. You can read more about this here and here.

Millicast Studio also adds solid send-to-end security.

The “Millicast Studio” is providing the studio bosses with what is practically Digital Right Management (DRM) on steroids, and putting in place bank level protection for the media content.

The media is encrypted from end-to-end and the studio gets the capacity to cherry-pick who they allow to see their content. They can, for example, restrict the access group to the team members, without intervention from the delivery platform, and without giving access to your content to any media server, or network box on the path! This is true end to end encryption. 

Let’s dive a little deeper

WFH, using the normal internet and consumer computing devices (laptops / desktops/tablets) would send media from (say) the visual effects artist, to the editor - located in another WFH location, over the public internet. Normally, it can be assumed that the media is protected while in transit over the public internet by transport encryption. But media has to transit through platform suppliers’ and Internet Service Providers’ (ISPs) servers. The risk in this approach is that it is possible to access media when it passes through the servers. The studio must trust the platform provider, and (possibly) the ISPs to secure their servers, and not to be legally forced to provide access to them. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception). Studios do not perceive this as an acceptable risk.

So, to provide some security In the media delivery process, studios use content protection measures like DRM, which in turn is based on an additional layer of encryption. (https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/). However DRM only secures the media delivery process and is not end - to - end encrypted.  

The solution - add more protection

CoSMo has added this real-time media double encryption solution to MIllicast Studio (in private Beta) - bringing peace of mind to Hollywood studios and allowing ALL staff to Shelter in Place and Work From Home with total security.

With CoSMo’s webRTC End to End Media Encryption studios can be assured that the flow from, and between, the WFH staff is secure. impenetrable.

Where did CoSMo’s End to End Encryption come from? For the past three years, In partnership with Google, CoSMo has been developing real-time media double encryption solutions to extend the existing WebRTC standard. (more info here: https://cosmosoftware.io/products/webrtc-end-to-end-media-encryption). This solution has been used in production by Google in it’s DUO product for since 2018, and is being standardised at the IETF (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-omara-sframe-00).

Conclusion

Using “Millicast Studio” from CoSMo Hollywood Studio bosses (And movie producers anywhere) can be confident that their staff who are Working From Home, while Sheltering In Place during Covid, can operate in a totally secure and impenetrable environment safe from leaks and hackers. The team in the studio reported by Stacy Perman can go home...

-------------------- 

To see more on how CoSMo delivers the requirements of the Hollywood studios see my post https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/millicast-our-streaming-service-saves-hollywoods-production-lewis/?trackingId=aoa0uxHeJ0MRqIBTkq8UHA%3D%3D

HOW HOLLYWOOD’S VISUAL EFFECTS ARTISTS CAN WORK    FROM HOME AND BLOCK THE HACKERS

Takeaway:  

CoSMo shows how Hollywood Studios can Work From Home (WFH) with complete confidence and security, and deliver studio quality. This is a UNIQUE Breakthrough in Movie Production. Hollywood’s fear of piracy during post production editing over the internet may now be unfounded. Not only can production and post production editing now be done by editors, visual effects artists and others when Sheltered in Home and geographically located away from the studio complexes, with consumer grade computers and normal internet connections, it can now do it SECURELY.  

How is this possible? In the upcoming “Millicast Studio” PaaS, CoSMo will provide a fully end-to-end encrypted, real-time, streaming service that allows editing, at film production quality, over the public internet - see here and here - and will provide a real-time forensic watermarking feature, which allows full traceability of any leak, without compromising the latency of the service which is necessary for interactive sessions (both features are in private beta today).

.

——————-

Crammed in a room

On March 20, 2020, Stacy Perman, writing for the Los Angeles Times reported that a 12 strong team of visual effects artists were crammed, cheek by jowl, into a 500 square foot room while COVID19 was wreaking havoc outside and the rest of Hollywood had gone home to Shelter In Place and Work From Home or had been furloughed.

Why did this happen? 

The visual effects artists were in their own version of lockdown, imposed by the studio, to protect the secret content of a blockbuster movie they were working on. These artists, digital compositors, were required to work on site because of a genuine fear of content being stolen if it was processed in any other way than on the strictly controlled and secure devices and networks of the studios special effects and production departments. Yet they were deeply concerned about the proximity threat of COVID19.

Was the lockdown of staff logical?

Movie piracy has been rampant. A 2020 report] by DataProt reported that 126,7 billion viewings worth of US produced content are pirated every year and the annual global revenue loss from digital piracy has reached nearly $100bn in the movie industry.

While these losses are mainly the result of pirating released movie and TV content, the effect of pirating of “to be” released movies - or in production movie content - can be devastating to the studio. When the Expendables 3 premiered in 2015 there had already been 70 million illegal viewings costing $100million in lost revenues.

Add to this the recollection of the infamous Sony hack and you understand why the Studio bosses are paranoid. On November 24, 2014, a hacker group which identified itself by the name "Guardians of Peace" leaked a release of confidential data from the film studio Sony Pictures. The data included personal information about Sony Pictures employees and their families, emails between employees, information about executive salaries at the company, copies of then-unreleased Sony films, plans for future Sony films, scripts for certain films, and other information

You also need to remember that today Hollywood has gone digital. Augmented reality and special effects are an integral part of movie making; digital filmmaking is the de facto production method.

If amateurs can get their hands on ‘screeners’ (the pre-release movie copies for marketing purposes) then hackers will try to get into the digital film production process. Today cyber security is a critical part of the film studios arsenal to protect its property.

In this piracy threatened, hacker threatened, environment, it is logical that studio bosses were not in the mood to entertain Work From Home and Shelter in Place for those producing upcoming secret movie content.

But this fear of loss can now be removed …

The production and post production process in today’s digital movie world is enabled by teams of producers, editors, designers, special effects artists and others working on studio wide, secure, networked servers, computers, cameras, and devices, “air-gapped” from the internet. If you need to replicate any part of this environment outside the studio, you require production quality and impenetrable security. In a Work From Home situation the device and connections being used by the “At Home” editor has to be as secure as the studio equivalent.

CoSMo Software, a software company who are specialists in real time streaming, has created an environment which meets what a Senior Executive of one of the top 5 Hollywood Studios described as the only Work From Home solution he would countenance. He says that “Whether in the studio or WFH, post-production and validation of content requires the same requirements:

1. Movie Production quality,

2. Interactive latency for team to collaborate in real time, 

3. Affordable price, particularly when everybody will need to have the solution at home, and

CoSMo’s real time movie editing solution “Millicast Studio” - named after their real time streaming platform Millicast - meets all requirements and is being adopted by several Hollywood studios. You can read more about this here and here.

Millicast Studio also adds solid send-to-end security.

The “Millicast Studio” is providing the studio bosses with what is practically Digital Right Management (DRM) on steroids, and putting in place bank level protection for the media content.

The media is encrypted from end-to-end and the studio gets the capacity to cherry-pick who they allow to see their content. They can, for example, restrict the access group to the team members, without intervention from the delivery platform, and without giving access to your content to any media server, or network box on the path! This is true end to end encryption. 

Let’s dive a little deeper

WFH, using the normal internet and consumer computing devices (laptops / desktops/tablets) would send media from (say) the visual effects artist, to the editor - located in another WFH location, over the public internet. Normally, it can be assumed that the media is protected while in transit over the public internet by transport encryption. But media has to transit through platform suppliers’ and Internet Service Providers’ (ISPs) servers. The risk in this approach is that it is possible to access media when it passes through the servers. The studio must trust the platform provider, and (possibly) the ISPs to secure their servers, and not to be legally forced to provide access to them. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception). Studios do not perceive this as an acceptable risk.

So, to provide some security In the media delivery process, studios use content protection measures like DRM, which in turn is based on an additional layer of encryption. (https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/). However DRM only secures the media delivery process and is not end - to - end encrypted.  

The solution - add more protection

CoSMo has added this real-time media double encryption solution to MIllicast Studio (in private Beta) - bringing peace of mind to Hollywood studios and allowing ALL staff to Shelter in Place and Work From Home with total security.

With CoSMo’s webRTC End to End Media Encryption studios can be assured that the flow from, and between, the WFH staff is secure. impenetrable.

Where did CoSMo’s End to End Encryption come from? For the past three years, In partnership with Google, CoSMo has been developing real-time media double encryption solutions to extend the existing WebRTC standard. (more info here: https://cosmosoftware.io/products/webrtc-end-to-end-media-encryption). This solution has been used in production by Google in it’s DUO product for since 2018, and is being standardised at the IETF (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-omara-sframe-00).

Conclusion

Using “Millicast Studio” from CoSMo Hollywood Studio bosses (And movie producers anywhere) can be confident that their staff who are Working From Home, while Sheltering In Place during Covid, can operate in a totally secure and impenetrable environment safe from leaks and hackers. The team in the studio reported by Stacy Perman can go home...

-------------------- 

To see more on how CoSMo delivers the requirements of the Hollywood studios see my post https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/millicast-our-streaming-service-saves-hollywoods-production-lewis/?trackingId=aoa0uxHeJ0MRqIBTkq8UHA%3D%3D

HOW HOLLYWOOD’S VISUAL EFFECTS ARTISTS CAN WORK    FROM HOME AND BLOCK THE HACKERS

Takeaway:  

CoSMo shows how Hollywood Studios can Work From Home (WFH) with complete confidence and security, and deliver studio quality. This is a UNIQUE Breakthrough in Movie Production. Hollywood’s fear of piracy during post production editing over the internet may now be unfounded. Not only can production and post production editing now be done by editors, visual effects artists and others when Sheltered in Home and geographically located away from the studio complexes, with consumer grade computers and normal internet connections, it can now do it SECURELY.  

How is this possible? In the upcoming “Millicast Studio” PaaS, CoSMo will provide a fully end-to-end encrypted, real-time, streaming service that allows editing, at film production quality, over the public internet - see here and here - and will provide a real-time forensic watermarking feature, which allows full traceability of any leak, without compromising the latency of the service which is necessary for interactive sessions (both features are in private beta today).

.

——————-

Crammed in a room

On March 20, 2020, Stacy Perman, writing for the Los Angeles Times reported that a 12 strong team of visual effects artists were crammed, cheek by jowl, into a 500 square foot room while COVID19 was wreaking havoc outside and the rest of Hollywood had gone home to Shelter In Place and Work From Home or had been furloughed.

Why did this happen? 

The visual effects artists were in their own version of lockdown, imposed by the studio, to protect the secret content of a blockbuster movie they were working on. These artists, digital compositors, were required to work on site because of a genuine fear of content being stolen if it was processed in any other way than on the strictly controlled and secure devices and networks of the studios special effects and production departments. Yet they were deeply concerned about the proximity threat of COVID19.

Was the lockdown of staff logical?

Movie piracy has been rampant. A 2020 report] by DataProt reported that 126,7 billion viewings worth of US produced content are pirated every year and the annual global revenue loss from digital piracy has reached nearly $100bn in the movie industry.

While these losses are mainly the result of pirating released movie and TV content, the effect of pirating of “to be” released movies - or in production movie content - can be devastating to the studio. When the Expendables 3 premiered in 2015 there had already been 70 million illegal viewings costing $100million in lost revenues.

Add to this the recollection of the infamous Sony hack and you understand why the Studio bosses are paranoid. On November 24, 2014, a hacker group which identified itself by the name "Guardians of Peace" leaked a release of confidential data from the film studio Sony Pictures. The data included personal information about Sony Pictures employees and their families, emails between employees, information about executive salaries at the company, copies of then-unreleased Sony films, plans for future Sony films, scripts for certain films, and other information

You also need to remember that today Hollywood has gone digital. Augmented reality and special effects are an integral part of movie making; digital filmmaking is the de facto production method.

If amateurs can get their hands on ‘screeners’ (the pre-release movie copies for marketing purposes) then hackers will try to get into the digital film production process. Today cyber security is a critical part of the film studios arsenal to protect its property.

In this piracy threatened, hacker threatened, environment, it is logical that studio bosses were not in the mood to entertain Work From Home and Shelter in Place for those producing upcoming secret movie content.

But this fear of loss can now be removed …

The production and post production process in today’s digital movie world is enabled by teams of producers, editors, designers, special effects artists and others working on studio wide, secure, networked servers, computers, cameras, and devices, “air-gapped” from the internet. If you need to replicate any part of this environment outside the studio, you require production quality and impenetrable security. In a Work From Home situation the device and connections being used by the “At Home” editor has to be as secure as the studio equivalent.

CoSMo Software, a software company who are specialists in real time streaming, has created an environment which meets what a Senior Executive of one of the top 5 Hollywood Studios described as the only Work From Home solution he would countenance. He says that “Whether in the studio or WFH, post-production and validation of content requires the same requirements:

1. Movie Production quality,

2. Interactive latency for team to collaborate in real time, 

3. Affordable price, particularly when everybody will need to have the solution at home, and

CoSMo’s real time movie editing solution “Millicast Studio” - named after their real time streaming platform Millicast - meets all requirements and is being adopted by several Hollywood studios. You can read more about this here and here.

Millicast Studio also adds solid send-to-end security.

The “Millicast Studio” is providing the studio bosses with what is practically Digital Right Management (DRM) on steroids, and putting in place bank level protection for the media content.

The media is encrypted from end-to-end and the studio gets the capacity to cherry-pick who they allow to see their content. They can, for example, restrict the access group to the team members, without intervention from the delivery platform, and without giving access to your content to any media server, or network box on the path! This is true end to end encryption. 

Let’s dive a little deeper

WFH, using the normal internet and consumer computing devices (laptops / desktops/tablets) would send media from (say) the visual effects artist, to the editor - located in another WFH location, over the public internet. Normally, it can be assumed that the media is protected while in transit over the public internet by transport encryption. But media has to transit through platform suppliers’ and Internet Service Providers’ (ISPs) servers. The risk in this approach is that it is possible to access media when it passes through the servers. The studio must trust the platform provider, and (possibly) the ISPs to secure their servers, and not to be legally forced to provide access to them. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception). Studios do not perceive this as an acceptable risk.

So, to provide some security In the media delivery process, studios use content protection measures like DRM, which in turn is based on an additional layer of encryption. (https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/). However DRM only secures the media delivery process and is not end - to - end encrypted.  

The solution - add more protection

CoSMo has added this real-time media double encryption solution to MIllicast Studio (in private Beta) - bringing peace of mind to Hollywood studios and allowing ALL staff to Shelter in Place and Work From Home with total security.

With CoSMo’s webRTC End to End Media Encryption studios can be assured that the flow from, and between, the WFH staff is secure. impenetrable.

Where did CoSMo’s End to End Encryption come from? For the past three years, In partnership with Google, CoSMo has been developing real-time media double encryption solutions to extend the existing WebRTC standard. (more info here: https://cosmosoftware.io/products/webrtc-end-to-end-media-encryption). This solution has been used in production by Google in it’s DUO product for since 2018, and is being standardised at the IETF (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-omara-sframe-00).

Conclusion

Using “Millicast Studio” from CoSMo Hollywood Studio bosses (And movie producers anywhere) can be confident that their staff who are Working From Home, while Sheltering In Place during Covid, can operate in a totally secure and impenetrable environment safe from leaks and hackers. The team in the studio reported by Stacy Perman can go home...

-------------------- 

To see more on how CoSMo delivers the requirements of the Hollywood studios see my post https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/millicast-our-streaming-service-saves-hollywoods-production-lewis/?trackingId=aoa0uxHeJ0MRqIBTkq8UHA%3D%3D