5 Minutes with Jeff Drury, Director of Technology Whitehouse Post/ Carbon

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‍Whitehouse Post is a post-production partner of choice for blue-chip brands from Nike to IKEA, Bank of America, Samsung, Porsche and Budweiser, many of which have been featured in the Super Bowl. They primarily focus on servicing clients or creative agencies with editorial, finishing and color grading. The company’s talent roster of creative artists, engineers, designers and editors spans the globe.

Whitehouse operates main offices in London, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Their sister company Carbon is a renowned creative studio, specializing in design, animation, live action production, and VFX, alongside color and finishing capabilities. Carbon also has studios in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Jeff Drury is the Director of Technology and sits across both divisions, overseeing workflow, adaptation and integration of new technology as well as site-planning, installation, and system configuration of facilities.

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The advertising market seems tough right now, would you agree?

Business is definitely less predictable than in years past. It rebounded following the pandemic but has stuttered since then with some creative agencies retaining post in house. This is a talent driven industry and at Whitehouse we have some of the best and most experienced editors and CG leads and directors around. They are what we will continue to lean into.

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How have you seen post production technology change?

I would characterize it right now as ‘anything anywhere.’ In the 20 years I’ve been in the industry we’ve gone from installing computer systems the size of refrigerators to virtual machines in the cloud. We are now able to offer all the technical resources of an individual facility to anyone, anywhere. 

Carbon has requirements to scale up and down in accordance with each project and has the ability to connect with the best freelancers. Whether they are in Mexico, Portugal or the United States, they are able to dial into our central infrastructure and work with media from anywhere.

The same distributed architecture has enabled us to establish bases in specific markets that we weren’t necessarily in before: Kansas City, San Francisco and Richmond. Sometimes we operate within an agency’s walls, but under the same Whitehouse technical infrastructure. The media backbone, the service and support is the same.

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Does this mean you can downsize the traditional on-premises facilities?

It’s a big question and one we are grappling with now. The amount of machinery we have in one physical location with all the necessary aircon and electric energy and carbon output – all that will go and potentially be replaced by systems of equal if not greater firepower that could fit into the space of a closet. From there we would establish connectivity to all our artists, directors and clients. It would be a virtual studio networked in the cloud. 

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Is there a central media repository to which staff and clients can access?

We remain flexible, depending on the project. For instance, if a project is based in London, it makes more sense for us to keep the media nearby, and if it then switches to our LA team we’ll replicate the project there. On the flip side, if we have 60 artists based in multiple locations working on a single project and they are constantly iterating versions, we will centralize that perhaps using AWS. 

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Can all the craft functions of post be conducted remotely?

Technically they can be, but in practice some aspects of post remain a challenge. Audio is the main one because we can’t control the viewing and listening environment. Remote audio mixing, especially for final sessions, doesn’t yet compare to the experience of being in a professionally calibrated room. It does depend on the project though, since most video content is ultimately being consumed by the audience as a video streamed to their TV or mobile the remote listening environment is often good enough.

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Tell us why you recently began to work with ClearView Flex?

We’ve known about Flex for a long time and often talked about implementing it for Carbon but since everything we were remoting was to the Cloud we had no need to route HDMI and SDI signals. As soon as Sohonet made ClearView Flex available over NDI – a data-based video stream –– it became a slam dunk. 

Flex is so much better than conference video quality connections. Plus, you can screen media on an iPad or Apple TV which many clients are really comfortable with. It looks great, it’s very robust and it is very simple to use.

We use Flex every day for CG and grading with our telecine, with Flame and nuke as well as Premiere and Avid where appropriate for the project.

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To what extent are you using AI in your workflow?

AI has been helpful in the pitch stage to give people a better idea of the vision for post. In the past, you’d rent DVDs to put together a pitch reel. AI is incredibly useful at explaining concepts quickly to kickstart that creative process. For final output though, the results tend to be generic. It tends to look like stock footage. I don’t think anybody believes Generative AI will actually take over the role of humans in terms of creatively thinking through a concept, but it can accelerate that process.

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What motivates you day to day?

Reinventing the way we can do things. My tenure at Whitehouse Post has been about transitioning to new ways of doing very old things. Every day we find new tools to take even more mundane work out of artist’s hands to enable them to spend more energy on thinking creatively. In my department we envisage our roles to be figuring out ways to cost effectively take infrastructure away from users so they can focus on being creative.

We are in the process of planning new studios and new locations. We have such a dispersed workforce now; we don’t need 20 suites locked in expensive real estate. Being able to reinvent how that all fits together in a way that allows people to operate wherever they are is an exciting challenge.

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Discover how Sohonet supports post production workflows here

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