Motion Impossible—a developer of camera robotic and stabilisation solutions—is working with SMPTE on a new open protocols initiative on the use of robotics in media production.
The company—which received an Outstanding Achievement in Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy for its modular robotic dolly system, in September, wants to bring together companies building motors and encoders for robotic camera systems to co-develop a shared framework that allows these technologies to work together more easily. Instead of competing proprietary silos, the goal is true interoperability—a common standard that gives creatives far greater freedom and flexibility in how they design and deliver movement, they said.
Helping drive this effort is Motion Impossible’s newly appointed CTO, Mat Hubbard. Hubbard made his name in the automotive sector, where he played a key role in standardizing protocols across a highly fragmented industry. Now he brings that experience into entertainment, laying the groundwork for an industry-wide effort to ensure a future where dollies, cranes, arms, remote heads and tracking systems can all sing from the same hymn sheet.
“We've all been living in a world where everyone has their own proprietary protocols,” Hubbard said in an interview with TV Tech. “Whether it’s an arm or a tracking piece of equipment or a stabilized head, or PTZ, everyone has their own way of communicating with that piece of equipment. What we want to do is open the book up so everyone's on the level playing field when it comes to protocol and everyone's talking with each other.”
Other People’s Gear
Rob Drewett, MI founder and CEO, says the very nature of assembling kits for robotic-enable production requires the use of a variety of vendors.
“[A media set up will] have our robotic platform and our lifter, but we're using other people's cameras, other people's remote heads, and we are very much agnostic to that,” he said. “We want to work with everyone who makes those bits of equipment, but as a customer of ours, if they want to go and do some filming, it'd be great if you can just turn up, take whatever remote head you've got, plug it into the equipment, and the kit just talks together.”
Hubbard stressed that MI is not the architect of any proposed standard but instead wants to instigate a process for MI and similar companies interested in proposing such a standard to SMPTE.
“We’re not looking to dictate a standard,” he said. What we’re proposing is a collaborative working group where vendors can jointly develop an open protocol the whole industry can use. We will contribute technical input alongside everyone else. The goal is a shared framework that all parties are happy to adopt.”
Drewett stressed the importance of interoperability among robotics developers in particular.
“We want more communication between companies,” he said. “We've always been agnostic, we've always taken third party products and added it onto ours. In fact, we don't work unless we've got all these other bits of pieces working on each other.
“But every time we've taken a piece of equipment, we've had to learn their language and then transform it into our system,” he added. “We would love to have the ability for everyone to have the same protocols that they're working with. Why is that important? It's important for innovation and it's important to speed up the way everyone works with each other’s robots as they're not going away.”
With robotics playing an increasing role in media production, safety is of paramount importance, Hubbard says.
“Safety is a major part of what we’re trying to address,” he said. “If you look at robotics in other industries, there are well-established safety frameworks that manufacturers can rely on. We’re not looking to import these systems directly, but to learn from the principles behind them, things like clear safety layers, predictable behavior and standard ways of communicating risk. Film and TV need their own version of that, especially when you’re moving cameras around people.”
Hubbard says they are in talks with SMPTE and have gotten good feedback so far, relaying a recent conversation he had with a member of the SMPTE Rapid Industry Solutions group, which, through its SMPTE RiS-OSVP group, has developed “Open Track IO,” a free and open-source protocol that seeks to improve interoperability in virtual production and beyond.
“He is an end user, and the reason why he's made Open Track IO is because they are fed up with not having the data for VFX,” Hubbard said. “He called me because I put a little post out on LinkedIn recently explaining what I'm trying to do and he said ‘my God, this is what we've been trying to do for ages; this is what Open Track IO was all about. Basically, as an end user, we need that data. It makes things so much faster.’”
More Buy-In
Paddy Taylor, Head of Broadcast at Mark Roberts Motion Control, thinks the initiative is a “really good idea generally,” but has some caveats.
“The problem is we have an open protocol already, so we give it away on the understanding that the third party company does the same, because we don't want to be in a situation where we're giving away our ability to be controlled to somebody that's not prepared to do the same,” he said. “That's where the problem lies.”
Taylor says that in the current scenario, MRMC has several workarounds for the issue when working with other vendors on a particular project.
“On very occasional scenarios where the customer has given their approval just for that project, the customer insists they give us access and the other vendor agrees solely because they won't get the business any other way,” he said. “And in a very small number of cases, it's not difficult to work out how a system is controlled, and we have reverse engineered those, particularly for legacy systems.
“So we have this kind of open agreement that if someone's prepared to give us access, we give them access,” he adds.
Taylor applauds MI for taking the initiative but also believes there will need to be more buy-in from other vendors.
“I think someone needs to start the conversation and it's a really good thing that Motion Impossible is doing that,” Taylor said. “We all need to come together and say, ‘you know, we've got a problem with this, because it won't support this number of axis or something else, because the way the system needs to be addressed doesn't work like that for them.’”
“But unless you're going to get those bigger players that are probably 50% of the market, unless they're going to come to the table to have that discussion, then it's very challenging, because I don't think you're going to get enough critical mass beneath that to address those issues,” he added.
SMPTE's Response
Thomas Bause Mason, head of standards at SMPTE said the organization has had preliminary talks with MI.
“What I usually do in these talks, I tell them ‘if you want to bring a project to SMPTE, then make sure that you bring support—talk to your competitors and make sure that they are on board.’”
Mason adds that SMPTE’s RIS group is already working on new solutions for on-set virtual production, encompassing camera and lens metadata, for example, but added that talks about a robotics standard are ongoing.
“I think it's in the very early conceptual stage,” he said.
Motion Impossible is seeking further feedback from like-minded vendors in the media production industry. Contact them at info@motion-impossible.com.
