Big Data Analysis for Media Production

A typical high-end film production generates several terabytes of data per day, either as footage from multiple cameras or as background information regarding the set (laser scans, spherical captures, etc). This paper presents solutions to improve the integration of the multiple data sources, and understand their quality and content, which are useful both to support creative decisions on-set (or near it) and enhance the postproduction process. The main cinema specific contributions, tested on a multisource production dataset made publicly available for research purposes, are the monitoring and quality assurance of multicamera set-ups, multisource registration and acceleration of 3-D reconstruction, anthropocentric visual analysis techniques for semantic content annotation, and integrated 2-D–3-D web visualization tools. We discuss as well improvements carried out in basic techniques for acceleration, clustering and visualization, which were necessary to deal with the very large multisource data, and can be applied to other big data problems in diverse application fields.