Digital Studio - September 2016

I dette nummeret

Cinema’s affair with computer graphics has been a long one – though Bollywood always trailed behind Hollywood when it came to employing special effects in movies. One reason for this was that filmmakers and production houses believed that movies that relied on VFX would not justify the expense at the box office. That perspective is changing as VFX-driven films like Baahubali, Detective Byomkesh Bakshi or Fan caught the audience’s fancy. The good news for the industry is that they no longer need to outsource VFX work to international companies, as Indian entities like Red Chillies VFX have displayed their calibre in delivering the goods. In Digital Studio’s cover story, Red Chillies VFX’s Haresh Hingorani and Keitan Yadav disclose how they used VFX extensively to transform a 50-year old Shah Rukh Khan into his 25-year lookalike in Fan. What made this a challenging task is the fact that it is easier to make a younger person look older using computer imagery, than the other way around. The other big stories this issue are about content security issues that broadcasters face, leading to huge financial drain for the broadcaster, besides loss of consumer trust and brand erosion. With increasing instances of these cybercrimes, companies are keen to deploy protective solutions like forensic watermarking to tackle issues like illegal redistribution of content. Broadcasters and other industry stakeholders are now improving their security practices to stay a step ahead of hackers and pirates and try to be more proactive, than reactive. Cyber security was one of the topics discussed during IBC 2016, as well. In this issue, we give you a sneak peek at one of the biggest and glitziest events for the broadcasting, production, media and entertainment business, where a host of game-changing technologies were unveiled by companies of all stature – big and small. This is just a primer; there is a lot more that makes this an interesting and information-packed September issue.