SAUCE (Smart-Asset ReUse in Creative Environments) is a three-year multi-company EU Research and Innovation project focused on the re-use of existing digital assets for future productions.
Content creators regularly overlook opportunities to reuse existing media assets on new productions, particularly virtual productions, to reduce costs, speed up production and, into the bargain, earn some residual revenue for the asset owners, often companies that operate much like their own.
The participannts in the project are:
- Universitat Pompeu Fabra
- Foundry
- DNEG
- Brno University of Technology, Animationsinstitut at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg
- Saarland University
- Trinity College Dublin
- Disney Research Studios
The SAUCE project concentrates on three elements:
- Smart Assets: What are ‘smart assets’, what makes them smart, and how can they be defined?
- ReUse: How can assets be made re-useable in both virtual production environment and post?
- Creative Environments: Why does this matter to creatives and productions?
DNEG focused on searching and retrieving data, Foundry on storing data, and Filmakademie on use cases in production.
The aim is to produce a pilot and demonstrate tools and techniques that can reduce the cost of re-purposing and re-using content and produce new and improved digital content production and management tools. These include a tablet controller for Filmakademie’s “VPET” – Virtual Production Editing Tools – which synchronises virtual sets to make virtual production more stable and workable.
For a more detailed explanation of SAUCE’s objectives and applications, read Mike Seymour’s in-depth fxguide piece here.