FEED Issue 26 Web

43 TECHFEED Production in the Cloud

EATING YOUR OWN CLOUD “The Lederhosen project was an

the hotel was something we had to work out,” says Nelson. “It was a mad scramble the whole time, but it resulted in a great proof of concept. It isn’t just imaginary. It’s something that people can use in their day-to-day productions.” On a regular basis, OwnZones is using the same file transfer tools that were used at the HPA project to deliver massive files to clients like Netflix and Amazon Prime. “Our strategy has been to try to eliminate everything that causes you to have to bring down heavy files from the cloud. As soon as you have to transfer a file to some on-premises workflow, it negates the value of the cloud. Things like editing, and some of the onset rough cutting are still very much making their way to the cloud.

“It’s a personal preference of editors and some facilities to have it more in an attached storage set-up. It’s hard to think of streaming that high res media straight from a cloud bucket, but the way we’ve mitigated that is to create lower res proxies where the actual data transferred between cloud and on-prem is significantly lower.” Nelson confirms the MovieLabs assessment that the change to cloud workflows will be gradual – but inevitable. “Let’s try to make it first so that the bits of data can stay relatively static in the cloud and enable all these processes to happen around it, instead of trying to boil the ocean,” he says. “And then we can pull in more elements of it as the tech becomes ready.”

opportunity for us to eat our own dog food and show how a complete cloud workflow can work, and how it can be done in near-real time,” says Nick Nelson, chief product officer of OwnZones, an HPA Tech Retreat sponsor, and a specialist in content management and delivery in the cloud. “Running the test was also about identifying pain points, and places where the workflow isn’t completely realistic.” The project wasn’t all smooth sailing. In some cases, the team was operating in poorly charted waters, and trying to sort out bandwidth issues continued into the 11th hour. “Even trying to get a simple gigabit ethernet connection at

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