Q : How about the use of cloud for high-end graphics? Daniel Url: A lot of customers are already doing that and using our systems in data centres or in the cloud, and the GPUs (and CPUs) are powerful enough to play everything we need. Gerhard Lang: The nodes that are available from cloud providers are very performant when it comes to compute power. Whether it’s a clip, decoding, compression, the cloud nodes you have available now are comparable to what’s on-premises. Q : Covid has led everyone to adding remote and distributed production to their workflows. Has it made you think about remote capabilities? Roger Crothers: The pandemic has shown how far you can push things. I’m not sure culturally we could ever have been able to achieve some of the different ways of working that we’ve now adopted. It’s made people think differently. Now, we have a hybrid working model, where apart from staff that physically need to be there – engineers, producers, camera
operators – people can work off- site some days, allowing us better utilisation of our buildings. Q : What’s the future for IP and cloud-based facilities? Roger Crothers: We have a drama facility in Roath Lock, with its own infrastructure, technology and storage. It would be beneficial if we could remotely control, or access, the main Central Square facilities from that site. The BBC is looking at that more widely and wondering if it could be done for all big sites. Work is ongoing. Gerhard Lang: The biggest innovations on our side are NDI 5 and NDI Bridge – and bringing NDI with metadata into the cloud. It enables you to select sources which are on-premises, or switching between to bring them into the cloud. You can do extremely complex productions with 200-plus signals that are requested as needed, and sources are only ever brought into the cloud when required, so we’re dancing a bit between cloud and 2110. We’re seeing thousands of NDI downloads at the moment, and of NDI 5. There is a huge adoption rate.
THE PANDEMIC HAS SHOWN HOW FAR YOU CAN PUSH THINGS... IT’S MADE PEOPLE THINK DIFFERENTLY
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