PART 2: EDITING IN THE CLOUD INDUS TRY.
workflow better, even to the point of re-architecting in-facility products to be more cloud-friendly. But the majority of cloud-based workflows suffer from unpredictable costs, mostly because the creative process doesn’t follow the enterprise model many providers have designed their cost structure around. There’s less control over the process, and that’s been difficult for many users to adjust to. Benefits-wise, you have the talent when you need it, regardless of location – and, of course, the OpEx vs CapEx financial benefits. STEPHEN TALLAMY: The positives are scalability and flexibility. In an age of unprecedented and unpredictable change, it becomes a business imperative to adjust to new circumstances quickly. The cloud embraces almost every possible future, and the fact it is offered as a service means there are fewer possible missteps, through investment in the wrong type or amount of capital equipment. PAUL MATTHIJS LOMBERT: There will be a shift from CapEx infrastructure investment cycles (one-time, but very high-cost purchases) to OpEx budgeting (SaaS, subscription models). This tends to make products, and thus productions, less expensive. But this change of pace and mix of budget allocation will take some time to get used to, especially for the broadcasters, who tend to be more traditional and resistant to modern technologies. Remote collaboration commoditises storage needs (from shared NAS to local NVMe drives), so storage vendors will have to find new products to make it easier to ingest and archive remotely. Tracking and consolidating all data used in a production becomes
harder if not kept in check from the get-go. That will be a pain point, and requires real focus. The assistant editor then becomes instrumental in managing these workflows – something we’ve seen happening a lot over the past year. There can be no remote workflow without a good assistant editor. EMILY FAIRCLOUGH: Accessibility, scalability and efficiency are just a few of the advantages of working in the cloud service. With a huge global demand for content, short production time, low overheads and rapid delivery are vital to any media organisation meeting the demand. Having elements of production working on the same project, in real time and remotely, creates more efficient and lighter hardware set-ups, meaning less downtime for the team. Is there a benefit to using a combination of local and cloud-based servers? Do you still expect post-production companies to keep their servers in-house? ST: There are certainly benefits, for now. Retaining on-premises equipment means it is possible to move to the cloud in stages, via hybrid solutions. The tipping point between on-premises and the cloud is moving all the time, as costs and performance vary according to your physical capabilities and the commercial decisions made by relevant companies. But two factors – flexibility and
production and post-production transition to the cloud is in the early phases. Today, loading assets of many different sizes into the cloud and transferring them is extremely common. Remote review and approval – through tools like Frame.io – are among the most common ways to leverage advantages driven by the cloud. Many productions are using it as a means of live transmission. The most common example is an editor, or colourist editing on a local machine with local media, and streaming a low-latency output to an off-site collaborator. This is a typical hybrid of using the cloud to move active media, while not fully cloud-based. The full transition of post-production is more common today in visual effects, where artists are beginning to run virtual machines, both media and kit, in the cloud – with only the control commands running locally. This saves tremendous time when fully deployed, because no data is ever downloaded. Outputs, transfers, renders and review are all cloud-to-cloud, and virtual machines enable users to spin up when more processing power is needed to execute complex tasks in shorter turnarounds. The other advantage of a full-cloud workflow is that the speed (and cost) of a local machine becomes almost irrelevant, since it’s just a remote control. The real power is in the cloud, which lowers the need for investing in storage and supercomputers on-premises. ALEX GROSSMAN: Many of us (product developers for M&E workflows) have put huge investments into making cloud
35. DECEMBER 2021
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