PART 2: EDITING IN THE CLOUD INDUS TRY.
there’s no advancement. The media and entertainment industry would do well to take some pointers – even steal talent – from the Silicon Valleys of the world, where some of the most innovative technologies are being developed. EF: As network bandwidth and latency improve, cloud services will undoubtedly become a more attractive solution to customers, as a viable alternative to physical workstations. Is the industry accepting of cloud-based workflows? How is adoption encouraged? MC: Many technologies start as fads, driven by early adopters. Once those catch on, fads give way to becoming trends, which expand across market segments and begin influencing the incumbents. The best innovations mature the technology and drive it to become an industry standard. Different technologies have their own timelines to execute the fad, trend and standard process – some never make it. Because of the pandemic, cloud-based workflows rapidly went from fad, to trend, to standard. Manufacturers had the opportunity to respond to new-found cloud solutions. Thanks to reliable adoption, they are now able to make longer-term investments. One of the freshest cloud technologies that emerged during the pandemic is Camera to Cloud (C2C). Frame.io deployed one of the most advanced and automated cloud transition systems, that has become the first major step in delivering a direct-to-edit workflow. Media cards and hard drives are no longer barriers “The media and technology industry would do well to take pointers – even steal talent – from the Silicon Valleys of the world” causing delays between the set and post- production. With major improvements in bandwidth, thanks to very mature LTE, Wi-Fi 6 and 5G networks, C2C is gaining global interest. By the end of the decade, total reliance on C2C technology will be standard. Today, early adopters are in a hybrid workflow, where they can deliver proxy files directly from the camera to the editor, while shipping hard drives in the background – which are eventually used for the online and conform processes.
use, yet secure enough to pass content controls. This is an area where I do think traditional post has a huge advantage – we know how to lock down a facility quickly and easily. JAMIE ALLAN: The ever-increasing number of regional cloud providers means that global CSP capacity is an easier obstacle to overcome. The larger global players often become ‘full’ in certain regions, because a major customer utilises most of their capacity. Smaller, specialist providers will have a bigger place in this ecosystem in the future. This can address regions where data sovereignty is a hot topic. The quality of pictures being streamed back to users will keep getting better as superior codecs are developed, alongside the improving technology provided to accelerate and encode the video streams. We are working on remote, virtualisable, uncompressed ST 2110 output capabilities for post- production applications as part of our Rivermax video streaming SDK. This will bring full, uncompressed video monitoring over the network. ST: The cloud will inevitably evolve into something bigger and better. Specifically, we have techniques that reduce the costs of egress, and our work with providers is paying dividends by furthering the viability of running everything – from ingest to delivery – in the cloud. For example, our NLE panels allow users to instantly switch between proxy and full-resolution images, to ensure accuracy in colour grading. Over time, cloud operation will become the default, with an almost completely frictionless experience. PML: There is such a big technology shift, that the need for developer talent is the biggest bottleneck. Without people to work on tomorrow’s products,
scalability – are always going to tilt the equation in favour of the cloud. PML: Yes, if only for consolidation and archiving. There’s a big advantage to on-premises finishing, even when done through remote protocols. Cloud only gets you so far, compared to LTO and scalable shared storage. EF: We expect the current mix of locally hosted and data-centre hosted servers to continue. It really depends on what facilities each customer has, as hosting servers locally can be great for some customers, but comes with big downsides in terms of space, cooling and power. How does the technology get better? What obstacles are there to overcome in terms of capacity, picture quality and security? MC: Cloud collaboration for professional applications within media is ripe for innovation. We’ve seen how fast the cloud has evolved in consumer distribution. Today, cloud streaming of 4K HDR is a standard across virtually every OTT platform. Technological standardisation and development has continued to keep up with capacity, quality and security, as OTT distribution platforms exploded. Post-production technology has the benefit of leveraging more than a decade of technological evolution in cloud technologies. When it comes to obstacles, the most common is resistance to change. The pandemic didn’t invent new cloud solutions; rather, it accelerated need. The next obstacle to overcome is moving hybrid workflows to fully remote systems. AG: Technology will continue to improve as we all go through the growing pains – we’ll learn and adapt. Security is probably the biggest hurdle going forward, because it must be easy enough for people to
37. DECEMBER 2021
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