ollywood has always had its head in the clouds. The mountain of the Paramount logo, or the WB shield, or Columbia holding up her torch and the TriStar’s galloping Pegasus (before they both dissolved into Sony) are all depicted against the backdrop of white heavenly fluff. But that lofty vision has come down to earth, with the big studios now putting cloud at the centre of how they aim to do business in the future. Motion Picture Laboratories (aka MovieLabs) is a non-profit, tech research organisation run by the
big five studios – Paramount, Sony, Universal, Disney and Warner Bros. Fox lost its place at the table when it was swallowed up by Disney in 2019. The purpose of the lab is to coordinate the adoption of new media technologies at the studios, to provide some standards and best practices across the industry – and cloud is at the top of the agenda. Mark Turner, MovieLabs’ program director of production technology, started out working at the coalface of broadcast technology, with the likes of BT and Eutelsat, before then becoming Microsoft’s ‘man in Hollywood.’ After a stint on Dolby
Vision and extensive work in post and visual effects, his long and varied experience was brought into the MovieLabs consultancy. “In 2019, at MovieLabs, we started collating studio opinions around cloud,” says Turner. “They had all been experimenting, but we needed something we could take to the industry – really showing what the studios were thinking about cloud, real-time rendering and software- defined workflows.” The result was the MovieLabs 2030 Vision, delivered in a white paper called ‘The Evolution of Media Creation.’ The paper outlined, in
INSTITUTION The greatest movie town in the world is adapting to major change
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