60 HAPPENING Vortech.by
“If you want five nine’s availability, you need a 24/7 operator MCR with eyes on glass,” she said. “I don’t know anyone who can use AI for monitoring today without fail.” Operator teams, she added, have to be aware at any point in time what is happening with development: “They must be hand in glove.” Latency – the delay between camera capture and playback online – is 30 seconds, but the aim is to get it below ten. “Customers want to get down to ten seconds latency,” Kalkanis declared. “Of course, the aim must be zero, but even ten seconds is a challenge.” CLOUD SAVINGS Another speaker, Tim Burton, co-founded Aframe in 2009, one of the first cloud platforms for handling post-production rushes. He is now MD at digital systems integrator Magenta Broadcast. Aframe was based on a number of what – in hindsight, Burton concedes – are outmoded notions. One of these notions was that cloud was expensive. “People thought they were going to send all their profits away to AWS, when in actuality the cost of using their systems was less than 10% of our cost base. We spent more on our NAB stand annually than on servers.” Second was the notion that Aframe, or similar private cloud services, could provide post-production from start to finish, when in reality they were offering little more than a walled garden. “The biggest misnomer was that egress kills media,” he said. This is the perception that the cost of sending media into the cloud would be exorbitant. “I was a cloud denier,” said Burton. “The reality is that egress may be zero rated, but it’s far from free if adding in the total cost of workflow. The time spent waiting for downloads is also a cost.” Fast forward a decade and Burton believes cloud is the only way forward for major broadcasters, let alone post- production houses. “The same code and
IF YOUWANT FIVE NINE’S AVAILABILITY, YOU NEED A 24/7 OPERATOR MCR WITH EYES ON GLASS
toolset can work across on-premises, a private cloud or a public cloud. Computer storage has shifted to the cloud.” BRINGING AI TO THE PARTY AWS principal solutions architect of media and entertainment, Lee Atkinson, ran through AWS’ machine learning and artificial intelligence software stacks for everything from automatic subtitle generation and multi-language translation, to object and activity tagging in live sports streams using Amazon Rekognition. One high-profile use case of Amazon’s AI was with Sky News during Prince Harry and Meghan’s royal wedding, covered extensively last year by FEED . Live feeds were taken from physical AWS Elemental encoders on-site and fed to AWS Elemental MediaLive as a mezzanine stream for media packaging delivered by Amazon CloudFront. In this process, metadata company GrayMeta extracted single frames of video and sent them to Rekognition for identifying people (famous guests like David Beckham) then output back to Amazon S3 as a JSON file and onward to a video player built for Sky News by UI Centric.
Atkinson revealed that this process was not entirely automated. “We built in a 30-second delay in the live stream for manual moderation of the AI recognition just to confirm the AI was correct,” he said. “AI (object, activity, facial) recognition operates on prediction and degrees of certainty. Nothing is 100% certain. Since this was working proof of concept, Sky felt they needed human eyes to confirm. If they didn’t react quickly enough, the AI wasn’t confirmed (published live).” AWS AI/ML is, however, being used to produce sports, including NBA, MLB and Formula One. Telemetry is pulled in from 120 car sensors during a Grand Prix at 3Gb of data a second. AWS Kinesis streams the data into S3 storage in real time where its AI/ML tools, including SageMaker and Transcribe, analyse each race to enrich F1 TV, the sport’s SVOD service. The conference also featured sessions from Grabyo, Arvato Systems, Valossa, Mayam and the DPP. Vortech.by is not Vidispine’s concept alone. The plan is for future instances of the conference to rotate, with different partners acting as host. FEED wishes it all the best on its journey.
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