By James Flores

Hollywood has the reputation of being an industry at the forefront of technology, thanks to the advancements of digital filmmaking, VFX and virtual production. But there’s one area where the media and entertainment industry falls short of other industries: new technology powering how files get shared and distributed.

Instead of simply uploading the digital assets of a shoot to the cloud and working remotely, many production companies are still moving physical hard drives as if the internet had never been invented. This is because of a hidden cost involved with the major cloud providers — egress fees (aka download fees). These fees can quickly spiral out of control when a studio tries to embrace the cloud model for all digital assets. Because studios don’t want to run up expensive bills with cloud providers, they’ve now built an entire ecosystem of workarounds to get video files off of sets and into post.

These ecosystems are draining resources by adding complication and subtracting budget, and they are ultimately just as damaging as paying egress fees. The M&E field is small but produces incredible amounts of data. The status quo cloud business model involving egress fees is holding our industry back from taking full advantage of the cloud and unlocking new innovations.

What Is Cloud Egress?
One reason that major cloud providers generate such massive profits is the number of fees and additional charges that they tack on, oftentimes without transparency. This results in huge surprise bills at the end of the month. Egress fees are the cost to customers whenever they move their data files out of the provider’s platform. The average egress fee is $0.09 per gigabyte transferred from storage, regardless of use case. But specific costs are not always apparent and can be difficult to predict. In fact, there’s an entire subindustry of consultants and service providers that manage cloud costs on an organization’s behalf (collecting their own fee in the process). The various fees and charges that don’t seem like much at first glance — or that are presented as just the cost of doing business — quickly add up within common M&E workflows.

The average file size from shooting a single take of a scene is several gigabytes, meaning that even one day of shooting creates a huge price tag anytime footage gets moved in and out of the cloud for multiple rounds of digital effects and editing. It makes planning expenses in advance extremely difficult, as filmmakers can’t know how much it will cost until they’ve uploaded their work to the cloud and started editing. With this virtual roadblock in place, it’s not surprising that many M&E companies feel that it’s unfeasible to embrace the cloud.

The Production Company Hard Drive Ecosystem
In the absence of cloud storage, an ecosystem of hand-delivering hard drives has sprung up to move and protect video files, which is not necessarily beneficial to a production company’s finances. Here’s how it works:

A specialized courier industry exists to serve production teams that need to physically send files to the right location. There are a number of issues with this approach. First, it creates a delay between filming and post production that can be anywhere from a few hours to several weeks, depending on the distance between the shooting location and the editing rooms.

Second, this process generates unnecessary costs. What immediately comes to mind are the packaging, courier and other travel fees from carrying those files around. But there are hidden costs as well. Companies will have to purchase multiple hard drives as the devices wear out, and they must keep up to dozens of drives on hand at set locations, depending on the duration of a particular shoot. And if those drives get lost or damaged, then the entire cost of shooting is wasted, and expensive reshoots become necessary.

Finally, those digital assets on hard drives aren’t necessarily safe. The danger of transporting on-premise (hard drive-stored) work means drives can be lost, held up by a foreign country’s customs department or even stolen if the production is high-profile enough. This adds even more cost for security and transportation experts to protect files against each of these threats.

There will always be some need for hard drives on shoots, such as in remote locations without internet connectivity, which therefore requires temporary storage. However, looking at the costs generated by this on-premise, physical transfer ecosystem, it seems fair to ask what it would look like if that wasn’t the case.

What Could Happen Instead
What’s next is the advent of cloud workflows. Cloud technology has reshaped how most businesses operate. The same is true for the M&E industry. Many different technologies offer the ability to take data (media) directly from a camera’s encoder and move it to the cloud. These camera-to-cloud technologies often create their own data silos; data can only go into the given vendor’s cloud storage, and moving it to other tools invokes costly egress charges. With cheaper cloud egress fees — or even no cloud egress fees at all — production teams could more readily use this cloud workflow, opening up room in studio budgets and speeding up their production time thanks to the elimination of the hard drive ecosystem. This could level the playing field for smaller production companies, as they’d be able to film content much more efficiently.

Companies could focus security investments into digital security, which can be much cheaper than physical methods. Instead of trained guards, companies could rely on encrypted backups and object lock, wherein a user can designate certain objects to be immutable, meaning they cannot be altered or deleted by outsiders and thus are safe from ransomware. They’d also be free to move a lot more post production tools and editing techniques to the cloud, and they could pick and choose where they want to store data or which tools they want to use without worrying about what cloud provider they’d be stuck with.

It’s Time for a Change
With the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes and negotiations thankfully behind us, there’s going to be pressure on everyone to get new films and shows finished as soon as possible. These condensed timelines mean it’s now time to talk about why it’s acceptable to waste so much money and time on outdated manual processes. This question is not just for the M&E industry but for the cloud industry as well. By keeping exorbitant egress fees in place, cloud providers hurt their own businesses and limit production companies’ potential. Eliminating, or simply reducing them, would be a net benefit for everyone involved.

James Flores is who has been a working video editor/assistant editor and DIT for over 25 years. He is currently product marketing manager M&E at Backblaze.