By Mark Turner
During the last week of February, entertainment technology luminaries from across the world gathered in Palm Springs at the HPA Tech Retreat. The event was a resurgence, with a sold-out crowd gathering for four days of conference sessions, informal and spontaneous conversations, and advanced technology demonstrations. MovieLabs, the nonprofit technology joint venture of the major Hollywood studios, took part in a series of sessions highlighting the progress and next steps toward its “2030 Vision” for the future of media creation.
MovieLabs CEO Richard Berger moderated the “Vision 2030 Update” panel, which included Marvel’s Eddie Drake, Universal’s Michael Wise, Avid’s Jeff Rosica, Google Cloud’s Buzz Hays, Microsoft Azure’s Hanno Basse and Autodesk’s Matt Sivertson. The group discussed how they see MovieLabs’ 2030 Vision — developed in a 2019 white paper called “The Evolution of Media Creation” and what has become known as a shared roadmap for how content production will evolve. The panelists each spoke about what it means for their organizations and how they are democratizing the vision to form a shared roadmap for the whole industry.
Of course, no discussion about the future of production technology can start without reflecting on the impacts of COVID and the opportunities for change it provides. “The pandemic accelerated our plans to go from on-prem to a virtualized infrastructure, and it created a nice environment for change management to get our users used to working in that sort of way,” shared panelist Drake, who is head of technology for Marvel.
Jeff Rosica
Avid’s CEO, Rosica, said of this path to the cloud, “If we weren’t aligned, if we were all off in a different direction and doing our own things, we’d have a mess on our hands because this is a massive transformation. This is bigger than anything we’ve done as an industry before.”
“We’re going to be working very aggressively” with both vendors and in-house software teams to accelerate cloud deployments in key areas where they see the most immediate opportunity, including set-to-cloud (where he sees tools are maturing), dailies processes, the turnover process, editorial, mastering and delivery, reported Drake.
Wise, SVP/CTO at Universal Pictures, explained that they have been focusing their cloud migration on distributed 3D asset-creation pipelines leveraging Azure on a global basis. The pipelines are in use initially at DreamWorks but soon to be on live-action features as well, all so they can leverage talent from around the world. “As we’ve done that work, we’ve been leaning into the work of MovieLabs and the ETC to make sure what we’re building leverages emerging industry standards, including the ontology and VFX interop specs from ETC and interoperability from MovieLabs.”
Michael Wise
Sivertson, VP/chief architect, entertainment and media solutions at Autodesk, is a relative newcomer to both Autodesk and the industry, and he explained how the 2030 Vision was used as shorthand for the job description in his new role at Autodesk. “When all your largest customers tell you exactly what they want, it’s probably smart to listen.” He’s looking forward to seeing how “we can all collaborate together to make it a reality.”
Hays, a post veteran and now global lead of entertainment industry solutions for Google Cloud, summarized the improvements that we can enjoy from a cloud-based workflow. “What we’re looking at is how can we make this a more efficient process and eliminate the delays that can end up costing money.”
Basse, CTO of media and entertainment for Microsoft Azure, agreed and added, “You need to rearchitect what you’re doing and ask, ‘Why are you going into the cloud?’” He then listed the main reasons Microsoft is seeing for cloud migrations, including enabling global collaboration; enabling talent to use remote workstations from anywhere; and enabling a more secure workflow, in which all assets are protected at the same level.
Picking up on the security theme, Hays challenged the perceived notion that there is a conflict between security and productivity and asked, “Why are those mutually exclusive?” He added that we should “come up with solutions that are invisible to the end user, that are secure, that tick all the boxes and are truly hybrid in nature, that work on-prem and are multi-cloud.”
Hayes went on to explain how zero-trust security, aligned with the MovieLabs common security architecture for production, works based on the notion of flipping security inside out to secure the core data first, rather than focusing on external perimeters and keeping bad actors out. “Until we get to the ‘single-source of truth’ cloud version, there are copies of everything flying around productions, and you never get all those back,” he said. Building workflows that leverage interoperability between common building blocks was a core theme of the discussion and was embraced by all those on the panel. “A bad outcome would be a ‘lift and shift’ from the on-premises technologies and specs and just putting them in the cloud. We’ve got a moment in time to make our systems interoperable, and interoperability is the key not just for asset reuse but also for asset creation and distribution.”
Hanno Basse
Basse from Microsoft was more prescriptive in what interoperability needs to include and said, “We need the industry to come together and define some common data models, common APIs, common ways of accessing the data, how that data relates to others and how to hand it off from one step in the workflow to the next.” He then gave the example of 3D assets that are typically recreated because prior versions cannot be easily discovered and shared between applications and productions.
During Basse’s seven years at 20th Century Fox, the same iconic building was destroyed in at least 10 movies and TV shows, and every time the asset was recreated from scratch. Allowing assets to be reused and interoperable between different pipelines and applications will therefore open workflow efficiencies, speeding content time to market.
Basse makes the case that creative applications that are running in the cloud on virtual machines are not the optimal solution for where we need to get to, but an interim step toward ultimately becoming SaaS-based services and running on serverless infrastructure.
Matt Sivertson
While looking at the opportunities ahead, the panelists agreed that no single company can do this migration itself and that it will require work to share data and collaborate together. Sivertson from Autodesk said, “Our intention is to be very open with data access and our APIs, as the data is not ours; the data is our customers’, and they should be able to decide where it goes. If providers let jealously guard the data as a source of differentiation, you’ll probably get left behind.”
Rosica agreed, saying the “desired state and the outcomes that we’re looking for allow us to develop roadmap plans, not just for ourselves but for all of our partners in the industry, as we all need to interoperate together.”
Interestingly, many of the themes explored during this HPA Tech Retreat panel echo the key learnings in MovieLabs’ latest paper in the 2030 Series: “Urgent Memo to the C-Suite.” That paper explains how investments in production technology can enable time savings, efficiencies, and workflow optimizations from a cloud-centric, automatable and software-defined workflow. It will certainly be interesting to see how far the industry has come in the 2030 journey by the time of HPA Tech Retreat 2023, hopefully without the masks and COVID protocols.
Main Photo Credit: Josh Rizzo
Mark Turner coordinates the production technology program for MovieLabs, which created the 2030 Vision for the future of content creation
