By Randi Altman

Cloud-based workflows in media and entertainment have never been more important than they are right now, but some are still trying to educate themselves and find their way there.

We rounded up some pros who are relying on the cloud to get work done, working remotely or on-premises. They share their experiences using the cloud to get work done. We also reached out to companies whose tools work in the cloud to find out the trends they’re seeing and where we all go from here.

DigitalFilm Tree CEO/Founder Ramy Katrib

LA-based post house DigitalFilm Tree has been providing remote post services for almost five years. Its newest offering is networking and security cloud services for those working from home or other post vendors. DFT also offers virtual production services, such as previsualization, for episodics, including NCIS Los Angeles and Manifest.

When things shut down, did you turn to a cloud-based workflow, or were you already working in the cloud?
We got quite busy when the initial shutdown occurred. Not only had we already been working in the cloud, but a number of our shows and partner vendors knew we had long since been leveraging it for secure, easy file access and management. Our first efforts were to help those clients who had deadlines related to lots or offices closing and get them set up quickly in their homes. Then it was migrating our own team. We kept a skeleton crew of less than 10 people on site at any time in our 10,000-square-foot space for physical media receivables (serving as a hub for our own shows and others) as well as any on-site tech needs for the rest of the team, who began working from home.

The biggest opportunity to serve our community came from what we know and have long been practicing with secure cloud infrastructure. We made the investment early on in our cloud infrastructure, knowing that cloud-based workflows would become the norm. Our chief information security officer (CISO) is a CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) and a certified ethical hacker who has built us — and, by proxy, our clients — a secure cloud workflow that protects their media whether they’re in the home or in a facility.

While much of the information we saw immediately was pointing people back to their own IT or security teams, we were able to quickly stand in the gap for those who were worried about compromising their unaired projects by deploying secure routers to the home and connecting them to the cloud with confidence. Some of our clients were already familiar with this setup, while others were surprised by the ease of set up and subsequent security.

What do you tell those clients about how you offer secure workflows in the cloud?
We tend to be more responsive to specific needs rather than casting a wide net or trying to boil the ocean. Our clients are our best source of innovation, so we learn from and solve for them. With that, we’ve been able to provide secure solutions across traditional physical media workflows as well as working with those who’ve either long been in the cloud or are transitioning for the first time. We provide infographics on how the media is stored and accessed while also remaining available for support. Again, this largely falls on the strength of what our CISO has architected for us over the past several years and the efforts we’ve undergone to provide a robust security infrastructure that’s dependent on technology as much as it is the wisdom of our team.

How has what you’ve been offering changed, or how has usage changed, since the shutdown?
COVID-19 hasn’t changed what we do, but rather it has revealed what we do. If anything, we’ve had to double down on our educational efforts to help catch people up to where we’ve already been and what we’ve accomplished for other shows. We’re trying to mitigate what feels like forced innovation into more of a comfort with where the industry was naturally going. To that end, we’ve been very grateful for opportunities like this to better circulate the number of options available that are secure, efficient and — to the surprise of many budget managers — cost-effective.

Is this the tape-to-digital moment for cloud? Did this force those who were on the fence into diving in?
In a way, yes, but this is a world we at DFT have been living in for quite some time, and it’s our feeling that we have to make it as comfortable and digestible for others as it has become for our team and our current shows operating with these workflows. It’s a lot of education and breaking down historical thinking and even line items into comparative, logical swaps for those still hesitant on making the jump.

 

AWS Senior Product Manager of Studio Technology Corban Gossett

AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and VR/AR, media, and application development, deployment and management from 76 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions. 

What are the basics of a cloud-based creative workflow? What tools can be used?
Cloud-based and on-premises workflows are the same from a creative tools standpoint. Artists can use the same applications and workflows — Maya, Nuke, Katana, Blender, etc. — in a way that’s comfortable and familiar while working on the cloud.

A major point of differentiation for cloud-based workflows is how they facilitate much easier collaboration. Creative aspects remain unchanged, but by hosting data in the cloud and not locally, that data can be synced and shared far more quickly, especially when end users are working in a multi-studio setup or have artists working remotely. Using the cloud also removes the physical restrictions that come with on-premises hardware, allowing for more flexibility and greater scalability.

How has users’ usage changed since the COVID-19 shutdown? And what are people using the cloud for?
AWS Studio in the Cloud solutions can basically be grouped into three buckets — storage, render and virtual workstations — using a Lego-blocks type of approach. So on AWS, users can pull from and assemble based on their needs, whether that’s a hybrid or all-in approach to the cloud.

Within these blocks, the offerings are constantly being updated based on industry needs. For example, our G4 instances are optimized for content production and feature Nvidia T4 GPUs and Quadro technology. Where we’ve seen the greatest change in recent months is a surge in interest in the cloud from our content creation customers.

Studios and companies were forced to adapt quickly in light of current events, and the cloud has proven a valuable tool to allow them to do so. We’re seeing many different approaches in how they’re using the cloud. Some users are just dipping their toes in for burst renders on the cloud, while others are going all-in. Many studios are realizing just how nimble they can be working on AWS and even work in different ways not possible with on-premises hardware.

Have you re-evaluated how you are providing your service/tools?
One of the things we’ve prioritized this year is making the cloud accessible and easier to implement for content production, whether adding resources to existing infrastructure or building a workflow from scratch. You don’t have to have an IT background to get started with and use AWS, and AWS solutions are beneficial at all levels, from major studios to individual users.

Is this the tape-to-digital moment for cloud? Did this force those who were on the fence into diving in?
We’ve been headed toward the widespread use of cloud in M&E for a while, but I think the adoption timeline has been accelerated this year. For many companies, shifting to cloud-based workflows is now no longer a question of if but rather when they should adopt the technology, and they’re building out plans to do so.

What do you tell M&E folks about how you offer secure workflows in the cloud?
Security is always the top priority at AWS, and many of the same security isolations of traditional data centers are also in place with the cloud. Additionally, AWS provides a lot of security documentation and best practices for customers and undergoes third-party audits to verify security.

We’ve worked with ISE and are participating in the Trusted Partner Network joint venture. I have found that as people start to learn more about how cloud security works, they tend to feel more confident in it.

How much bandwidth do you expect your users to need in order to use their products effectively?
Consumer-grade internet and a connected device are all that are needed to create content on AWS. On a more granular level, specific bandwidth requirements depend on the task at hand and the artist’s setup. Variables such as using a dual monitor or working in 4K will impact the amount of bandwidth needed for an optimal experience.

Almost more important is latency. An artist that’s storyboarding, drawing or texture-painting on a virtual workstation will need lower latency than one working on animation, lighting or compositing, and the closer the virtual compute resides to the end user, the lower the latency will be. This is where the extensive coverage of AWS is key. AWS has 76 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions. We also have Local Zones in key content production hubs, including Los Angeles, to bring latency-sensitive workloads closer to the end user.

What would you like those who are about to jump into the cloud for the first time to know?
The capacity of AWS is not only valuable for rendering but also for scaling teams. On-boarding freelancers can be a multi-week process after you’ve made sure they have the appropriate hardware and software and actually send them the data for the shots they’ll work on. With the cloud, it’s much faster and easier to hire remotely, and with AWS, artists can be up and running in minutes using an internet-connected device when your pipeline is running on AWS.

 

Barnstorm VFX Executive Producer/Co-Founder Cory Jamieson

LA- and Vancouver-based Barnstorm VFX is an Emmy-nominated effects studio specializing in high-end digital effects, design and production. Shows include S.W.A.T., Project Blue Book, Grey’s Anatomy and The Order. 

When things shut down, did you turn to a cloud-based workflow? Were you already working in the cloud?
We were able to fully transition to a work-from-home system for everyone in the office over a matter of days. This move was disconcertingly smooth and fast. I do think there is an important distinction between what we think of as “cloud” and what many companies have implemented for our new way of life working from home. All of our artwork is still performed by workstations on site in our office. All the artists are remoted into those workstations from home setups through secure VPN and remote desktop software.

Particularly in VFX, most of the work is completed on pretty beefy workstations or virtualized workstations on powerful servers. Combine that with the need to work in teams that share central media storage, and it becomes clear that virtualizing the office network is the way to go. In that sense, the office becomes the “cloud.” There are many other cloud services that Barnstorm has used for some time. Rendering and storage have leveraged Amazon’s AWS, as an example, which has been a huge boon for us. The team there is really strong and great to work with.

Has cloud helped you keep your team together on projects during the crisis? How?
Yes, 100%. We use several cloud services, namely Slack, Google G Suite, Zoom, Shotgun and the Atlassian tools Confluence and Jira. We were early adopters in some of these and have used them for several years. They were useful tools for bringing people together prequarantine, and their utility has now expanded to the point of making life difficult to imagine without them. Every project has Slack channels devoted to its management and communication among team members. Every meeting is hosted on Zoom with video and screen-sharing, and simple annotation makes idea interchanges pretty seamless. Shotgun is where the pipeline lives and breathes — where we track progress, render thumbnails, assign tasks, etc. Jira is used for the help desk and the dev team, while Confluence is where our “living operations manual” resides. All of these were services we used prepandemic, and I only see our reliance on them, and similar services, expanding in the future. Come to think of it, even accounting and HR are cloud-based at this point.

Which parts of the cloud are you using for workflows? Storage, rendering, etc. — before, during and after the shutdown?
On-site storage (remotely accessed) is still used for all live production media and artwork. All 2D rendering is done on the local render farm, and 3D rendering is done as a hybrid workflow between on-prem and cloud rendering on AWS, depending on project demand. All of this has actually remained unchanged since the pandemic, except that everyone accesses their workstations remotely.

Do you think COVID-19 has hastened some companies turning to cloud workflows, and will your studio be expanding how it works in the cloud?
Yes, absolutely. In general I think people across industries have been surprised at how easy the transition to working from home has been, at least technically. I think that ease of adoption, combined with the necessity to maintain productivity, has helped many companies hasten their transition into the cloud. We’ve seen corresponding spikes in subscribership to services like Zoom and Slack as a result. There are myriad social implications and considerations that remain a challenge, and we’re constantly looking at new solutions and trying new things to see what might fit.

How are you handling security of content in the cloud?
Content security is a top priority for our clients, so giving them peace of mind is mission-critical at Barnstorm. There are myriad ways that content stays secure, ranging from data encryption and network behavior monitoring provided by AWS in its data centers to multi-factor authentication for VPN access to workstations.

In a work-from-home environment, it’s also very important to manage the physical space in which the work is taking place. Most of these steps are common sense and relatively simple to implement. Examples include keeping your blinds closed if near a window, locking your screen when idle or away from your keyboard, and keeping your operating system up to date with the latest OS and security patches. Both the MPAA and the Trusted Partner Network (TPN) maintain exhaustive guidelines to help everyone keep things buttoned up. The bottom line is that no content should ever exist in a location where an unauthorized person might be able to access it.

Has working remotely with the cloud made you re-evaluate your on-site storage/workflow solution?
Working from home used to be done on an as-needed basis, but now we’ve found that many positions are actually more efficient in a work-from-home situation, at least some of the time. We conducted a survey to get Barnstormers’ thoughts about the future of remote workflows, and even in a post-COVID world, about 80% of respondents believed that a balance could be reached between work in the office and work from home.

Particularly in places like Los Angeles, where it’s not uncommon to have an hourlong commute one way, there is a huge amount of productivity to be gained. There are several direct implications of this that I believe are actionable today. A few big ones come to mind.

The first is that we can fearlessly continue to migrate solutions into the cloud and continue expanding the use of existing services, knowing that they serve both on-prem and remote workers. The flexibility of cloud infrastructure — the ability to ramp up and ramp down quickly, for example — will allow us to take on bigger and more complex projects. As we grow, cloud use will follow that growth exponentially as larger and larger proportions of the workflow become remote-capable.

Second, the office square footage can be seen as a multiple of its previous utility. What I mean is that, depending on what business you’re in, the office can support the employment of an increased number of workers. For example, if the office currently holds 100 people comfortably, but half of them work from home 50% of the time, you can now support 25 more people on the same footprint, assuming some sort of space-sharing policies are implemented. The specific ratios and trends of implementation will vary from company to company, but I think this will allow for more efficient use of physical space.

Third, geographic proximity will rank much lower on the list of important factors when job-seeking. If anyone can leverage the full power of the office infrastructure from anywhere, where you are physically located becomes much less important.

Despite all of this, I do think there are still vital aspects of working in the office that we need to maintain. In the survey I mentioned earlier, 50% of the same people said they would like to be able to work at least some of the time in the office as soon as possible. There are certain efficiencies of communication and levels of camaraderie that are not attainable in remote-only workflows. Particularly in post production, no matter how efficient it is to get on a shared timeline and draw on the screen, it’s not quite the same as sitting in a high-resolution screening room talking and pointing.

Lastly, an important thing to think about is the relationship between the office network, the connection to the cloud and the media bandwidth requirements. For example, at least in VFX, the reason we don’t render 2D in the cloud is because transmitting thousands of 4K (or larger) frames of 16-bit, multi-channel files up and down all day can become taxing, and streaming them 1:1 uncompressed is still not quite possible directly from the cloud. We should ask ourselves this question: Do we believe that the office network bandwidth will always have the capacity to be faster than the connection to the cloud, assuming both can leverage advancements in better and faster technology? If this is true, and media bandwidth requirements also increase approximately proportionately, either by ever-expanding resolutions, higher bit depth per pixel, or adding new data like depth, then there will always be a place for on-premises workflows. However, as soon as the bandwidth requirement of the media itself is met equally well by either solution, we will end up completely in the cloud and never look back.

 

Signiant Senior Platform Manager Bill Thompson

Signiant’s enterprise software provides content creators and distributors with fast, reliable, secure access to large media files, regardless of physical storage type or location. Its tools enable authorized people and processes to seamlessly exchange valuable content – within and between enterprises.

What are the basics of a cloud-based creative workflow? What tools can be used?
The cloud offers many benefits for creative workflows, which are now more global and more collaborative than ever. Under the current situation, where teams are working remotely, the cloud offers great benefits in operational efficiency.

The basics include secure, seamless access to media assets and the ability to access tools for remote edit. If you can ingest content, collaborate, edit and share with anyone anywhere, that is a pretty good starting point for a creative cloud workflow. Our stack starts with Media Shuttle, which has been the on-ramp to the cloud for many media companies. The stack would also include users’ favorite edit tools, typically accessed using cloud VMs.

How has what you’ve been offering changed, or how has usage changed, since the COVID-19 shutdown? And what are people using the cloud for?
Media Shuttle has seen a massive surge in usage since the shutdown began. Shuttle is used for remote access to media assets that reside in any type of storage, both on-prem and cloud. So when the industry went remote, Shuttle became an even more important tool in keeping the content supply chain moving.

In addition to huge spikes in users and transfers, we’ve also seen more companies adding Media Shuttle portals connected to cloud storage to support new remote workflows. Using cloud storage is a trend that has been growing for several years now but is being accelerated by the pandemic, as IT teams can now manage their entire system without setting foot in the office.

Have you re-evaluated how you are providing your service/tools?
No. As a leader in cloud-native SaaS, our approach is working remarkably well — and even more so during the pandemic. By delivering our software in this way, it’s been easy for Signiant to continue to innovate and deliver our products while working remotely. And more importantly, it’s been very beneficial to our customers, who can access and manage our software through the cloud. We’re big believers in this model, and companies who have embraced a SaaS model and cloud technology in general are doing much better during this time than those who have lagged behind in that area.

Is this the tape-to-digital moment for cloud? Did this force those who were on the fence into diving in?
Use of the cloud had been growing fast, but this has certainly been a catalyst for those who needed a compelling event to get going with their cloud initiatives, and the data supports that.

What do you tell those customers about how you offer secure workflows in the cloud?
The most important thing about our hybrid SaaS architecture is that assets always remain entirely in the control of our customers. File movement is orchestrated from our cloud control plane, but assets always move directly into and out of the customers’ own storage, whether on-prem or in the cloud.

Signiant software never takes control of assets, not even temporarily. In fact, we don’t offer or resell storage, so the customer is always in complete control. Of course, we secure our software using industry best practices and work with an industry-leading security firm to audit our software on a regular basis, while ensuring customers maintain control of their own valuable digital assets — a practice that is paramount to any secure cloud offering.

How much bandwidth do you expect your users to have to use your products effectively?
The beauty of Signiant’s intelligent transport technology is that it can take advantage of whatever bandwidth is available. The more bandwidth, the faster our software can move assets. In fact, in higher-bandwidth situations, our acceleration technology adds even more value, something that is often counterintuitive.

But even in lower-bandwidth situations, Signiant software will move files as efficiently as possible, and with Checkpoint Restart, interrupted transfers will automatically restart from the point of failure, offering unprecedented reliability. That alone can make all the difference, knowing the files will reach their destination even with poor connectivity.

What would you like those who are about to jump into the cloud to know?
Make sure to work with reputable providers. There are lots of cloud services available, but they aren’t all created equal. Confirm that any service you use allows you to keep complete control of your assets — what is referred to as storage independence — and beware of consumption-based pricing, which can sneak up on you quickly in media. Also, confirm that any vendor you choose has a top-notch customer success program, great customer support and devops to ensure things are always running smoothly.

 

The Embassy President Winston Helgason

The Embassy is an independent creative studio specializing in visual effects and production. Located in the heart of Vancouver’s Digital District and in a new office in Los Angeles, The Embassy works with global production companies, agencies and brands in film, television and advertising.

When things shut down, did you turn to a cloud-based workflow? Were you already working in the cloud?
We didn’t employ the cloud for everything once COVID-19 hit, but we did need to have the majority of our staff working remotely, and they still are. Due to our advanced pipeline and infrastructure at Embassy, we decided on a hybrid approach.

For years, our whole production suite has been in the cloud —Shotgun, Google G Suite, Frankie, Adobe Creative Cloud — and we’ve been using Shotgun in the cloud for nearly a decade. So from the production side, we were kind of ready to work remotely already. Something that was new for us is being apart, and Google Chat and Google Hangouts meetings have become integral for communication and are now part of our workflow.

For our VFX workforce, we used a remote working solution to take advantage of the investment we have made at Embassy on an advanced pipeline and infrastructure. We were still able to employ our Qumulo enterprise server, our Linux workstations, GPU render farm, etc., but all remotely. The artists were sent home with Lenovo terminals, monitors, and RGS (Remote Graphics Software) and were then connected to their workstations at The Embassy via a Fortinet firewall. This workflow enabled all the data to remain secure at Embassy, while artists could access all the power of our pipeline remotely.

Also, since we were delivering the last 100 of 700 shots for Warrior Nun, quality was key, and supervisors could come in one at a time to the office to view the team’s progress on proper 4K uncompressed EXRs. This was essential to maintain the high standards Netflix demands.

Has cloud helped you keep your team together on projects during the crisis? How?
Remote working and cloud-based production tools have enabled our team to stay employed and productive throughout the pandemic. We delivered the finals on two different television shows, the aforementioned Warrior Nun and The Twilight Zone, plus multiple commercials.

Do you think COVID-19 has hastened some companies turning to cloud workflows, and will your studio be expanding how it works in the cloud?
Yes, for sure. We would never have embraced this workflow, at least not this soon, without the threat of COVID-19. We are 18 years old as a company, and this has made us re-evaluate what can be done in terms of expansion and has allowed our employees to have the option to work from home if they become ill or need to attend to their families. Also, in the past, we’ve had limited expansion capabilities based on our physical footprint, but now we can add people remotely and increase capacity, which is amazing.

How are you handling security of content in the cloud?
All the data remains in the office, so security is maintained through our enterprise firewall.

Has working remotely with the cloud made you re-evaluate your on-site storage/workflow solution?
For now we’ll still employ our infrastructure at the office while increasingly exploring ways to work in the cloud. This pandemic has taught us how to collaborate remotely though, which has really been eye-opening and incredible as a business owner. We now see the fact that people can work efficiently and be remote. When things are back to normal, we will still be exploring ways to use this workflow for our staff, and expansion is also a strong option.

 

NetApp Media Solutions Strategist Dave Frederick

NetApp systems allow M&E pros to manage, store and access content for diverse media workflows. The company offers a portfolio of data management and storage solutions, unifies existing NAS and SAN infrastructures and achieves data portability with hybrid cloud.

What are the basics of a cloud-based creative workflow? What tools can be used?
Most people would say that a “cloud-based creative workflow” is the ability to use the flexibility, cost models and administrative ease of remote public storage and computing for some or all of their workflows, with the same performance of locally owned and operated infrastructure. The key to this statement is “some or all.”

Not all creative workflow stages can be implemented in the cloud and satisfy the desires/requirements of the creatives involved. While achieving tens of gigabytes per second of data access might be technically possible, it might not be financially prudent. An editorial team may decide that working on proxies is fine for their 4K projects, but a color grader would not. That said, we are in the “Age of Cloud Enlightenment” in the media and entertainment industry, and both customers and vendors are developing and deploying new approaches to old workflows.

How has what you’ve been offering changed, or how has usage changed, since the COVID-19 shutdown? And what are people using the cloud for?
While COVID-19 has been an accelerant, the desire for efficient, cost-effective, high-performance and application-compatible distributed infrastructure has been a goal of our industry for a long time. Originally, networks of television stations and now divisions of multi-national media conglomerates have asked for and implemented this to varying degrees and in support of specific needs.

It wasn’t that long ago that it was faster to ship a truckload of Betacam tapes than to transmit the data over a network. At NetApp, we focus on efficient, reliable and task-appropriate data management on the ground and in the cloud, and making the connection between them as seamless as possible is an integral part of the solution.

Have you re-evaluated how you are providing your service/tools?
We’ve always prioritized automation and remote administration of systems — both in the cloud and on premises — so our customers and partners have had minimal impact from the virus. Obviously, extra considerations have to be taken to install new equipment, and this is one of the advantages of a robust integrated cloud strategy like NetApp’s. Deploying additional capacity in the cloud, even when most of the infrastructure is on the ground, is easy for us.

Is this the tape-to-digital moment for cloud? Did this force those who were on the fence into diving in?
As you know, media folks are notoriously risk-adverse. If they have a process that works, they will hold onto it until it’s more costly or time-consuming not to change. The other qualifier is that in our industry, applications are in the driver’s seat, and infrastructure is along for the ride. Cloud adoption is going to depend first on whether the primary application is compatible or can be made compatible. The good news is that more and more application developers are offering versions of their apps in the cloud and building in direct access to cloud storage. Once the compatibility is solved, then it’s just a matter of making financial sense.

What do you tell those customers about how you offer secure workflows in the cloud?
Data security and reliability is of paramount importance to all industries, not just the M&E space. The financial, medical, industrial and government industries demand unfaltering security. NetApp has hundreds of thousands of deployments across these industries, and our media and entertainment customers enjoy the benefit of the thousands of collective years of engineering that goes into our systems to provide that level of security. Very early on, public cloud providers had to prove their security capabilities and engineer new capabilities to meet requirements. Now it’s pretty much table stakes, or else they would not attract customers.

How much bandwidth do you expect your users to have to use their products effectively?
That depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Remote access to data, either via synchronized transfers or virtual desktops, may not require much bandwidth at all. Having a large group of editors sharing the same files directly from a public cloud at full resolution is not going to be feasible. That said, application developers and storage/data management companies like NetApp are working with our M&E customers on caching, staging and synchronizing across cloud and local storage protocols to make access to remote content feel as efficient and predictable as local storage. Why boil the ocean when all you need is a cup of tea?

What would you like those who are about to jump into the cloud to know?
Come on in. The water’s fine! But don’t expect to migrate every operation in your business to the cloud all at once. One of the cloud’s strengths is its flexibility and compartmentalization. Work with industry experts to determine the workflows that can benefit most from moving to the cloud. Usually this ends up being a cost and productivity calculation.

Also remember that you don’t have to use a public cloud provider if you prefer to operate your own cloud. A private cloud may be a better fit, especially for frequently accessed, infrequently modified material in a large repository.

Cinnafilm CEO Lance Maurer

Cinnafilm provides video and audio processing solutions for standards conversions within realtime transcode workflows, high-quality motion-based frame rate conversion, audio/video retiming, deinterlacing, denoising, and texture management.

What are the basics of a cloud-based creative workflow? What tools can be used?
The basics are economics and performance. There are many tool combinations available; ultimately the process has to be economically viable and the performance has to improve on previous processes to make it worth migrating the creative workflows into the cloud.

Regarding economics, there are four major contributors: storage, compute, applications (software), and the human factor. Each contributor must be equally and carefully addressed when designing a successful cloud workflow that won’t break the bank (or deadline). No two solutions look exactly the same between our B2B customers, so each outlay is partially custom. Vendors are working hard to make cloud a plug-and-play environment, but it is still rather convoluted. While significant advances have been made by great companies creating ubiquitous operational glue, we still struggle with an overly complex ecosystem due to a lack of established industry standards. Two of the four contributors to the economics formula I listed depend on big-tech cloud providers. Their inconsistencies (such as egress) complicate the vendors’ ability to deliver smooth, multi-cloud options for clients.

Regarding performance, we measure the ability of the cloud machine(s) to process creative workflows reliably and in a predictable time frame. There are still several technical challenges to automating and improving cloud operations, such as visual QC, orchestration and media management, and intra-region connectivity. But the technology exists today to begin migration now, and the benefits of making all of this work are truly undeniable. Once the cloud machine is designed and built, it can self-replicate relatively easily — meaning massive scaling on demand. This is strategic for a lot of reasons and perfectly relative as our industry faces massively growing content demand. Investing millions in metal that collects dust half the year is no longer a smart play, especially with remote access becoming a norm.

The tools available to process workflows today are varied and plentiful. The main components are storage, data transfer, MAM, orchestration and supply-chain management, QC, playback, transcode, image/audio processing, and other cool, evolving cloud “services” such as AI-driven analysis and seek tools, voice-to-text, etc.

Most exciting to me is the paradigm shift for disruptive entrepreneurs. Being unrestrained by hardware requirements is truly liberating — as long as big tech can maintain cloud systems equally accessible to all. Frankly, I think the cloud provider who makes it easiest for small and large companies to co-exist is going to win the “cloud shootout” within the “streaming wars”; this is because the best professional, cloud-based workflows combine small and large technologies, similar to how it has been in the past. It’s a great time to be a pioneer in this business.

How has what you’ve been offering changed, or how has usage changed, since the COVID-19 shutdown? And what are people using the cloud for?
Fortunately for Cinnafilm, we took the cloud migration idea seriously when it first surfaced in 2015 or so. We have spent most of our R&D since then preparing for this inevitable shift, so I think our offering is well-positioned. Pivoting from a file-based, B2B enterprise software focus to a truly cloud PaaS/SaaS company has been no easy (four-year) task.

We have had to invest significantly in building an ever-evolving platform (PixelStrings) with API endpoints relative to how the big cloud ecosystems operate. Before COVID-19, there were a few media companies (Discovery, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.) who pioneered cloud as a basis for supply chain operations, but most of the B2B facilities we have engaged have been very carefully checking the temperature of the pool, with nominal budgetary focus.

COVID-19 has forced the entire industry to shortcut this plan and jump in the pool. From our vantage, we are seeing a big uptick in transcode and image/audio processing in the cloud (our area), and many content owners are aggressively seeking the most efficient ways to get a lot of work done remotely, which is bringing a larger-than-expected variety of customers to our platform. All of this is very healthy for our industry even while it presents major challenges to us and our society.

Have you re-evaluated how you are providing your service/tools?
Not really. Since we have been focused on cloud for some time, it is confirmation that our direction is the correct one. It feels like we are on a speeding train, and we know we want to be on it because we think it is taking us where we want to go. But we are also not sure exactly who is driving this thing, which is a little unsettling.

Is this the tape-to-digital moment for cloud? Did this force those who were on the fence into diving in?
Absolutely. This is a once-in-a-lifetime global economic shift, and everyone should have a plan for it. Fence-sitters will be in a lonely place if they stay there much longer.

What do you tell users about how you offer secure workflows in the cloud?

Our PaaS system works securely in Amazon and Microsoft, and, frankly, I trust their IT security over anyone else’s. The fact is, there is no foolproof workflow system — even a fully locked-down, walled garden can be penetrated by someone on a vile mission. Security is serious business, and it is an area that improves each day thanks in large part to those big-tech companies. Security has two responsible parties: the tech companies and the people/companies who use them. Good practice by both parties is necessary to be the most secure.

I reject the idea that the onus is solely on the tech vendors to provide 100% security, and there is no such thing. I used to work as an aerospace engineer on the heavy launch rockets — decades of good practice still never meant that rocket travel was 100% safe. Same with the cloud. Basically, it is a risk/reward equation, and without a doubt the risk warrants the rewards. I am a risk-taker at heart, so I am a little biased (smiles).

How much bandwidth do you expect your users to have to use your products effectively?
As much as you can afford to start with. Honestly, as an engineer, I highly recommend the following general practice: analyze/prepare, build/test, put into commission and constantly improve. Start with what works, then make it more efficient over time. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Any tips for those who are about to jump into the cloud?
The cloud works reliably well now, and it can revolutionize your operations in ways that are impossible to capture here. Just keep in mind that cloud-based media workflows are complex machines so be sure to hire the best — you will always get what you pay for.

Lastly, you need to invest more now to realize the full rewards later; expect some trial and error, and expect things to change over time for the better as technology (always) improves. Nothing is static.

Conductor President/CEO Mac Moore

Since 2017, Conductor has been offering large-scale render services in the cloud, targeting both AWS and GCP. To date, the company has managed over 350 million core-hours on its platform.

What are the basics of a cloud-based creative workflow? What tools can be used?
Most components that studios use locally are now broadly available in the cloud, so the options are pretty expansive. Small studios can leverage usage-based licensing for preconfigured remote desktops running their preferred DCC environments.

For studios with more established pipelines, there are mechanisms for loading custom preconfigured images in a cloud-based virtual machine (VM) for storyboarding, content creation, collaboration, review/approval and high-performance compute, like rendering. There are even some more advanced features that are accelerated with cloud-based machine learning and artificial intelligence, like autodetection of scene elements for replacement and localization.

How has what you’ve been offering changed, or how has usage changed, since the COVID-19 shutdown? And what are people using the cloud for?
Our focus at Conductor has been turnkey cloud compute orchestration, centered mostly on rendering, since 2017. However, up until the pandemic, the studios almost exclusively came from an on-prem environment, using cloud for peak shaving, when project requirements outpaced their local infrastructure.

With work-from-home mandates in place, those same studios are now asking to run our platform from VMs, creating content in the cloud with all their scene dependencies housed in cloud storage. This has been quite a large jump for cloud-based workflows and a real testament to what VFX studios can put in place in such a short time.

So, the recent changes to Conductor are focused on addressing those new starting points and managing at-scale compute orchestration from a cloud-first approach. For larger studios, we’ve begun implementing new bespoke models, wherein Conductor will run within their own cloud accounts while relying on us to manage jobs, meter software, and dynamically control spending.

Have you re-evaluated how you are providing your service/tools?
Oh, absolutely. With the acceleration to cloud post-pandemic, there’s a lot of training and optimization needed to overcome the initial technical challenges. While Conductor itself is simple to use, the industry has pushed years of migration into a span of two to three months. Before the pandemic, industry think tank MovieLabs published a 10-year outlook that projected mass adoption of a cloud-first approach by 2030, so we’re force-feeding 10 years of learning into a few months.

We haven’t historically been a services-heavy organization, but we’ve started filling that need to get studios going quickly and efficiently with their holistic cloud strategy. Also, as cloud adoption continues, standards will be key for creating deterministic workflows. To that end, we recently joined Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) and are working with MovieLabs to help move those standards and recommendations forward.

Is this the tape-to-digital moment for cloud? Did this force those who were on the fence into diving in?
I certainly think so. We spent most of the first years at Conductor evangelizing cloud, and even up until early this year, many studios looked to the cloud only for those “hair on fire” moments. Obviously, our industry is ripe with those, but there has always been the opportunity for a more deterministic and cost-efficient, always-on approach. It will be incredibly hard to put the genie back in the bottle with respect to working from home, and studios who want to attract top talent will need to accommodate a geodiverse infrastructure. I think you’ll see a migration to consolidated centers of excellence from a brick-and-mortar standpoint, where location flexibility becomes the norm. And what enables that flexibility? Cloud.

What do you tell users about how you offer secure workflows in the cloud?
Security has always been top-of-mind for us, working on large cinematic projects that require us to run third-party audits, but I think the pandemic is starting to force the issue on a number of fronts, most notably, formalized cloud security processes and project-specific NDA provisions for remote work environments.

I’m seeing good movement on both, but we at Conductor are specifically focused on the cloud security signoff (through the Trusted Partner Network, most likely). Up until now, it’s been a bit of a choose your own adventure, and focused mainly on physical locations, so I think there will be significant acceleration toward a single cloud security signoff approach.

How much bandwidth do you expect your users to have to use their products effectively?
This is always a big question with cloud in general, and the answer depends on the specific aspect of cloud usage for a studio’s workflow. For virtualized workstations there’s a pretty heavy latency requirement, and people use PCoIP solutions to best accommodate. To answer your question for Conductor, however, studios are not interacting directly with the compute resources, so the main requirement is just that: bandwidth.

We have functionality like file deduplication, so smaller studios can get by with limited connectivity, but we typically see larger studios have 1Gb or larger connections that can support many artists submitting many scenes simultaneously. For WFH scenarios, as little as a 50Mb line from their home is certainly sufficient.

Any tips for those who are about to jump into the cloud?
I think the most important thing cloud newcomers need to know is that this technology offers pretty significant cost benefits. For an industry operating on razor-thin margins, a business built on elastic expense as projects ebb and flow is key to profitability. The vast majority of overspend I see is related to services not being optimized to scale dynamically, where studios are essentially “lifting and shifting” their on-prem environment to cloud infrastructure. That method burns through your margins pretty quickly and has contributed to the perception of cloud being costly.

Optimization is key, and studios need to be cognizant of how long services run in the cloud. From storage and file serving to virtual machines for interactive use or high-performance compute, it’s important to spin up resources only as they’re needed. Minimizing uptime to only the components necessary could cut up to 50% of a studio’s spend over traditional on-prem methods.

 

Dell Technologies Senior Business Development Manager Alex Timbs

Dell Technologies offers end-to-end technology solutions to meet the needs of content creators and broadcasters in the media and entertainment industry.

What are the basics of a cloud-based creative workflow? And what tools can be used?
If you evaluate your creative needs from the perspective of collaboration, rather than technology, you’ll find the right workflow, whether on-prem, hybrid or in the cloud.

Ask yourselves these questions:
– Why? The simple act of asking yourself why will help map a strategy toward the right type of cloud workflow for saving money, for efficiency, for iterating the creative, for scale, etc.
– Where is the data created?
– What is the variability of the compute used against it, e.g., am I using from peak render, playout, storage, VDI, etc.?
– Who or what needs access to the data?
– How do I ensure I use automation to let people do higher levels of work, reduce collaborative friction and improve efficiency while not compromising cost controls?
– How am I going to ensure content security obligations are met?

Often, we find that the answers to these questions result in customers determining that sometimes data should live in cloud, sometimes near cloud, sometimes in private cloud, and even sometimes a mix of all of them. In M&E, collaborative data use drives where the data should live. Where you put the data should not drive or limit collaboration.

Leaving the specific hyperscalers’ choices out of it for now, once you have a clear understanding of the business value and have answered the “why,” the required tool sets for cloud become much clearer. To be honest, there isn’t a huge difference between the tools needed for a modern on-prem technology function and a hybrid or even pure cloud play.

Some of the major considerations are:
– Cloud infrastructure automation (How am I going to manage images, deployment, etc. in the cloud?)
– Networking (How am I going to connect to the cloud, e.g., dark fiber, IP transit?)
– Containers versus VMs versus microservices (What technology do I plan to use in the cloud?)
– Cost management and reporting (How can I see what it’s going to cost and is costing, and how will I make informed decisions, including least-cost routing of my workloads?)

How has what you’ve been offering changed, or how has usage changed, since the COVID-19 shutdown? And what are people using the cloud for?
There has been a huge uptake of instant messaging/video collaboration platforms. Otherwise, in M&E, there’s been a significant paralysis in content creation activity, so there hasn’t been a major shift in anything beyond what I mentioned. Actually, I would suspect that cloud consumption for the typical use cases in content creation would actually be down on last year due to stalled activity.

Have you re-evaluated how you are providing your service/tools?
Clouds are awesome! It’s one of the most positively disruptive technology trends in decades, with competition driving innovative new services while lowering costs. Cloud operating models are moving on-prem as well, often called private cloud.

We are cloud-agnostic. We love all clouds. We have offerings from native to hybrid, reducing egress costs and providing unmatched performance for common M&E workloads. We offer customers tightly integrated solutions with the cloud of their choice and with the best network to storage performance as possible. But because it’s in partnership with Dell, we bring enterprise-grade uptime and performance SLAs to the offering as well.

Is this the tape-to-digital moment for cloud? Did this force those who were on the fence into diving in?
I don’t think it can be considered a “digital tape moment,” as you would need to look at the evidence, which, at this stage, doesn’t lead me to believe that cloud workflows in M&E have had a seismic shift in adoption. Having said that, what the lockdown(s) have done is prove to many businesses that remote workflows are feasible and may offer significant cost and human capital benefits.

All the same considerations would be made today as would have been 12 months ago, but perhaps cloud, and its associated utility consumption models, will be seen as another risk mitigation strategy should a business not know if they had a future three months out. While it would be a fraction of the cost to buy, run and amortize a production asset over a three-year period, when compared to using the public cloud for the same, you also need to have the confidence that the asset(s) will be needed over a good part of that period.

To look at it another way, would you purchase a car to travel to work if you were uncertain about having a job, or would you catch an Uber? The car will likely be much cheaper over multiple years but is not something you would want to own if you had no way to pay for it

What do you tell customers about how you offer secure workflows in the cloud?
Based on requirements and feedback from key M&E partners and vendors, Dell commenced a cybersecurity compliance and alignment initiative in early 2020 to demonstrate how specific Dell products and services meet or exceed industry cybersecurity standards and best practices. This pack will assist customers and partners that are participating in the TPN assessment process and planning on building their facilities and production workflows to meet the TPN/MPA’s CSBP. (The CSBP is an M&E industry-specific cybersecurity controls standard, offering best practices and implementation guidance.) This pack includes architectures for remote workflows and cloud use.

So what would you like those who are about to jump into the cloud to know?
– Answer the “why.”
– Try to have a hybrid cloud strategy to avoid “lock in” and support the lowest-cost workflow options.
– Leverage trusted partners, like Dell Technologies, to help you.
– Ensure that you understand your connections (pipeline), and use technology where it allows humans to address higher levels of work, an increase in collaboration, or improvement to efficiency.

How much bandwidth do you expect your users to have to use their products effectively?
This is very much dependent on the data set(s), workflow(s), scale, budget and collaboration strategy of each customer. VPN over IP transit might be good enough for one customer, yet four 10G multiplexed direct connects is not enough for another. Additional factors might be distance to access zones/POPs, hybrid scenarios with storage on-prem, hybrid scenarios collocated next to the clouds, cloud native, etc.

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Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years.