Post Production Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: A Cloudy Future For Post Production

Posted on 21st July 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Even before the pandemic, post-production was moving into the cloud. With the mantra of bringing your apps to the media, remote working was coming to offices and now it’s also coming to homes. As with any major shift in an industry, it will suit some people earlier than others so while we’re in this transition, it’s work taking some time to ask why people are doing this, why some people are not and what problems are still left unsolved. For a wider context on the move to remote editing, watch this video from IET Media.

This video sees Key Code Media CTO,Jeff Sengpiehl talking to Bebop Technology’s Michael Kammes, Ian McPherson from AWS and Ian Main from Teradici. After laying the context for the discussion, he asks the panel why consumer cloud solutions aren’t suitable for professionals. Michael picks this up first by picking on consumer screen sharing solutions which are optimised for getting a task done and they don’t offer the fidelity and consistency you need for media workflows. When it comes to storage at the consumer level, the cost usually prevents investment in the hardware which would give the low-latency, high-capacity storage which is needed for many professional video formats. Ian then adds that security plays a much bigger role in professional workflows and the moment you bring down some assets to your PC, you’re extending the security boundary into your consumer software and to your house.

The security topic features heavily in this conversation and Michael talks about the Trusted Partner Network who are working on a security specification which, it is hoped, will be a ‘standard’ everyone can work to in order to show a product or solution is secure. The aim is to stop every company having their own thick document detailing their security needs because that means each vendor has to certify themselves time and time again against similar demands but which are all articulated differently and therefore defended differently. Ian explains that cloud providers like AWS provide better physical security than most companies could manage and offer security tools for customers to secure their solution. Many are hoping to form their workflows around the Movielabs 2030 vision which recommends ways to move content through the supply chain with security and auditing in mind.

“What’s stopping people from adopting the cloud for post-production?”, poses Jeff. Cost is one reason people are adopting the cloud and one reason others aren’t. Not dissimilar to the ‘IP’ question in other parts of the supply chain, at this point in the technology’s maturity, the cost savings are most tangible to bigger companies or those with particularly high demands for flexibility and scalability. For a smaller operation, there may simply not be enough benefit to justify the move. Particularly as it would mean adopting tools that take time to learn so, even if temporary, slow down an editor’s ability to deliver a project in the time they’re used to. But on top of that, there’s the issue of cost uncertainty. It’s easy to say how much storage will cost in the cloud, but when you’re using dynamic amounts of computation and moving data in and out of the cloud, estimating your costs becomes difficult and in a conservative industry this uncertainty can form part of a blocker to adoption.

Starting to take questions from the audience, Ian outlines some of the ways to get terabytes of media quickly into the cloud whilst Michael explains his approach to editing with proxies to at least get you started or even for the whole process. Conforming to local, hi-res media may still make sense out of the cloud or you have time to upload the files whilst the project is underway. There’s a brief discussion on the rise of availability of Macs for cloud workflows and a discussion about the difficulty, but possibility, of still having a high-quality monitoring feed on a good monitor even if your workstation is totally remote.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Ian Main Technical Marketing Principal, Teradici Corporation
	Ian McPherson Head of Global Business Development, Media Supply Chain
	Michael Kammes VP Marketing & Business Development, BeBop Technology
	Jeff Sengpiehl CTO Key Code Media

Video: SMPTE Presents – MovieLabs 2030

Posted on 8th February 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Workflows changed when we moved from tapes to files, so it makes sense they will change as they increasingly move to the cloud. What if they changed to work in the cloud, but also benefited on-prem workflows at the same time? The work at MovieLabs is doing just that. With the cloud, infrastructure can be dynamic and needs to work between companies so data needs to be able to flow between companies easily and in an automated way. If this can be achieved, the amount of human interaction can be reduced and focused on the creative parts of content making.

This panel from at this SMPTE Hollywood section meeting discusses the work underway moderated by Greg Ciaccio at ETC. First off, Jim Helman from MoveLabs gives an overview of the 2030 vision. Kicked off at IBC 2019 with the publication of ‘Evolution of Media Creation‘, 10 principles were laid out for building the future of production covering topics like realtime engines, remote working, cloud deployments, security access and software-defined workflows (SDWs). This was followed up by a white paper covering ‘The Evolution of Production Security‘ which laid out the need for a new, zero-trust approach to security and then, in 2020, the jointly run industry lab released ‘The Evolution of Production workflows‘ which talked about SDWs.

“A software-defined workflow (SDW) uses a highly configurable set of tools and processes to support creative tasks by connecting them through software-mediated collaboration and automation.”

Source – Annie Change, Universal Pictures

This SDW thread of the MovieLabs 2030 vision aims to standardise workflows at the data-model level, and, in the future, API level to allow for data to be easily exchanged and understood. Annie Chang from Universal Pictures explains that the ‘Evolution of Production Workflows’ publication deals with Tasks, Assets, Relationships and participants. If you can define your work with these four areas, you have enough information to get computers to understand the workflows and external data.

This leads to the idea of building each scene in an object model showing relationships between them. The data would describe key props and stage elements (for instance, if they were important for VFX), actors and their metadata and technical information such as colour correction, camera files and production staff.

Once modelled, a production can be viewed in many ways. For instance, the head of a studio may just be interested in high-level stories, people involved and distribution routes. Whereas a VFX producer would have a different perspective needing more detail about the scene. A VFX asset curator, on the other hand, would just need to know about the shots down to the filenames and storage locations. This work promises to allow all of these views of the same, dynamic data. So this not only improves workflows’ portability between vendor systems but is also a way of better organising any workflow irrespective of automation. Dreamworks is currently using this method of working with the aim of trying it out on live-action projects soon.

Annie finishes by explaining that there are efficiencies to be had in better organising assets. It will help reduce duplicates both by uncovering duplicate files but also stopping duplicate assets being produced. AI and similar technology will be able to sift through the information to create clips, uncover trivia and, with other types of data mining, create better outputs for inclusion in viewer content.

Sony Pictures’ Daniel De La Rosa then talks about the Avid platform in the cloud that they build in response to the Covid crisis and how cloud infrastructure was built in order of need and, often, based on existing solutions which were scaled up. Daniel makes the point the working in the cloud is different because it’s “bringing the workflows to the data” as opposed to the ‘old way’ where the data was brought to the machine. In fact, cloud or otherwise, with the globalisation of production there isn’t any way of doing things the ‘old way’ any more.

This reliance on the cloud – and to be clear, Daniel talks of multi-cloud working within the same production – does prompt a change in the security model employed. Previously a security perimeter would be set up around a location, say a building or department, to keep the assets held within safe. They could then be securely transferred to another party who had their own perimeter. Now, when assets are in the cloud, they may be accessed by multiple parties. Although this may not always happen simultaneously, through the life of the asset, this will be true. Security perimeters can be made to work in the cloud, but they don’t offer the fine-grained control that’s really needed where you really need to be able to restrict the type of access as well as who can access on a file-by-file basis. Moreover, as workflows are flexible, these security controls need to be modified throughout the project and, often, by the software-defined workflows themselves without human intervention. There is plenty of work to do to make this vision a reality.

The Q&A section covers exactly feedback from the industry into these proposals and specifications, the fact they will be openly accessible, and a question on costs for moving into the cloud. On the latter topic, Daniel said that although costs do increase they are offset when you drop on-premise costs such as rent and utilities. Tiered storage costs in the cloud will be managed by the workflows themselves just like MAMs manage asset distribution between online, near-line and LTO storage currently.

The session finishes talking about how SDWs will help automation and spotting problems, current gaps in cloud workflow tech (12-bit colour grading & review to name but one) and VFX workflows.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Jim Helman MovieLabs CTO
	Daniel De La Rosa Sony Pictures’ Vice President of Post Production, Technology Development
	Annie Chang Universal Pictures Vice President of Creative Technologies
	Moderator: Greg Ciaccio ASC Motion Imaging Technology Council Workflow Chair EP and Head of Production Technology & Post, ETC at University Southern California

Video: Cloud Services for Media and Entertainment: Production and Post-Production

Posted on 28th January 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

My content producers and broadcasters have been forced into the cloud. Some have chosen remote controlling their on-prem kit but many have found that the cloud has brought them benefits beyond simply keeping their existing workflows working during the pandemic.

This video from SMPTE’s New York section looks at how people moved production to the cloud and how they intend to keep it there. The first talk from WarnerMedia’s Greg Anderson discussing the engineering skills needed to be up to the task concluding that there are more areas of knowledge in play than one engineer can bring to the table from the foundational elements such as security, virtulisation nad networking, to DevOps skills like continuous integration and development (CI/CD), Active Directory and databases.

The good news is that whichever of the 3 levels of engineer that Greg introduces, from beginner to expert, the entry points are pretty easy to access to start your journey and upskilling. Within the company, Greg says that leaders can help accelerate the transition to cloud by allowing teams a development/PoC account which provides a ‘modest’ allowance each month for experimentation, learning and prooving ideas. Not only does that give engineers good exposure to cloud skills, but it gives managers experience in modelling, monitoring and analysing costs.

Greg finishes by talking through their work with implementing a cloud workflow for HBO MAX which is currently on a private cloud and on the way to being in the public cloud. The current system provides for 300 concurrent users doing Edit, Design, Engineering and QC workflows with asset management and ingest. They are looking to the public cloud to consolidate real estate and standardise the tech stack amongst many other drivers outlined by Greg.

Scott Bounds Architect at Microsoft Azure talks about content creation in the cloud. The objectives for Azure is to allow worldwide collaboration, speed up the time to market, allow scaling of content creation and bring improvements in security, reliability and access of data.

This starts for many by using hybrid workflows rather than a full switch to the cloud. After all, Scott says that rough cut editing, motion graphics and VFX are all fairly easy to implement in the cloud whereas colour grading, online and finishing are still best for most companies if they stay on-prem. Scott talks about implementing workstations in the cloud allowing GPU-powered workstations to be used using the remote KVM technology PCoIP to connect in. This type of workflow can be automated using Azure scripting and Terraform.

John Whitehead is part of the New York Times’ Multimedia Infrastructure Engineering team which have recently moved their live production to the cloud. Much of the output of the NYT is live events programming such as covering press conferences. John introduces their internet-centric microservices architecture which was already being worked on before the pandemic started.

The standard workflow was to have a stream coming into MCR which would then get routed to an Elemental encoder for sending into the cloud and distributed with Fastly. To be production-friendly they had created some simple-to-use web frontends for routing. For full-time remote production, John explains they wanted to improve their production quality by adding a vision mixer, graphics and closed captions. John details the solution they chose which comprised cloud-first solutions rather than running windows in the cloud.

The NYT was pushed into the cloud by Covid, but it was felt to be low risk and something they were considering doing anyway. The pandemic forced them to consider that perhaps the technologies they were waiting for had already arrived and ended up saving on Capex and received immediate returns on their investment.

Finishing up the presentations is Anshul Kapoor from Google Cloud who presents market analysis on the current state of cloud adoption and the market conditions. He says that one manifestation of the current crisis is that new live-events content is reduced if not postponed which is making people look to their archives. Some people have not yet done their archiving process, whilst some already have a digital archive. Google and other cloud providers can offer vast scale in order to process and manage archives but also machine learning in order to process, make sense and make searchable all the content.

The video ends with an extensive Q&A with the presenters.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Greg Anderson Senior Systems Engineer, WarnerMedia
	Scott Bounds Media Cloud Architect, Microsoft
	John Whitehead Senior Engineer, Multimedia Infrastructure Engineering, New York Times
	Anshul Kapoor Business Development, Google Cloud

Video: Remote editing, storage, cloud dynamics & reopening production

Posted on 29th July 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

The rug was pulled from under the feet of the production industry due to the pandemic, both in film and television. The scramble to finish projects and to fill TV schedules has resulted in a lot of creative ideas and a surge in remote editing. This panel looks at the benefits of this work and considers whether this will continue to be done in the future when the restrictions are lifted.

In this video, we hear from Sony, Teradici, Lou Wirth Productions, EditShare and PADEM Group on the gaping hole in workflows left by the pandemic and how the industry has bridged the gap with remote editing.

Moderated by IET Media Exec director Allan McLennan from PADEM group, we hear answers to questions like “What are the challenges moving to remote editing?”, “Can Remote Editing open up diversity in this part of the industry?” and features a look to the future in terms of new technologies for meeting the streaming demand.

“One of the challenges with a technology transition is people often need a motivation”
Stephen Tallamy, EditShare

“It’s easy to keep doing the thing you used to do until you’re forced to do it,” explains EditShare’s Stephen Tallamy. But the panel doesn’t see the pandemic as just something that forced a change, rather they see the benefits in the move towards remove editing and remote collaboration. David Rosen from Sony was positive saying that “Creative resources can be anywhere and the elimination of having to move those people to where the content it…is a significant advantage.” From his perspective, increasing numbers of customers have cloud as part of their workflow.

“Never again.” My customers are saying, “Never again will I be in a situation where I cannot get access to. my content.”
David Rosen, Sony

The panel’s discussion moves to remote editing, the practice of giving editors access to remote computers which run the editing software and have access to the relevant media. The editor’s local computer then becomes a window on to the edit suite in a different building, or in the cloud. Ian Main from Teradici, explains that a company can open an edit station up to an editor who could be anywhere in the world which is why this is such an important part of the solution to enabling work to continue in an emergency. Teradici specialises in developing and deploying high-performance remote control of PCs and Stephen Tallamy speaks from the experience of enabling remote editing using Teradici for enabling remote editing workflows on AWS and other cloud providers and data centres.

“The production side shut down, but the post-production side accelerated.”
Ian Main, Teradici

Lou Wirth, award-winning editor and producer, joins the panel as someone who has continued to edit locally. “For producers who were forced to go into a remote editing situation, they may have always been on the fence about it”, Lou says, “…If it was a good experience, they would see the advantages of it and continue.” Indeed the consensus does seem to be that much of what’s happening now will be fed back into workflows of the future even when restrictions are lifted.

Listen to the whole discussion which includes a look ahead to IBC.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Ian Main Technical Marketing Principle, Teradici
	David Rosen VP, Cloud Applications & Solutions, Sony
	Stephen Tallamy Chief Technology Officer, EditShare
	Lou Wirth Head Story Editor, Lou Wirth Productions
	Moderator: Allan McLennan Chief Executive, Global Market Technologist, PADEM Media Group, Executive Board Director, IET Media technology network

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