What is it? Where is it? Why should we use it?

Now that the ETC has launched the Hollywood Production in the Cloud effort, I though it might be a good idea to sit in on the HPA panel discussion titled Hollywood in the Cloud to hear first hand what the post-production community thinks of the cloud. The unanimous conclusion of the HPA panel was that the biggest impact the cloud can have on the Hollywood post-production community is to improve “collaboration.” This theme was also prevalent during the ETC’s “Hollywood Production in the Cloud” Round-Table discussion back in January. I think the HPA panelists were right on target with their assessment of collaboration. The panelists were very optimistic of the cloud’s potential while being pragmatic and understanding of the cloud’s limitations today. Pointing to an inhibitor to cloud adoption, the panelists concerns were bandwidth and latency. From the other direction, “mayhem in the market” is driving how content is marketed and distributed, and the “notion of any screen, anywhere, anytime is driving the need to get media out in the marketplace as fast as possible.” Distribution is migrating “from devices & packaged media, to integrated IP based TV sets to cloud services supporting edge-devices.” We used to have “one market – theatrical, with only one format – 35mm film. Now we have an exposition of digital formats,” which is close to exceeding the capacity of the studio to deliver. The exploding need for more storage and compute cycles is driving the need for internal clouds as well as external clouds as solution of choice. In 2005, a major post-production facility had about 50 TBytes of ingest and transcoding per year, now that is done on a daily basis. Looking at the cloud today, some could not “see how rendering can happen in the cloud,” while others already could see a clear path ahead.

Behaviors are changing dramatically, “wall postings have out paced email, millennial’s have a different expectation, we now are communicating with different metaphors driven by Facebook generation.” From the perspective of a cloud-service provider, the “studios should focus on how the cloud can cater to the end user.” This is a new viewpoint from the technology industry. The legacy approach was to provide manual services, but with the advent of the cloud, a self-service model is emerging built on automation. The true value of the cloud will be realized when an end-user can be working on “an application that runs without knowing if it is under my desk or in the cloud.” The good and bad is that “we are finally starting to see providers become focused on the Media & Entertainment industry, but we don’t have enough critical mass just yet.” Most vendors “don’t have a tight coupling of storage and compute necessary to support the unique demands of video transcoding.” While another panelist announced the effectiveness of their cloud-based editing, review and approval. They had to ensure that cloud-based “jog & shuttle” performed as well as it would if the “computer was under my desk.” From a “practical matter it doesn’t matter where it is as long as I can get it and it’s secure.” From a technology provider, “I am most interested in how the cloud impacts my engineering, we are not building anything that can’t be ported into the cloud. That’s a huge change for me as a vendor.” To change to a service model versus a product model is a difficult transition for technology vendors to traverse.

Public, private, internal, external, it will not be just one cloud model that fits perfectly for everything, the cloud will be a blending of approaches. The panel concluded on the theme that “there is a big difference between production, post, distribution, and there are many more problems production has to face with the cloud than in post and distribution.” That challenge will be addressed by the ETC’s “Hollywood Production in the Cloud” project. Stay tuned…