The Entertainment Industry Bats for the Cloud
While visual effects have always relied heavily on large and flexible storage, it is only recently that almost every aspect of film production has become heavily dependent on cloud computing. Editing, storage and post-production work are all carried out in the cloud.
In the early days there were some worries caused by concerns about cloud security, bandwidth and loss of control. Even though hundreds of other industries were already storing terabytes of data in the cloud, the entertainment industry stayed aloof. It was only after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that people became aware that organizations dealing with very large quantities of data could be wiped out without adequate data protection.
Visual Effects studios began to look at alternate means of managing and securing data, and the public cloud was perfectly positioned. Studios realized that they could use the processing power of the cloud to reduce their own IT expenditure besides just getting reliable storage. Specialist cloud computing data centers that offered studios petabytes of data (1 million GB) and access any frame of the movie quickly began to emerge.
Other service providers realized that entertainment businesses know very little about information technology and began to offer instantaneous plug-and-play solutions. MTV, Shine Group and BBC are all heavy users of cloud computing. These plug-and-play solutions are extremely easy and intuitive to use and require almost no trained manpower.
Reality TV shows the way
Yet another big fan of cloud service is reality TV. The format of cloud services allows reality TV producers to store enormous amounts of raw footage, tag it rapidly and locate specific scenes with ease. This searchable database of tagged video is the backbone of production. Only a cloud platform can satisfy the sheer size and processing capability needed.
Contract Management
Those who know something about the entertainment industry are aware that there are a large number of contracts that need to be negotiated for every production. These contracts have to be refined and approved before being subjected to negotiation and consequent re-editing. For this to be done on-line there is a requirement for collaborative file- sharing and document management.
This requires specialist capabilities that companies are rarely able to find in-house. You need to set up an online conference room where participants can discuss and share documents as the negotiation progresses. It is no surprise to find that there are a number of companies that specialize in this service while being able to demonstrate strong security and manage version control of documents. Well-known users of this cloud computing service include DreamWorks, Media Horse and Relativity Music Group.
Vfx is supreme
However, it is the visual effects groups that are the best-known and most powerful advocates of cloud computing. Many studios feared that connecting to a data center over the Internet would make work painfully slow and perhaps kill the creative process. Service providers have worked with RAM and Flash to bring latency down to acceptable limits, with the best service providers achieving 0.1 milliseconds.
DreamWorks uses a 15,000 processor core cloud service to animate its characters. Just four seconds of animation takes 96 frames and these take nearly 10 hours of computing time to ensure that the animation is precisely as the director has visualized it. Once that is done, the 15,000 core processors get to work stitching the frames together. Doing this kind of work with only in-house equipment meant millions of dollars in costs. Doing it in the cloud is much cheaper and needs very little setup time.
Democratizing the Industry
The cloud is also making it possible for small producers to experiment like never before. It has brought down the costs of production, resulting in many productions that would otherwise never have made it to the screen. More realistic 3D and graphics are just the beginning of a new trend.
Cloud computing is fast becoming an indispensable component of the entertainment industry. One of the reasons is because of its capability to meet system demands of the industry. Check out the High Availability configuration example of GMO Cloud and see how cloud is able to do what traditional hosting cannot. Quality is going up all the time while costs are dropping. Think carefully about this when you watch your next film.
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About the Guest Author:
Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.
