18 Executive Summary IBC Big Screen Experience


theibcdaily


Cloud


Dream factory moves to the


“If you want to


roll out a trailer for a movie you need 40-80 media formats just to hit your broadcast and internet


deliverables”


Richard Welsh Co-founder and CEO, Sundog Media Toolkit


Region: UK Interviewed by: George Jarrett


The virtualisation of digital cinema mastering and its integration into other cloud- based services was Richard Welsh's topic at IBC2014’s European Digital Cinema Forum event, Global D-Cinema Update. “Ultimately movie delivery is going to move into this environment, just in terms of how it gets to cinemas,” he asserts. “Not cloud on its own: content delivery networks are an incredibly important part of the equation, but the entire IT structure element is what we have to embrace. The cloud is actually quite well defined in computing terms – it is the virtualisation of physical resource.” Welsh started at Dolby as a sound engineer. He moved into digital cinema in 2003, and


subsequently fronted Dolby 3D. As Technicolor's head of operations for digital cinema, he gathered his ideas about transitioning post production and delivery to the cloud. “It felt like something that couldn’t happen within a large corporation,” he says. Teaming with former Dolby engineering colleague Christian Ralph, Welsh developed software for creating a cloud- based platform for compute intensive post production processes and launched under the banner of Sundog Media. “The industry has been trying to move from an interoperable technology to a true SMPTE standard,” says Welsh, also a Governor for SMPTE in EMEA. “That has been a difficult process because the industry


has struggled to roll that out. From all of my career positions the SMPTE DCP is the Holy Grail, but that has been a difficult transition that has not actually happened. It is something that requires a catalyst.


“The other issue is capital investment. It is very difficult in the current economic climate. Film has enjoyed incredible periods of stability with regard to formats. Broadcast has as well, but both are now finding that formats are almost consumer driven.


“Because we live in an IT world there is no barrier to that change. However, we are in a back to front situation because you have to make large capital investments to support any formats both in broadcasting and in movie making; there is a hell of a lot of resistance on the content side.”


Those rapidly changing formats and processes ought to be supported in a more flexible and operational way. “Do not spend the money on capex; spend it on opex. Move with the formats and only spend what you need to for doing the job,” urges Welsh.


The IT community is taking


standards more seriously, and surely we need to see more integration between IT,


telecoms, and media engineers? “Yes. On one side you’ve got the infrastructure and the delivery channel, and on the other you’ve got the picture and sound quality guys; actually we need to merge and marry those two. That’s where it’s going to become important,” says Welsh. What did he want to get


across at IBC? “There are no limitations on the infrastructure available from the larger cloud providers. Those guys are servicing all sorts of industry sectors on a much larger scale than our industry is ever going to require,” he says.


“This is going to be one of the last industries to switch over to that way of thinking: I know that parts of the media business, particularly on the delivery side, embrace cloud massively. And cloud providers are leading the way in one respect, as they are becoming content providers. You can transition to 4K in a snap if you are operating in a virtual environment because it is essentially an upgrade.”


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