POST
FUTURE WORKFLOWS
a Flame, Houdini or a Baselight. If you can get an hourly pay subscription model, then you could then have 100 Arnold licences, spin them up for an hour across a fair 1000 machines and spin it down again. If you can run a Flame for four hours, two hours, and you need a Baselight for a week, you can just spin them up. You still have the other accessories on top but that then becomes way more financially viable than forking out for the machine that sits in the data centre.
A virtualised future?
MITCHELL: The way we are going to work is going to change. People are at different stages around this table. The very first step is getting comfortable with the idea of virtualisation, which is just remotely accessing your own machines. The next step is then augmenting by allowing some expandability of your capital growth or needing to deploy stuff in the cloud to add or augment what you’ve already got. I was talking to a VFX company who told me that they’re 100% virtualised. They put all of their assets in the cloud. And it makes complete sense, particularly for VFX companies, because they have this expand/ contract model. And they need to move geographically, sometimes because of tax breaks. If you can put all your infrastructure in the cloud, you can pop up in any country, and just build dumb stations that are connecting into it.
We will get to the point where you could walk into an office, rent it for nine months or two years, or however long the project is, speak to a furniture company and fill it with desks and chairs. And then just set up the dumb points and you’re done.
We’ll conclude that we don’t need an entire machine room. We could probably just have a grading room with a theatre and some dumb heads to a computer in the cloud. So that’s the basement level of what I call cloud.
In live broadcast production you already have parallel workflows, working with people on the other side of the world; editing, switching, replays… and you’ve got real time or near real time workflows. If we’re able to put assets in the cloud, then that opens up that door for us to create a fabric that connects everybody together. So that, for
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example, as soon as you start shooting, you can start putting content in the cloud using 5G and Starlink as that matures, you can start producing dailies, within minutes or hours of footage being shot; you can be editing and sending VFX pulls. You can start parallelising your workflows and shortening the entire production process.
But once you create that fabric where you’re parallelising workflows, you can keep track of all the shots, the versions, what are we waiting on to get the shot back into conform, and you can have oversight of that entire process. You can have a top-level understanding of what’s going on, even if you’ve got three or four different VFX vendors in a way that we’ve never had before in production.
MALTBY: Tin quickly becomes redundant. If we were setting up from scratch, I would be actively looking at what can I do on an Elastic Compute Cloud Platform with Amazon, where does my data need to be? It’s a lot clearer now, there’s a lot more conversation, there’s a lot more people who have done it. I remember looking at this four or five years ago, and just getting lost in the terminology.
Artificial Intelligence
MITCHELL: The next phase after virtualisation is the intelligence layer, which is where we start to use, and I know these are buzzwords at the moment, algorithms and AI to start bringing in real intelligence capability that just you
Top Boy, Grade, The Look | Cowboy Films for Netflix
Landscapers, Grade, The Look | Sister and South of the River Pictures for Sky, HBO and NBC Universal
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