VFX


CLOUD AND REMOTE WORKING


ENABLING TECH Truly efficient remote workflows would not be possible without the cloud. AWS, which has over 400+ M&E partners and, increasingly Azure which is in the middle of a five year deal with Avid and signing more agreements all the time, have courted the market assiduously. Meanwhile, companies such as Qumulo offer ways to (relatively) easily spin up render nodes in orders of magnitude within minutes and tear them down in the same timeframe, while Pixit Media’s Pixstor uses a software-defined architecture to provide a single global namespace that controls all commodity hardware, applications and systems in the workflow. This sort of centralisation


in particular is a key enabling technology of the new era of remote


98 televisual.com Summer 2022


workflows, providing frictionless, secure global namespaces that effectively present — and crucially perform — as local drives. This is pan-industry technology,


with Media & Entertainment often just a subset of a growing overall clientele, albeit one that arrives with its own challenges (notably concerning the sizes of files and the amount of compute power required for rendering) and workflow requirements. Happily the vendors are


meeting these. Hammerspace, for instance, is integrated with workflow management tools such as AutoDesk Shotgrid to make it easy for editors to access content whether it’s kept locally, in a remote data centre, with a different artist, or in the cloud. “This unique collaboration


capability makes creation efficient


as there is no need to make multiple copies of the same content files,” says Molly Presley, SVP marketing at Hammerspace. “And, when work is ready to render, with ‘the push of a button in Shotgrid’, rendering can be kicked off in datacenter or cloud compute clusters.” Such features can be real


timesavers on complex projects. And the companies involved are keen to highlight their compliance with the security requirements of high profile VFX work. “When we are talking about


the intellectual property of M&E brands, discussing this topic in terms of cloud technologies can often result in upset stomachs as opposed to peace of mind,” says Dave Leopold, Strategic Development Director, LucidLink wryly. LucidLink, in common with most other solutions aimed at the


top tier, uses AES-256 encryption that can only be decrypted locally by an authenticated client. “Additionally, files in a LucidLink Filespace are broken up into small blocks, and each one is encrypted,” he adds. “That means, in flight or at rest in the cloud, all files are fully encrypted and unreadable.” Leopold says global


namespaces solve the problems of many short-term cloud solutions deployed since Covid (namely lengthy I/O, poor security, versionitis, creatives being tasked with individual media management, and more), while Presley sees the move towards their use accelerating out of necessity. “Efficiently enabling remote workforces and building efficient virtual studios to enable intelligent collaboration are key trends for the next 5-10 years,” she says.


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