CLOUD AND REMOTE WORKING
VFX
If you like we’re now at the point of Remote 2.0; with the technology
now largely in place and the way the industry optimises it being one of the key ways of demonstrating competitive advantage. Jellyfish uses Hammerspace to provide a global data environment for its projects (see box opposite) in combination with Microsoft Azure cloud and Teradici VMs. Hammerspace is integrated with Jellyfish’s workflow management tool, Autodesk ShotGrid, so that as a project is triggered within ShotGrid to move content files, Hammerspace leverages Terraform within Azure to make the files globally accessible for read/write access in multiple locations, in what are billed as “minutes.” Change some of the vendors, and such set ups are typical. There
are two things worth pointing out here though. First, this set up allows vfx houses to render work in different geographic cloud regions, decoupling the rendering from the origination. This locational flexibility can save as much as 20% of cloud rendering costs. Second, it helps highlight the criticality of time and latency in particular when it comes to remote workflows. Given the sheer number of GBs typically involved here, global
availability of files in minutes is impressive. When the workflow moves into more direct operation, however, milliseconds become important and, as the famous saying goes: “You cannae break the laws of physics,” leading many facilities to deploy a ‘hub and spoke’ network architecture to mitigate latency and work on a regional basis within a global framework “It takes light 130ms to travel round the world, if light bent and was not
in a cable,” says Escape Technology CTO, Lee Danskin. “With cables and switches etc latency between London and LA or Australia can be 200-300 milliseconds depending on routes, providers etc; just a little too long for a good remote pixel workflows. London to Milan is 40-50 mill seconds and we have users in Bulgaria regularly dialling into machines in London or Dublin, so it’s a wide net — around 1000 miles. If you want to use a
FOLDING TIME WITH ORIGAMI Newly distributed workflows and the cloud architecture they sit on don’t just result in the adaptation of existing tools, but enable the creation of new ones. Origami is a case in point, a new platform from the team at Mission Digital that is leveraging their expertise in DI to, in company Technical Director, Tom Mitchell’s, words “connect the dots” and make life easier for creatives. Its debut component of what is
set to become a linked, modular toolset is Phoenix, a fully-managed hybrid tool that automates the delivery of VFX pulls to multiple destinations. Locating, processing, and
delivering these files and sending them to the correct destination is one of those labour intensive manual processes in the VFX workflow that is ripe for automation. Phoenix does just that. Pull submission is via a validated EDL, with the software conforming,
processing and delivering the shots from pretty much any location from drive to S3 (and soon Azure) to pretty much any destination in pre-defined correct formats with constant reporting along the way. It can stay in the cloud all the way, it can come down, whatever fits with an established workflow “Most post production
companies will give you a timeline of about 48 hours for a VFX pull, not including weekends,” says Mitchell. “What Phoenix allows you to do is make sure that the right things get sent to the right people in a very short period of time; less time than it would take to write the email just to get those instruction sets. “We humans do our best work
when we’re being creative and making good creative decisions,” he adds, “and we do our worst when we’re inputting thousands of numbers into spreadsheets and copying and pasting and importing and exporting files. I want to take that away from people.”
Summer 2022
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