VFX IN THE CLOUD
PRODUCTION
C
G shot renders were the first major piece of the postproduction puzzle to enter the cloud. A decade
on and VFX continues to lead the way with more and more of the creative workflow performed on virtual workstations. However, issues of cost and increasingly complex cross-cloud, multi-vendor project management mean that camera to delivery VFX cloud production is almost but not quite ready for action. As the demand for high-quality
VFX has multiplied and delivery timescales have halved, the industry has leaned heavily on the cloud to keep up – resulting in a shift in how VFX content is now budgeted and created. Cloud storage, virtual workstations,
cloud-based rendering, and a thriving freelance culture means that scaling up for a project now not only requires less capital expenditure (spent on workstations, and servers), but includes the ability to cast a wider talent net – indicating that the transition to digital solutions has come at no cost to speed or expertise and might even offer a quality of life improvement. That was all in play before
COVID shutdown production and everyone scrambled for the remote. The pandemic has since pressed fast forward on the industry’s inevitable trajectory. “Where once this was a
convoluted mishmash of ideas – with everyone testing and learning on the job – the industry is now able to make an elegant cloud/remote pipeline function,” says Lee Danskin CTO of Escape Technology. “We really have got a handle on what an ideal cloud workflow can look like for companies and how much they want to expose and integrate themselves with remote workflows or private clouds.” However, not every recent
working from home setup was built to be sustainable beyond the next
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12 months. “The pandemic forced studios into short term decisions just to keep working and accelerated longer term considerations about the future of their infrastructure,” says Mathieu Mazzerolle, Director of Product - New Technology, The Foundry. “How long is production going to be in this state? How can you support hybrid situations where some creatives are in their normal work setting, while others still participate from home? Where will the onset supervisor be?”
Revised Vision 2030 MovieLabs, the think tank set up by the majors including Disney, Warner Bros and Sony, set out a blueprint last year for all studio content to be created and ingest straight into the cloud and gave a ten-year timeframe for that to happen. The genus of the vision was to have
productions upload to the cloud one time and one time only and let the creatives and their applications access them there. “You wouldn’t have to send files all
over the place, [but] have them stay in one location and have the applications come to the medium,” says Richard
Berger, MovieLabs’ CEO. “That in and of itself should create a lot of change and opportunity to reinvent and optimise workflows.” Since the Movielabs paper was
published, COVID has shocked the industry into action. Jeremy Stapleton, Global Head of Software, Technicolor believes its vision is now just two years away. “All studios are migrating to public cloud,” he says. The main benefit of public cloud is
sheer infrastructure scalability to spin up machines to render, manipulate and deliver faster. There are some constraints holding
back the vision right now. One is around critical review: the problem of achieving high-quality real-time output is still not solved. The most common solution is to move the ‘client ready’ review material back to an environment supporting infacility and remote reviews rather than host it in the cloud.
Cost and complexity Another issue is licensing. According to Chuck Parker, CEO, Sohonet, many cloud-based tool providers cannot
offer a license for the tool, which must be purchased separately, directly from the tool creator. In addition, he says, there are
some toolsets for VFX and editing or colouring that have not treated all cloud partners the same. “You can use it for this cloud provider, but not for that one which somewhat defeats the purpose of having a cloud-based toolset.” The bigger problem though is cost.
Egress is expensive. “The economics are a bigger issue
than people want to admit,” says Parker. “Facilities have $10m-plus of capex sitting in their building – you can’t ignore that.” The big debate in Hollywood is
whether the economics of VFX will be sorted naturally as demand rises and costs reduce. Parker says, “Post is a relatively
small industry compared to, say, banking and health and it is possible that other sectors have been willing to pay more for raw compute. If that is true, then maybe the economics don’t change much. I don’t expect AWS or Azure to change their pricing structure
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