VFX IN THE CLOUD
PRODUCTION
for media just because we need a cheaper deal.” Industry CFOs like the idea of
only paying for use on cloud, he adds, “They just don’t like it when they add it all up.” His advice is to design the creative workflow to stay within your cloud service provider as long as possible – to reduce the egress costs triggered by bringing large amounts of data bandwidth out of the CSP. The cost of cloud is a function of
“we need to figure out how to leverage cloud in a more practical way”
how much data needs to be moved around. Mazzerolle believes that what’s missing are the “brains” to figure out what is the right data to move, at what time, to where and to do that consistently. “We have to get to a point
where we don’t need multiple data wranglers,” he says. “What is missing is a smart (automated) application to inform projects of where the data is and how to move it at the best price. We need to figure out how to leverage cloud in a more practical way.” “The cost of cloud workflows
depends heavily in your business approach. Explains Danskin, “If you want lots of employees on staff over the next 5-10 years to work on projects as a team then doing that in the cloud is not such a great idea. Buying kit will be cheaper in the long run.” An alternative is owning your own
private cloud perhaps co-locating kit in a data centre but again you will incur CAPEX and monthly running costs even when this kit is not being utilised. “However, if you are completely
project-based where you are hiring in freelancers for several months and spinning up 100 machines then shutting it down immediately on completion then cloud is the perfect workhorse,” he says. “You can get the perfect mix
by treating cloud as the outsourced element of the job, buy kit for permanent staff to generate the IP and pipeline then up load to the cloud with freelancers to do the legwork, shutting down the cloud at the end.” Facilities such as US-based
FuseFX are building entire TV shows, commercials and even feature-length films from cloud resources. London’s Untold Studios launched as the world’s first entirely cloud-based studio (on AWS) and has worked on VFX for The Crown. Far from being outliers trialling a highly disruptive business model, it is far more likely that this will be replicated many times over.
Spin up, spin down “When you are setting a virtual studio up you need to make a load of decisions [such as] how much storage you want, how much capacity do you want in that file system, how much render you want,” explains Sam Reid, Head of Technology at Untold Studios. “If we get a big job tomorrow we just add more nodes to our storage cluster and away we go. The speed at which we can do so is phenomenal, all thanks to cloud.” Technicolor’s Stapleton agrees;
“Development is never simple and there are things to think about such as availability of virtual machines in a region but you can figure it all out with public cloud. It’s pretty straightforward.” Indeed, there does appear
consensus that the concept of ‘spin-up, spin down, pay for what you use’ is as simple as it sounds. “If you wanted a 20-person facility
I could spin that up for you in an hour and half,” says Danskin, although he is suggesting that facilities use Escape’s cloud aggregation tool Sherpa to do the heavy lifting. “Sherpa takes away all the complexity of the cloud. If you want Linux workstations then 5 minutes later you will have them.” The Foundry was forced to
discontinue its cloud-based ‘studio in a box’ service Elara when it became apparent that the industry wasn’t yet ready to make the transition. Mazzerolle says the industry needs to shift from its current use of multiple “gravity wells” of data. “Ideally, you would migrate all
data per project to cloud and connect Autumn 2020
televisual.com 61
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