PRODUCTION
VFX IN THE CLOUD
everybody as a hub but the reality is that VFX data moves from vendor to vendor and studio to studio. It’s a supply chain for which the industry has not established best standards or the full infrastructure to work in a cloud-based manner. When you have to dip in and out it become very painful and the benefits of cloud quickly diminish.” Even if piecemeal cloud
“We really have got a handle on what an ideal cloud workflow can look like for companies”
implementations can be more inefficient than a legacy approach, Berger agrees there is more work to do as an industry “to enable various applications to talk to each other and to hand off assets and metadata to other components in a chain.” Cloud interoperability is another
issue. How can people working on the same show but in a different cloud access the same media? “We need to have a way to join clouds together or a seamless way where the operator doesn’t realise there are multiple clouds happening at the same time,” says Greg Ciaccio, workflow chair of the technology council at the ASC. “Right now, duplication of data
is all over the place,” Stapleton emphasises. “People download data, distribute it, upload it, over and over again to get work done. The goal is to
leave data where it needs to be and provide access to it from anywhere.”
Gravity wells of data This requires sophisticated asset management. There are various project management and pipeline tools that help studios track, schedule, review, collaborate, and manage their digital assets including those from Shotgun, Bebop, ftrack and StratusCore while post- production platforms such as Avid and Adobe are adapting to operate as SaaS applications in the cloud in order to facilitate this trend. Larger facility groups have
developed their own. Technicolor developed Pulse in 2015, principally for debayering the image ahead of moving plates to VFX. “Pulse is a software solution
for centralised and collaborative content management, storage and delivery from anywhere in the world,” explains Stapleton. “Original camera files are uploaded and ingested, debayered, rendered and delivered to vendors via Aspera.” This takes out the manual
touchpoints in a traditional workflow, such as sending EDLs
to VFX vendors over email, and automates much of the process. “From our perspective Pulse
is unique in its ability to handle original camera files from the point of capture on set, it can manage a colour pipeline and automate the workflow for clients so colour is accurate and consistent.” Hosted on data centres (private
cloud) in LA and London, Technicolor recently launched access on the public cloud of Microsoft Azure. It has an open API to enable integration with third party systems (such as Shotgun) and exchange of metadata. Anticipating rising demand for
VFX content across its commissions, Netflix announced development of its own VFX pipeline. NetFX is in beta in Canada with rollout across Netflix regions from 2021. By providing virtual workstations,
integrated storage and full access to secure rendering in a connected environment, Netflix explains that NetFX will allow it to “scale and creatively iterate on our VFX work as never before.” Nonetheless there is no all in one
solution pervasive across the industry. “You are going to see a lot of
innovation and experimentation particularly around systems that allows multiple artist interactions with onset data while being remote,” forecasts FM. “The industry needs to finesse ways of providing access to data in the cloud for those working remotely, those in centralised facilities, that maintains creative flow, in sync and secure.” The Academy Software
Foundation is taking a lead in developing open source (Linux-based) standards. Weta Digital, Dneg, AWS, Netflix, Disney, Autodesk, Warner Bros and Unreal Engine back the project which has already delivered a colour management standard and is working on an open source API and interchange format for editorial timeline information. “Industry open source APIs needs
to be built and everyone should benefit,” says Parker, who think this will happen in the next year. “It’s not a hard tech problem but a herding cats problem.”
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televisual.com Autumn 2020
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