Production and post prepare for next phase of cloud-fit technology

SMPTE is worried about registration and discovery, which have already provoked several standardisation efforts.

Driving the momentum to neuter those irritants is a massive wave of virtualisation that owes its origins to pioneers like Caroline Law, Managing Director of Cloud Edits, and its widening impact to product initiatives like the Grabyo Cloud Producer, a browser-based production system for collating and editing multiple streams for feeding to social media. Facebook immediately adopted Grabyo as a partner.

Law worked on her idea for a virtual post house for several years before, in 2014, it became viable. “The technology was not available, but now we are spoilt for upload technology,” she said.

Law’s choice is Digital Pigeon, but there is no problem with clients who use Media Shuttle, and every cloud uses a different technology any way. Law tries to affiliate to editors with strong reputations who she knows. What are her beefs?

“The technology needs to be concentrated on squeezing masses of data through a tiny hole,” she said. “We are relying on bandwidth and happily I can get a Gig a second. I forget how difficult it can get if you do not have that.”

The big issue was getting clients over their reservations of working in a different way. “Some executive producers and technical departments want to go for it, and some want to use editors who are reluctant to work this way,” said Law. “I suggest they do something small to see how the cloud works.”

After Adobe kicked off with its Creative Cloud and Avid followed suit, Law is spoilt for choice. “It is always the latest version so you do not have to upgrade a whole post house. For offline it is enough,” she said. “For grading we work with partners.

“I am looking to make the level of communications as authentic as possible. Production companies want to work in this way but have no idea of how to do it,” she added.

Cloud Edits has cut a lot of corporate work, in part because companies like Unilever are keen on different ways of working.

“The demand for higher production values exists across the board, and the money is there. The standards of online video will go up because everything is now consumer led. It just keeps getting better,” said Law.

Before speaking to Peter Brightwell, lead engineer for BBC R&D and Jean-Louis Lods, director of business development with DMC, IBC365 asked Felix Poulin, the EBU’s senior project manager, networked media management, to identify where things stand.

He said: “Now that SMPTE ST 2110 and AMWA IS-04 are evolving towards a wide adoption, our industry needs to prepare the next phase of interoperable cloud-fit technology. This will bring the ultimate benefits of shareable infrastructure and distributed workflow promised by the JT-NM roadmap for the transition to IP production.”

Cloud in a box

Peter Brightwell has been heavily involved in the success of the AMWA Networked Media Incubator Project, and with the BBC IP Studio, which was first seen at IBC 14. “We are working on moving the studio into a virtualised environment so it can be deployed in the cloud.

”We are building a test bed for cloud production that can be used in different ways. It will allow us to deploy the same things in our own data centres,” he said. “We are building one common approach to cloud platforms, to deploy the same thing on a shared cloud, or even a public cloud.”

On the issue of resources being shared by different end users, Brightwell said: “You may find that with multiple small content producers the economies of scale don’t come into play until they start sharing the back end with piers and rivals, so security becomes important if you are sharing a resource.

“The industry has to demonstrate that valuable content is secure from other organisations,” he added. Brightwell also pointed to available bandwidth as an issue, and confirmed that much of AMWA’s work is about moving live production to the cloud.

“We are moving towards hybrid environments with a mixture of traditional kit and facilities as well as the cloud” – Peter Brightwell, BBC

The big thing though is the test bed. “It will be a flexible platform that can allow our IP stuff to be deployed in different ways. So in some cases you may want to deploy the physical devices, and in other cases you might like the idea of a cloud in a box,” said Brightwell.

“It’s like a portable play out you can take to an event and have a plug-in – have all your capture, camera and mic feeds, in a local environment that works in the same way as if deployed in a data centre.” he added.

BBC R&D is using an open source cloud platform (Open Stack), but it is strictly a technical trial. Brightwell said: “We will see more stuff possible in the cloud. It is surprising how the network landscape is changing; even when we started this project 10 Gig network connections were quite expensive. Now they are very cheap and there are discussions about 25, 50 and 100 Gig connections.

“More and more we will see the cloud being important in terms of joining the production and distribution. It is an attractive prospect,” he added. “All the big media players have their cloud strategies, and this leaves public service broadcasters in an interesting position. On the technical side we are moving towards working in hybrid environments where you have a mixture of traditional broadcast kit, tradition production facilities as well as the cloud.”