Broadcast Beat Magazine 2018 BroadcastAsia Special Edition | Page 23

how virtualization and cloud
are impacting content creation,
which aspects of production are
currently ready for primetime
in the cloud, and what this all
means for production workflows
– today and in the future.
A Framework for
Assessing Cloud
Viability
We’ve developed seven crite-
ria that determine the cloud’s
efficacy for specific content
creation applications. Although
other factors may come into
play, these are the core indica-
tors.
Location - Where content cre-
ators are located is extremely
significant in analyzing the via-
bility of the cloud for content
production. Is the workflow dis-
tributed or co-located? A dis-
tributed workflow will benefit
more from more virtualized pro-
duction. With co-location, the
cloud’s benefits are reduced to
data protection use cases like
archive and disaster recovery.
Workload - The key workload
question is predictability. Static
“bare metal” provisioning can be
highly efficient for predictable
workloads. But unpredictable
workloads are impractical to
manage with traditional, inflex-
ible infrastructure and benefit
greatly from the cloud’s elastic-
ity, scaling up and down directly
in line with capacity needs.
Datasets - The scale of data
in a workflow is another criti-
cal determinant. Public cloud
business models are typical-
ly calibrated to enterprise IT
applications that are much less
data intensive than professional
media applications. Heavy media
can be more problematic in the
cloud due to the additional stor-
age, bandwidth and processing
required. Further, egress charges
can make it expensive to move
data out of the public cloud. The
proliferation of ‘heavier’ produc-
tion formats, including HDR and
4K, presents a significant chal-
lenge for the cloud. At present,
tasks that involve lighter media
like proxies are more cost-effec-
tive and practical in the cloud.
Collaboration - The number of
contributors in a production
workflow is an important cloud
consideration. The cloud doesn’t
have as much to offer an art-
ist working alone. But if that
artist is collaborating with oth-
ers, the cloud can spark cre-
ativity and increase efficiency
through easy data access and
sharing. Generally, if a produc-
tion involves many contribu-
tors—multiple editors, sound
engineers and VFX artists, for
example—then the cloud offers
many benefits.
Interactivity - For production
tasks that require very low-
latency interactivity, cloud
deployment can be problematic.
With the cloud, there are inher-
ent delays in data access due
to the distance traveled and
the number of hops required to
transfer data. Live media pro-
duction tasks are less tolerant
to latency. For example, an art-
ist singing into a microphone
needs to hear their voice and
the other tracks simultaneously
with no delay. Similarly, when a
colorist is adjusting a color con-
trol surface, image processing
delays will be extremely dis-
tracting to the creative process.
By contrast, non-real-time tasks
like vfx rendering involve no
interactivity and are therefore
ideally suited to the cloud.
Equipment - A content creation
task that requires purpose-built
equipment is not as well suit-
ed to cloud. To enable elastic
scalability, cloud data centers
are equipped with COTS (com-
mercial off-the-shelf) hardware
only. Although custom, purpose-
built hardware can be housed in
co-location sites, this increases
costs and inhibits scalability.
To participate in cloud work-
flows, purpose-built media
equipment is becoming increas-
ingly IP-connected. But overall,
production tasks that can be
accomplished using software
running on generic servers are
best suited to cloud deploy-
ment.
Environment - Some content
creation tasks require special-
ized physical environments. For
example, a color grading suite
is a controlled environment,
where lighting and even paint
colors are carefully calibrated
to project a neutral backdrop. A
music studio designed for live
recording or mixing is equally
specialized, constructed care-
fully to isolate the environment
from outside sounds and culti-
vate a pleasing neutral sound
on the inside. IP connectivity
can allow specialized environ-
ments to participate in cloud
workflows, but tasks that require
no such specialization can take
better advantage of the ubiqui-
tous access that cloud offers.
Content Creation
Disciplines and the
Cloud
We’ve evaluated several con-
Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com • 23