Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past 3-5 years, you’d know that media workflows have been moving from traditional on premise (on-prem) locations to the cloud or large datacenters that house massive computing infrastructure. The cloud as it is known by most IT professional today consist of one or in some cases all three of the following vendors/companies:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Now there are many other cloud providers, but these 3 represents the overall hierarchy of top tier computing resources offered to the masses of the world. Each vendor provides similar services which range from leasing powerful datacenter servers, databases, private networks, storage and a host of others services I won’t mention. In fact, it is quite rare for many companies these days to purchase large amounts of servers to build out their infrastructure on premises as it’s easier to simply purchase computing “time” in the cloud. You only pay for the time you use and never have to worry about physical security, failed disk, cooling infrastructure and every other headache that comes with maintaining on-prem equipment.
The cloud has many benefits, one of which being able to support broadcast and production workflows. Covid-19 spawned many advances in cloud computing and broadcast applications. Broadcasters and media companies had to figure out quickly, how to produce content remotely since in person production was pretty much halted. Crews quickly learned how to build and use IP based communication tools in the cloud to talk with anchors, field producers, etc. Anchors had to learn how to use Teams, Zoom, Skype and other remote IP contribution tools which saved many productions. Technologies like SRT became critical for getting reliable high quality video feeds from the field to the studio. As for me, I was able to leverage a variety of resources in the cloud, but one I’ll discuss here is virtual computing or VM’s. A virtual machine (VM) is just a computer in the cloud or some datacenter somewhere that you use for a specific purpose. You pay for the time you use and when you’re done with the application or task, you stop paying for it. I needed a powerful windows machine to render out video, so I fired up a Windows 10 VM on the Azure cloud, install my editing application and I was ready to rock and roll. Being able to simply upload my finished project onto the VM, hit render and watch it blaze thru the rendering task that would take hours on my local PC was a tremendous time saver. Leveraging the power of a 12+ core CPU with 64GB of RAM and Nvidia GPU’s makes a world of difference in post production. This is one of many ways to leverage cloud computing for production. Encoding farms and entire live streaming workflows have moved from on-prem to the cloud for the majority of most media companies. There’s a high probability that your companies live stream is being powered by an AWS Media Live resource in the cloud as you can spin these streams up and down in a matter of seconds.
For live event producers, this is a major benefit as you can now point your local encoder or phone (running an app) to the cloud to distribute your live stream quickly in case of last minute requirements and spontaneously production requirements.
As the cloud becomes the standard and no longer an option, the majority of productions will utilize cloud resources to produce content. This means independent producers and non IT professionals will soon be forced to understand and work with cloud resources. We all use the cloud in some way or form, whether you have a Gmail account, Google Drive, Box.com or Office 365. Cloud computing is here to stay and leveraging it for production will not only save you time, but allow you to scale up resources on-demand and pay as you go. The world of cloud computing is massive and ever growing as companies are building multi-cloud solutions, meaning they’re no longer relying on just one cloud vendor. In future articles I’ll expand on specific applications that are cloud centric such as IP based communication tools like Unity and VLink or Sony Ci for cloud based collaboration and file sharing. The cloud is here to stay and if you and/or your company doesn’t learn it or know how to use it, you and/or your company will get left behind.
