Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: 3, 2, Red 1.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Cloud has been one of the biggest promises in post production for over a decade. We've been told that it's more flexible, it's more scalable and more secure, and in many cases more cost effective. At the same time, budgets are tightening this year.
Studios are scrutinizing every line item and post houses are being asked to do more with less. And the question is no longer whether cloud is possible, it's whether it actually makes financial sense. See, there's a difference between a cloud pilot and enforcing cloud across dozens of productions around the world. There's a difference between theoretical savings and real world invoices. And that's why this conversation matters today.
Joining us today is Suzanne Greenfield. Suzanne recently wrapped five years as head of post production for Amazon Prime Video and MGM Studios, where she oversaw more than 40 productions, including international Originals. During her tenure, Amazon mandated that all television and features be edited in AWS cloud. Suzanne was responsible for onboarding vendors, standardizing workflows, so supporting editors, and ensuring compliance across a global network of post facilities. Few people in or out of our industry have seen cloud post production at this scale across so many vendors and in so many countries. Suzanne has seen where it works, where it breaks, and where the cost conversation gets, well, a little bit complicated. Suzanne, thanks so much for joining us today.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Can you kind of go over some of the things that kind of in influence the things that make the cloud pricing in the cloud? Well, cloud pricing in the cloud variable instead of kind of fixed?
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, the most unpredictable thing about paying for cloud is how you move the media. If you're planning out a project and you're say like, okay, I'm going to have 150 terabytes.
So 150 terabytes of storage in the cloud versus 150 terabytes of of storage on prem. It's actually cheaper to store the stuff in the cloud.
Right. But what happens when you start working in the cloud? That's a completely different story because you're paying for how you move the media around. You're paying for access.
So the things you have to, you have to consider is how many people are accessing your media, how are you downloading material. The more you download, the more expensive the cloud is going to be.
The more you move media out of the cloud or into the cloud, the more expensive it's going to be.
It's also, you have to consider how many hours are you actually going to use it.
So if it's yours, if you own it, if it's on prem and you're working in a facility, it's your Avid, it's your local Nexus or Isis or Editure or whatever it is. You know that that is X dollars a week, right?
So. But if you have an AE or an editor that goes overtime, you're paying for that time. Not just for that actual labor, but for the. But for the editor. But for the system as well also, which happens often. You have an AE or an editor, they forget to turn off their computer.
That's money that that will cost you. That will rack up a bill. So you know, it is. While it is very flexible in a lot of ways, the price is also very unpredictable. Now we were in a very privileged situation at Amazon where Cloud Editorial was an internal tool for us, so we didn't have to pay for it the same way. But I know at KIE Code you've done a lot of work with various clients. So what are the things that you consider when you're setting up the cloud?
[00:03:57] Speaker B: That's a great question. I think there's kind of two ways to approach it. There are the providers that say we do all of it for you. We spin up your shared storage. We spin up the machines that your creatives are using.
We give you some light asset management. We do file transfer.
We give you the ability to spin things up in the background up and down. And because of that, here is a per price. And that price will get you X amount of hours, X amount of storage and use it or lose it.
And that's very attractive because it's almost like a rental scenario on prem just deliver it will work the kind of, I don't want to call it roll your own. But if you were to look at it from a. I'm going to build this philosophy. The things that normally you take into account are the editing machine. And the editing machine needs a dedicated GPU and has to be able to work with all those wonky formats. So you're looking at, you know, three, $3.50 an hour per workstation running Windows. You multiply that out over 170 plus hours in a month. That's just the computer to edit on. You then take a look at the storage. And is this block storage? Is it object storage? Are you using something like Lucid Link or Suite Studios? Those are dozens of dollars a terabyte and they persist. We then look at, as you pointed out, ingress and egress.
If you're working with other vendors, we where do you have to transfer the media and content out of on that cloud shared storage to somebody else and then maybe get it back.
So, you know, we find that in a very conservative estimate that normally $700 per user per month is a good starting point. When you start adding on bells and whistles, white glove service, phone support, that kind of thing, it gets up over a thousand. If you want to start having multi tiers of technology of storage, that then that gets higher. But it's rare to find productions that are doing it for Anything less than $700 a user per month.
But as you're right, it's throwing a dart at a dartboard with a blindfold on.
And the cloud providers do not make it really easy to get a full accounting to then reconcile all that.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: And we start out with one plan and you're like, oh no, I need this, I need this version of the software. Oh no, I actually don't need 50 terabytes. I need 150 terabytes.
And instead of owning it, you're renting it.
So there's pluses and minuses to that. It's not an asset that you're making money off of.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Right. And I think as much as people want to have, we used to call it the cell phone plan, where you would see everything in plan A has this and everything in plan B has plan A plus this. It's not as easy to say if you want to use the cloud, you'll be able to do this instantly. Here are all the things on prem that you'll be able to do. And just pick one it often there's, well, I can't do all of that and I'll have to do some of that with this plan and some of that with that plan. So it's very rare to find just cookie cutter ways to say the cloud is going to cost this much.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think, and I know we'll talk about this later, but you know, I think it also, it depends on like are you setting up a project or are you setting up a company?
[00:07:12] Speaker B: That's a very good way of thinking about it.
[00:07:14] Speaker A: You know, is it like, what's the scale that you need to operate at? It's not a frugal solution. It's a scalable solution.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: I'm glad you brought that up because we look at, let's say unscripted and unscripted is usually picked up for a season and then at some point maybe they get picked up for another season. So it may be very attractive to say we're gonna do the first season in the cloud because we may not be around for season two. And if we do it in the cloud doesn't take, get picked up for another season, we can just wash our hands of it and said, well, we
[00:07:46] Speaker A: didn't invest in anything. Right, right. But I think also you have, it's the budget predictability. And as we know, anything in unscripted is very unpredictable.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: So before we started recording today, you were talking about one of the advantages of using the cloud. And one of those advantages is being able to switch out vendors in the middle of production, which, you know, kind of worried me a little bit because, you know, one of the rules is, is try not to do that. So how was that easier to do in the cloud than it would be with just an on prem situation?
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Yeah, so I mean, I've spent many, many years in post production and many of those years kind of in the trenches on shows and it doesn't happen very often, but there's.
But it does occasionally happen where you have, whether it's an editor or a vendor that really can't deliver and you're up against deadline and you have to change and you have a situation where you have an editor somewhere where you're not who has your media or you have a vendor where it's like, oh, I really, I'm worried about this vendor being able to, I don't think this vendor can deliver my project on time for launch or air or whatever it is, but they have all my media. We did have instances where we did have to make a change over, you know, we, we did dozens and dozens of projects all over the world. So there are unfortunate circumstances where sometimes you do have to change an editor or a vendor and turning off those permissions instead of sending somebody on a plane to get the hard drive, security, whatever it is, you're able to literally flip off with a switch.
[00:09:27] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: And so that's a, that is. Or to move to a different vendor with a switch instead of, you know, to give them access to the media.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: I see.
[00:09:38] Speaker A: And instead of being tied in that way. And that's, that's actually one of the things that's so not just from the flexibility to be able to fire a vendor because nobody really wants to fire a vendor or an editor.
But that is one of the things that makes cloud so appealing to your bigger players like Amazon and Netflix is it protects their ip, it gives them more control over their proprietary content.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: But you gotta imagine if you take the good and you take the bad, there's still the ability utilizing Amazon or other providers that we suddenly have to add on an additional dozen editors or maybe half a dozen editors. And we need machines for them and we need to have them plug in and start to work asap.
Usually with an on prem vendor, you have to put it in that order and then have them get the person power to then deliver that and set it up. How does the cloud kind of mitigate some of that time lost?
[00:10:29] Speaker A: Well, we had. So we had. I'll give an example. We had a situation in a movie where it was, the editor was editing in Mexico.
That editor couldn't complete the project.
They ran out of time, they were in trouble, they were up against deadline, they had to make a change. They were able to redirect that overnight to an editor in Spain, you know, all the way across the world with a flip of a switch.
[00:10:53] Speaker B: Many editors like to be in their flow state, right? It was, this is the editing experience. I prefer, I like it this way, I like it that way. And if the machine doesn't work in a way I want, then I need to get it fixed. There was a, this is how I need it to operate. And then we move to the cloud and suddenly you were forced into an OS that maybe you didn't like, or maybe you were using an application you didn't like, or the delay between a key press and that actually happening on the screen to took a little longer. And prior to Covid it was, that's unacceptable. I can't be in my flow state with this. And then it was, well, this is the only way you're going to work because we can't be in the same room because of COVID And then after Covid it was, I don't want to go back into the office, I want to work remote. So have you found that those strict requirements that creatives may have had prior to all of this have been relaxed a little bit because you get to work from home.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: It really depends on the creative and the editor.
Right.
So, you know, I think you, you like anything, you're going to have more. Some people are going to be more flexible than others.
[00:11:59] Speaker B: More tolerance level.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: So if you have an A list director and a minute of latency, then, or a second of latency, you know, you're going to have. It's going to be a much different experience than if you're working on an indie film.
So it really, it's the tolerance level, like anything else of what is acceptable. And when you're kind of working all
[00:12:21] Speaker B: over the world, that's, that's a good point. I probably put you on the spot a little there.
One of the things I can share from a, a zeros and ones perspective is that I found is that the, the magic number is usually around 60 to 70 milliseconds. Meaning if you press a key on the keyboard, you, you can kind of tolerate 60 to 70 milliseconds before it reflects on the screen.
And anything more than that becomes, you want to pull your hair out because you're hitting the keys and the shortcuts faster than what the computer is doing and then showing, and then you can see that from the display.
What that usually translates to is you want to be on the same continent. Right. I mean that's, that's kind of.
[00:13:03] Speaker A: And we do and that. And actually I should add in that when we were, when we did plan out viability of cloud, it was also how close they were to an AWB center.
You know, that was really important. You know, we did projects in Nigeria, we did projects in India. Those weren't really cloud friendly areas. And so, you know, those, those did not happen in the cloud.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: And even going so far as to say, well, we'll have this on the east coast, but then we'll use the westmost part of Europe.
Will that work? And still, you're still over 100 milliseconds. And I get it, if you need to make rent, you'll suffer through that. But it's just not a great editing experience.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: We've learned a lot over the last year about how to, you know, how to make editorial easier in the cloud. And it really has come a long way in the last few months. But it is not perfect.
[00:14:05] Speaker B: Seeing that a lot of studios have said, look, any of our vendors who work on our content, it can't touch the cloud. And those vendors, obviously, because they're not using their own ip, they have to, they're beholden to that. So did you find that security was a big hurdle that your users and you had for these productions in the cloud?
[00:14:24] Speaker A: So, you know, we were working with our own IP in our cloud. So yes, if I were a production company and it wasn't my IP or it was my ip, of course I wouldn't want to put it in someone else's cloud.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: So that is a big thing. There's a lot of skepticism about, especially corporate America.
And so we're also getting into the age of AI and other things where, you know, data is so important and security of data, where you keep your data, who has access to your data.
It wasn't so much an issue for us because we were it was content that Amazon owned in an Amazon environment.
If you're an outside company setting it up, that is something you have to consider.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: Let's talk about something that you teased a little bit earlier. And that was the kind of proof of concept that was shown last year.
I know Keycode was invited to it and we were able to see a show that was being done across the pond and all the PTZ cameras, all the mixing, I don't know if lighting was being done, but everything was being done live on the fly, controlled from thousands of miles away. Can you talk a little bit about that project?
[00:15:45] Speaker A: Yeah. So there's a very successful project that Amazon has called Last One Laughing. It's not produced in America, but it's produced in dozens of countries in dozens of languages every year. And it's a studio comedy game show.
52 cameras, shoot about 100 terabytes a day.
And it requires very large crews and a lot of data processing and really fast turnarounds because they're very popular. So we're trying to get them to air as fast as possible. Traditionally, what Amazon has done and still does is, you know, those.
That show goes out to various production companies all over the world to make local versions of the. The production footprint is very heavy and everybody's flying in. One of the ideas about utilizing the cloud in that particular instance is it goes back to like, you know, when you're doing things at scale and, you know, does the cloud make sense? The cloud makes more sense when you're looking at large scalable projects that you need to do with. Last one. Laughing. And you all were present for that?
[00:17:18] Speaker B: Yeah, we're not breaking any NDAs here.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: Yeah, you all were present for that.
You may have seen that the camera remotes were still tricky. There was lag. There was lag. And in a show that's very time sensitive, that's not perfect right yet. But what was really, you know, where post production really benefited from that was the mass amount of content that you could get into, edit seamlessly.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: They were showing Premiere and Avid being able to pick up growing files and begin to cut those chasing the live feed.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: That's kind of the evolution that both, you know, Avid and Premiere has come to in terms of being able to facilitate editorial in the cloud as well and how they play together.
Avid more so than Premiere, but Premiere is also working in the cloud as well.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: It certainly works. I haven't seen any documents in literally the past few years that qualify cloud machines for editing. So I think there may be a little Bit of. Not a lot of people are asking us for this or it's expensive and
[00:18:25] Speaker A: it's not well supported.
[00:18:26] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: So I think that that's the biggest hurdle is, you know, you still don't have a lot of people that support it. And the people that do know how to support it are not entertainment based.
Right. Because it wasn't a tool that was really built for the entertainment industry as we talked about before.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: So we talked about the things that are working in the cloud, things that have gotten better. As you mentioned, color and the editorial process is a lot more smooth at this point. But what are some things that just aren't working right now?
[00:18:59] Speaker A: Audio. Audio is, does not work in the cloud.
[00:19:03] Speaker B: And is that more of a technological hurdle or is that a sound person can't do what they feel technical?
[00:19:11] Speaker A: That's the way that Pro Tools works in a cloud environment.
So that's really like the main tool for audio is generally Pro Tools. Pro Tools is not yet feasible in a cloud environment.
[00:19:24] Speaker B: What about things like higher resolution? Right. When people say, well, we're going to shoot this show in 4k and we're going to release in 4k, or maybe they just want 4k to punch in. Did you find that you could handle things that were larger than HD without much of an issue?
[00:19:38] Speaker A: Well, you'd have to be. That's when the bandwidth comes. Right. So if you're an editor editing from home in their pajamas.
Not on proxies. Yeah, not on proxies. Then you probably not. If you're in a post house in a live environment, for example.
Yes, although we did not do that.
So. But in theory, yes.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: If someone were to come to you and, and give you a workflow and without missing a beat, you'd say yeah, yeah, that, that's cloud. Go cloud. What, what's kind of the fingerprint, what's the blueprint of a, a production that should be done in the cloud in, in your estimation?
[00:20:15] Speaker A: So I think, you know, if you're talking about a production specific, so we're not talking about a, a company infrastructure, but a production specific is something where you need a lot of heavy data management where you have very dispersed teams and you need to centralize access and security.
So those are kind of the three things where it's just like that's where the cloud really makes sense.
And you could do any version of those. Right. You could be a hybrid. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: But I think too often people want a this or this and make it binary. And, and I think it's just like shared storage or storage in general is always going to be some kind of hybrid. Yeah.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: And I mean, I think, you know, we work in a creative industry. You know, we have to, we have to come up with creative solutions. Right. That it's not a one size fits all.
[00:21:13] Speaker B: Outstanding. Thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast and there's been a ton of information shared here, so thank you very much. Thanks for watching. Broadcast to post. Don't forget to follow keycodemedia on social and contact us about your projects at keycodemedia. Com.
