George Kilpatrick, vice president of product strategy with Technicolor, talks about cloud computing and how well established it is in many industries, its potential in media and entertainment is just beginning to be fulfilled
Global parallel cloud-based processes are starting to replace traditional workflows in the media and entertainment sector that have been more expensive, manual and sequential in nature. Cloud adoption, explains Kilpatrick, will raise new artistic and operational opportunities to streamline production flows and offer more flexible creative options for talent working on movies, television series and beyond.
Technicolor has two cloud offerings to assist creators of high-quality entertainment content: Pulse, a private cloud digital production platform, and Rush, a public cloud platform for providing access to rushes or dailies.
The offerings, says Kilpatrick, are available to anyone who needs to use them for a production. This means that the creatives have the flexibility to choose who they feel is best to do any particular job.
"Technicolor Pulse coordinates and controls the flow of content, the original camera files and the transcoded files we send out to VFX houses," Kilpatrick says. "It controls the meta data and ensures that the production has full visibility of what is happening on a day-to-day basis and can then feed that into the last parts of the production process.
"Rush is an easy to use cloud-based solution for managing dailies. It is a solution that is easy to learn because it is based on public cloud technology," he explains.
The objective is to help the industry move away from facilities-based processes, and move toward a more pervasive use of the cloud to enable a virtual production environment. This allows creative teams to work seamlessly around the clock and around the world.
"Technicolor is very keen to support the creative process and remove the overhead and the difficulty of administering a project, allowing creatives more time to think about what they really want to do, which is to take great shots and tell a great story."
Technicolor will be demonstrating Pulse and Rush at NAB 2017.
