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REMOTE WORKFLOWS www.postmagazine.com 28 POST MAR/APR 2021 Lexhag virtualizes on AWS Alexis Haggar established boutique UK-based visual effects studio Lexhag (https://lexhag.co.uk) in 2009 as a resource for filmmakers looking to solve creative problems. The studio often combines both digital and practical effects for its film and television clientele. Recent work includes the BBC period drama Poldark (pictured at top) and Netflix's star-crossed lovers saga The Innocents. Its latest project, set to air later this year, is Too Close, a three-part psychological thriller for ITV and Snowed- In Productions. For this project, Lexhag moved to a remote workflow based entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS). "We're now 100-percent on AWS, and our old kit is being repurposed for on- set work," Haggar explains. "AWS does the heavy lifting so that we can focus on creating." Lexhag's journey to the cloud dates back to 2014, when they began using AWS (https://aws.amazon.com) primarily for back-up storage. After attending the AWS re:Invent conference in 2018, Haggar was inspired. "Once I saw the breadth of what AWS was doing in content creation, I knew it was the move for us," says Haggar. "We were looking to virtualize our setup given how expensive it is to rent space in Soho, not to mention outfit that space with the render power we needed, and nothing else came close. I've been ex- perimenting with AWS since then, and the lockdowns of 2020 were the catalyst to make the full switch. Now we use our time capturing and creating, instead of managing brick and mortar locations or workstations." Initially, Lexhag and a production partner teamed with Arch Platform Technologies to help with its cloud transition and create a two-minute, fully-CG, proof-of-concept trailer. Built on AWS, Arch provides its customers with man- aged access to cloud-based content production workflows. "It was super easy for our artists to spin up a virtual workstation through the Arch layer, and they quickly got used to working without a giant machine under their desk," Haggar explains. "That said, we're tinkerers at heart and our team is pretty tech-savvy, so it made more sense for us to build our own bespoke setup specific to our market. This provided us with more freedom and flexibility to customize our workflow. We also moved our pipeline to Linux, which was a priority, and now we can tap into its raw power." Replicating its on-premises workflow in the cloud, including more than a decade's worth of legacy material, required a bit of planning. In preparation, Lexhag engaged IT solutions provider TransAct to move more than 170TB of data stored in various formats on local hardware to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket. Haggar and his team have since pruned and tiered the data, with most files going into an Amazon Glacier Deep Archive. Along with S3 storage, Lexhag's Linux-based workflow includes virtual work- stations powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) G4dn instances, Amazon FSx for file throughput, and a fleet of EC2 Spot Instances for tiered rendering. The team manages render resources with AWS Thinkbox Deadline and taps Autodesk Shotgun for project management. Other applications used by Lexhag artists include Autodesk Maya, 3ds Max and Arnold; Foundry's Nuke and Hiero; SideFX's Houdini; and Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve and Fusion. "I love the way that all of the AWS services fit under one virtual roof," Haggar concludes. "There are so many untapped worlds to explore within the AWS eco- system, such as automation and robotics, and as we understand these different aspects, we can ripple that knowledge into other parts of our business." Amazon Prime's The Expanse overcomes shutdown The long-awaited fifth season of Alcon Entertainment's sci-fi series The Expanse (pictured below) completed shooting last March, but the post process faced a considerable slowdown when COVID struck. The ten-part season, which pre- miered in December on Amazon Prime, went ahead with barely a hiccup. Season 5's ten episodes were cut by a team of three editors. Nicholas Wong was one of them. Wong, who is an independent editor based in Toronto, cut Episodes 2, 5 and 8, spending three or four days on a rough assemblies and then another four with the director, followed by two days with the producer. Company 3 Toronto — which provides dailies, color, conform/editorial and sound mixing — went into rapid-response mode once the pandemic hit, moving all work offsite and setting up colorist Joanne Rourke and re-recording mixer Steve Foster's houses to serve as a color bay and mixing stage respectively. "When COVID hit and everything was shutting down, we knew we had to work fast to continue posting and delivering our show to Amazon," says Alicia Hirsch, the series' post production consultant. "Security, efficiency in the remote workflow and maintaining the quality of our show was paramount." "This was truly an enormous endeavor," says Greg Hull, VP, engineering & technology. "We have set up remote sessions for our clients based in other locations before, but this was the first time we have architected a workflow at this level, with so many artists, technicians and support personnel collaborat- ing remotely." Post began as soon as the worldwide shutdowns were put in place. The com- pany's engineers removed the DaVinci Resolve panel and delivered it, following the strictest safety protocols, along with reference monitors to Rourke's house. Likewise, they set up senior online editor Motassem Younes at home with his GVG Rio 4K, so he could begin conforming episodes and incorporating the many visual effects. A mixing console, along with two complete ProTools sys- tems, were delivered to Foster's house to pre-mix in 5.1. The mix would later be completed in Dolby Atmos at the facility, after lockdown orders were lifted. Calibrated displays and video decoders were delivered to showrunner Naren