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www.postmagazine.com 23 POST NOV/DEC 2022 CLOUD OUTLOOK O WORKFLOW or all of its incredible technolog- ical progress, the M&E industry has historically been slow to change. In all fairness, that's partially due to ongoing production cycles. No studio wants to make big pipeline updates mid-project, and finding the right time to do so can seem elusive. Yet rapid ad- justments quickly became essential with the sudden shift to remote workflows. In many cases, change entailed leveraging the cloud, whether to stream remote workstations, or use virtual machines. Now that more studios and artists are accustomed to working in the cloud, it has become a core component of many workflows, and its role is increasing industry wide. Once established, cloud-enabled workflows provide access to near infinite compute resources. However, the setup process can be complicated. Pipeline engineers need to evaluate providers and choose one, then sift through the provided documentation and tutorials to ensure they've downloaded and installed the proper source-code repositories to create a cloud-based network file system (NFS). There's also typically a language learning curve, as each provider uses different terms and acronyms for various services and procedures. Optimizing cloud resources on the backend presents another challenge. It's one thing to oversee local workstations and a render farm on-premises, but man- aging them virtually can quickly induce a headache. Further exacerbating the situation, studios often turn to the cloud reactively when they have a project deadline looming. But migrating to the cloud doesn't have to be hard. Enlisting a man- aged service (or solutions integrator) to assist with your studio's cloud mi- gration frees you to redirect attention to other areas of pipe- line development and management. It's similar to the approach studios have taken in recent years with off-the-shelf creative and project-man- agement tools; they still create bespoke pipelines, but don't build everything from scratch. This allows them to focus development resources on key areas, rather than wasting time on problems that have already been solved. Using the cloud for computing in any scenario will always be complex due to the nature of infrastructure, virtualized or on-premises. It requires ongoing management to ensure compatibil- ity between software packages and plug-ins, and to find available resources among countless other considerations. Offloading this responsibility is the quickest path for streamlined access to the cloud, whether in the midst of a production fire drill or not. That's not to say you can't successfully manage cloud integrations on your own or shouldn't take that approach — it just might not be the most valuable use of your time. Based in Raleigh, NC, Conductor's mission is to accelerate the VFX and animation industry's transition from local, fixed infrastructure to an on-demand, cloud-based model. REMOVING COMPLEXITY IN CLOUD MIGRATION BY MAC MOORE CEO CONDUCTOR WWW.CONDUCTORTECH.COM t Light Iron, we were engaged in remote collaboration well before the pandemic spurred an industry-wide acceleration toward remote workflows. Most often, those remote collabora- tions took the shape of color sessions, where the client would be in one of our facilities while the colorist was working in another. Then, in early 2020, we tran- sitioned to allow the filmmaker to par- ticipate in color reviews from virtually anywhere, and we expanded our remote capabilities to cover all of our service offerings, including dailies, offline, and online editorial and finishing. What the advancements of the past few years have made clear is that the future of post will continue to be about connecting the creative community through advanced technology that enables and empowers them to do their best work, driving the reduction of the geographic challenges introduced by the brick-and-mortar model. A foundational aspect of that will be the ability for a dis- tributed network of artists to work within cloud-based collaborative environments that will continue to become more and more powerful through advanced soft- ware applications. In the near term, this evolution will be highlighted by the further adoption of set-to-cloud workflows in which the orig- inal camera files go straight to the cloud. The next steps will see the migration of applications into the cloud, so that "set- to-cloud" becomes a direct link into the tools we use for post. And beyond that, things get really exciting, particularly in terms of the software automation that this entirely cloud-based ecosystem will better enable. We're aligned with the studios in this recognition that the future of the imaging chain is in the cloud. Motion Picture Laboratories (aka MovieLabs) is a consortium of major Hollywood studios focused on standardizing innovative practices to meet current and future industry challenges. In their 2030 Vision whitepaper, they lay out ten principles they foresee for production and post by the year 2030; the first two principles are "all assets are created or ingested straight into the cloud and do not need to be moved" and "applications come to the media." With our colleagues at Panavision, we're actively envisioning what this next-level collaboration will look like in five to ten years. With facilities across North America and remote services available globally, Light Iron offers creatives and technolo- gists advanced tools and innovative workflows to enhance the creative process. THE FUTURE OF IMAGING IS IN THE CLOUD BY SETH HALLEN MANAGING DIRECTOR LIGHT IRON (A PANAVISION COMPANY) WWW.PANAVISION.COM F A