Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1540216
STORAGE www.postmagazine.com 20 POST SEPT/OCT 2025 ENGINELAB DRIVES A NEW ERA OF CLOUD-BASED CONTENT PRODUCTION WITH AWS LONDON — EngineLab (www.enginelab.io), the creative technology partner that builds cloud solutions and AI integrations, has teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help creative teams reduce the time needed to build cloud workflows for high-priority projects. EngineLab was founded earlier this year by Sam Reid, Daniel Goller and Matt Herman. Reid served as CTO at Untold Studios, leading the company's efforts to launch entirely on the AWS Cloud in just six weeks. The trio realized that many artists need help with the complexities of a digital infrastructure, leading them to launch EngineLab. The new company's first call came from former leaders at VFX studio The Mill, who decided to start a new company and keep projects they were cur- rently working on going, even though parent company Technicolor was closing. Their new company, ARC Creative, had just 72 hours to set up an infrastructure. "We started chatting with the ARC team and discussed what they wanted to do, and how they wanted to do it," Reid explains. "We soon came to the real- ization that the Flame workflow for finishing and VFX was the most important one to get up and running, because it was the most sensitive workflow with the most client interactivity. So, our remit was to get this workflow created and running in the cloud as quickly as possible." EngineLab completed the setup in three days, leveraging the team's expe- rience in creating similar workflows, along with using a host of cloud-native services, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for graphical workstations and Amazon FSx for scalable storage. The EngineLab team also emphasizes the importance of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), leveraging AWS CloudFormation to create repeatable, auditable and scalable deployments across multiple regions. This codified approach verifies studios can scale quick- ly across geographies as project demands evolve. In addition to using AWS for its core infrastructure, EngineLab is helping to pioneer the integration of generative AI into creative workflows. The company leverages Amazon Bedrock to power AI-driven tools that streamline tradition- ally tedious post tasks. By automating non-creative, repetitive tasks, EngineLab allows artists to focus on the work that matters most. "AI isn't about replacing artists — it's about speeding up their workflows so they can spend more time being creative," says Reid. "We are using Amazon Bedrock and we'll continue to use the service whenever we can." STORJ'S PRODUCTION CLOUD EMPOWERS GLOBAL CREATIVE TEAMS ATLANTA — Storj (storj.io) has introduced Production Cloud, a new, pur- pose-built platform for modern media workflows. Production Cloud combines the company's new Global Collaboration tier of high-performance distributed object storage and Object Mount cloud media access into a unified media solution. Designed for editorial and media production teams in post, news and sports, Production Cloud empowers creative teams to collaborate globally, move faster and scale with confidence. By combining distributed object stor- age and seamless file access into a single offering, Production Cloud enables collaboration, low-latency editing and cost-effective archiving across distribut- ed environments. A cloud compute for media function is currently in beta and will soon be added to the platform. "Storj is focused on solving the challenges in the world's most demanding workflows," explains Colby Winegar, CEO of Storj. "We now have the storage, compute and access solutions to give creative teams the speed, scale and flexi- bility to work without limits." Traditional cloud providers may not be optimized for media & entertainment workflows, which often need to transfer hundreds of gigabytes of media across regions. This can lead to delays and surprise egress fees that strain budgets. In addition, replication-heavy architectures can slow down productions. Production Cloud addresses many of these specific needs, reflecting a stra- tegic shift in how creative teams interact with a cloud infrastructure. It bundles Storj's high-performance Global Collaboration tier of distributed storage with Object Mount, Storj's proprietary interface for accessing media in the cloud. There are no egress fees or API fees. This integration allows users to ingest camera-to-cloud, perform frame-accurate editing, create proxy workflows, con- form and distribute content directly from the cloud. Customers can also add an Active Archive storage tier that supports long-term retention and active retrieval for repurposing content. Storj is well suited for ingest, creating a fast process with less wrangling with direct S3 access for camera-to-cloud workflows. For dailies, Production Cloud provides frame-accurate playback for reviewing LUTs, and enables instant remote review for creative decision making. In an assistant-editing scenario, Production Cloud provides proxy generation, metadata tagging and global clip access. Editors can quickly begin working on rough cuts thanks to an instant bin and timeline access. And fast final conform and mastering features allow users to export directly from cloud storage in realtime. Additional benefits include a transparent pricing model that results in predict- able and reasonable costs, and consistent performance thanks to Storj's distribut- ed architecture, which stores data across tens of thousands of nodes worldwide. Production Cloud will be priced at $40/TB/month for the high performance Global Collaboration tier of storage, with egress and 10 licenses for desktop access (Object Mount) included. EngineLab's Herman, Goller and Reid