Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1541878
www.postmagazine.com 22 POST NOV/DEC 2025 homas Burns is the CTO for media & entertainment at Dell Technologies, and says 2025 has been an interesting year, thanks to the implications of artificial intelligence. "People are both afraid of AI, especially generative AI, as well as the whole industry changing in terms of the way content is being created and distrib- uted. We're just trying to keep up between the AI PCs, the faster PowerScale storage, and the new generation of PowerEdge servers. One way to think of it is, we're Nvidia's sales arm. Whatever they do, it's to fit in a Dell server, and we are in the business of engineering solutions around that. The new GPUs from Nvidia — like the RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell Server Edition — those are really unique because they have AI cores as well as video cores, so all of these software-defined television or other types of applications can take advantage of all the 10-bit video processing on the GPU for live media, as well as doing AI things to that live media. "Everybody's looking for how can we do video search and summarization cost effectively against our media archives so that we extend the metadata and make it more searchable and more monetizable. That's a big one. There's so many other niches: AI translation, AI face replacement, all kinds of things. You could go so far as to say that what we used to think of as a pipeline for getting episodic and feature projects made will that someday be replaced by just this swarm of autonomous agents that go around and say, 'Oh, that's not my task, but go over here because I think that's their task and they'll do it for you. And this kind of haze of bots will be in charge of what we use to do as a very tightly-defined, API-driven workflow orchestration layer — a studio operating system kind of layer. I don't know how far it's going to go, but cer- tainly we've had some good success on the enterprise AI side. "Every visual effects company has one dev-ops person sitting there at a workstation, just figuring out what's good, what works and what's repeat- able. All we're saying to people about AI is, if we organize your data now and your workflow, it follows along with that." Burns notes that a VFX facility, at its busiest time, could be generating up to 10 petabytes of data per day. "Gigantic data! How do you process that data as smoothly and efficiently as possible? It starts with placing it properly, and that's where storage comes in. But the place/process/protect thing works for all data — realtime and batch. OUTLOOK 2026 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PLACING, PROCESSING AND PROTECTING DATA T New technology makes its way into post production workflows BY MARC LOFTUS Over the past year, the post industry further embraced the cloud, remote workflows, new forms of entertainment and the benefits AI tools can provide. Here, a number of professionals from throughout the industry share insight into trends within their segments of the business and what they expect in the year ahead.