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www.postmagazine.com 27 POST JULY 2014 USING THE CLOUD fl ow Engine, which is off ered to clients who sign up at theworkfl owengine.com or which can be highly customized for a "white glove" user experience. Some customers discover the service having already worked collaboratively with iChat or Skype. The Workfl ow Engine is based on a colleague's IT-intensive idea, which has been adapted for the Amazon Web Service. It enables producers to see through the lenses of multiple cameras during production, and it allows directors and producers to view editorial sessions and screen cuts remotely. "On studio lots they typically pipe in video from the stage so producers can watch the feed of TV shows," Rizzo explains. "The Workfl ow Engine replaces that with IT and extends it beyond the studio lot with multiple channels. Once set up, it's a zero-confi guration service — it's self-maintaining — so when the client asks, 'Where are we with that cut?' they can fi nd out with a private, on-demand system over the Web." The service has been used by CBS on The Good Wife and Blue Bloods, and a number of other broadcast and cable networks for everything from casting and interviews to screening fi nal cuts. Right now The Workfl ow Engine has about a :04 latency from one source to many viewers. "We are aiming to get that down to less than a second," Rizzo says. In addition, a hardware-based 1:1 super-low latency system that's plug- and-play deployable is slated to launch this summer as a rental service. "The biggest problem today is not storage or streaming technology, it's bandwidth," Rizzo points out. "Band- width is still so expensive that it's prohib- iting smaller productions from getting on board. But this is a transitional problem. All the tools are there. Look at the com- pute power in the Amazon cloud; Soho- net is building out its own storage and compute resources and is also enabling connection to the Amazon cloud — you get up to a 10 gigabit connection by being their customer. "And here [in southern California], the public utility Burbank Water & Power has been very progressive; they [allow] customers to move media between the studios for not a lot of money. They've en- abled a high-bandwidth private network that can support private cloud service; maybe they don't run from New York to LA yet, but they run within the local en- tertainment production community." Looking ahead, Hula Post is planning to create an off -site disaster recovery service for clients. "People are using Dropbox as a way of backing up metadata references for projects," Rizzo says. "With the cloud as a platform you can have a real insur- ance policy without spending an arm and a leg. We could off er data replication at our facilities to any vendor with a decent Internet connection." Hula Post is also exploring a true, cloud-based archiving service with browsability. "The cloud allows archiving to be integrated in our day-to-day opera- tions," notes Rizzo. "Soon we'll be making cloud archival back ups during produc- tion, as a natural part of the workfl ow." JOHN STANLEY PRODUCTIONS In England, John Stanley Productions "NVIDIA Quadro GPUs and Adobe Creative Cloud work together seamlessly, enabling digital artists like us to work at the speed of thought." – Jeff August, Creative Director, Jump Studios Creators of a compelling ESPN ® trailer for NASCAR ® Drive. Projects. Faster. Get The Advantage. www.pny.com/quadro Get The Advantage. Get The Advantage. www.pny.com/quadro Get The Advantage. Get The Advantage. } Support for any system brand } Three-year hardware warranty } Toll-free phone and email technical support Scan code to watch trailer CONTINUED ON PG 44