by Tyrell | May 26, 2023 | Blog, Cloud, News
AWS blog authored by Stephen Tallamy, CTO, EditShare.
Cloud-based video editing has quickly evolved from vision to reality, accelerated by a pivot to remote workflows brought on by the global pandemic. As facilities and on-premises workstations sat idle and post houses faced supply chain delays in procuring kit, editorial studios, teams, and freelancers began exploring new ways of working to keep teams safe and productions on track. Now that many studios have begun experiencing the benefits of cloud-based editorial pipelines, there’s no turning back, and for studios yet to make the leap, there’s no better time than the present. New technologies are emerging and converging to make cloud editing more accessible, and the cost benefits they introduce might just surprise you.
Unlocking cloud potential
Before diving into the costs of cloud editing, it’s important to look at the unique value proposition it brings to the table. Content must be in the cloud to be edited in the cloud, and centralizing storage and asset management in the cloud lets studios more easily track files and project work across post production pipelines. Editorial workstations can quickly be spun up on demand, so you’re not building and purchasing on-premises equipment to support project peaks, which can lead to wasted resources when systems aren’t fully utilized. With the cloud, appropriately equipped edit suites can be turned on and off, so studios only pay for what they use, and editors can work from anywhere, broadening the available talent pool a studio can leverage.
Streamlining a secure, cost-efficient path to cloud-based editing
While some studios opt to build their own cloud-based editorial workflows from scratch, managed solutions, such as Tyrell Cloud, provide a streamlined approach. Designed to help productions migrate to the cloud without any technical experience, the cloud platform is built on proprietary and partner technologies and Amazon Web Services (AWS) – including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). It integrates with industry-standard tools, including EditShare FLEX for remote collaborative workflows and editing in the cloud.
With an EditShare account for shared storage, Tyrell Cloud users can quickly deploy new workstations on demand and adjust settings as needed, without losing any work. The Tyrell Cloud platform accelerates the ingest of content from on-premises drives into the cloud or content that is streamed directly from the camera. Once media lands in the Tyrell Cloud environment, EditShare provides the performance and shared storage for editors and an asset management layer to help facilities make sense of that content, allowing editorial teams to start work almost instantly.
Maximizing capacity, minimizing costs
Contrary to any preconceived notions that cloud implementations may be costly, insecure, or complex, most deployments often come in under budget, and are more secure and intuitive to set up than on-premises workflows, especially with the help of services like Tyrell Cloud. When planning for the cloud, companies often overestimate the amount of time a workstation is active. Editors may work 9am-5pm, but they’re typically not actively using a workstation (and incurring costs) the entire time. With traditional on-premises hardware, however, machines perpetually require air conditioning, power, and real estate, and are aging.
Taking a cloud-based approach, editorial deployments are faster, saving time and resources. Implementations that previously took six weeks or more to get up and running on premises can be done in nearly 24 hours. Working this way is also helpful for finance teams, as they can glean insights into their cloud spend and direct teams to course correct as needed and more accurately bid future projects. Companies also save on travel, shipping, and even air conditioning costs. There’s no need to fly people around the world to be present for review sessions that can be done virtually or for live events, which often require hefty gear transport.
A production company that recently deployed Tyrell Cloud and EditShare for the first time found it was able to deliver a new season of a documentary weeks in advance of historical timelines and under budget. Based on the project’s success, the company is looking at other ways it can benefit from a cloud-based editing workflow, such as accommodating project overlap to scale the business, which would not be possible with solely on-premises infrastructure.
Cloud-based editorial workflows also unlock new opportunities for pipeline innovation and automation. Rather than storing media on LTO tapes, the cloud provides a space where that media can deliver additional value. For instance, cloud-powered artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications can help automate transcription and translation of media stored in the cloud to give the editorial team a rough idea of the script to inform the cutting process. They can also streamline object detection, which is crucial when studios own large amounts of archive footage, especially in the case of sports and news, or automate previously manual tasks like finding the timestamp where a particular reality show participant appears in the timeline.
To minimize egress costs, move only the data you’re planning to use into the cloud. However, if media must move again, rest easy that it won’t be massive raw files. With Tyrell Cloud, media is streamed at a very low cost; all the raw footage lives in the cloud and can remain there indefinitely. The only material that will move again is the final edit, and even that might not exit the cloud. It could effectively not leave the cloud until it’s delivered in the distribution chain, but even at that point, it’s no longer hundreds of terabytes of raw footage.
Real-world applications
To date, many TV productions have used Tyrell Cloud with EditShare FLEX to create, pause, and delete editorial workstations across projects. Private colleges with large-scale media labs are also leveraging the solution to ensure student access to the latest software upgrades and better tailor resources to accommodate lab schedules. Furthermore, with deployable technical infrastructure and accurate cost modelling, training organizations like Creative Media Academy Ireland (CMAI) are tapping the solution to run educational courses with more flexibility and to only deploy technology as needed.
For instance, CMAI leveraged a Tyrell Cloud account to launch a pair of redundant HP Anyware (Teradici Servers), 12 virtual workstations, storage, and NLEs in a matter of hours for a two-week educational training. The setup ensured each student received a workstation login and was online within CMAI or from the comfort of their home. Tyrell initially projected costs to run €4,232 – inclusive of a month-long Tyrell cloud subscription and running each system 8 hours a day for two weeks, but the actual amount came in less at €3,422. They arrived at this projection using automated cloud cost modeling powered by Tyrell’s unique IP. It merges the various M&E vendor subscription types and unit costs (GB/TB, User, Hours, Single Use) with live AWS costs to ensure that actual spend will be approximately 80% of the estimated cost.
From the lens of “Tarzan Economics,” the M&E industry has been swinging from the same on-premises vine for over a decade, but cloud-based applications in a range of environments are proving the value in reaching out for a new vine. Those who make the leap now stand to gain future advantages beyond our imagination.
Original article featured here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/cloud-editing-costs-demystified/
Contact the Tyrell Team to find out how Tyrell Cloud can revolutionise your production and post workflows sales@tyrellcct.com.
by Tyrell | May 9, 2023 | Blog, Cloud, News
Tyrell Brings its 23 Years of Experience to Tyrell Cloud with New Market-Leading Cost Certainty and Fresh Applications
MPTS, Olympia, London, (Stand B40) – 4th May 2023 – Having launched Tyrell Cloud at MPTS 2022, and following a highly successful year of sustained growth, this show sees Tyrell introducing new cost certainties via its AWS expertise and vendor relationships. The company is also revealing new service offers via Tyrell Cloud.
One of the key concerns customers have voiced across the industry about cloud use is the inadvertent spiralling of costs and how much using AWS, for example, will actually be in reality. Tyrell has spent the last year adapting its backend architecture, using its AWS expertise, to create a simple-to-use method of very accurately predicting usage costs.
Dan Muchmore, Sales and Marketing Director at Tyrell, said, “There’s no doubt that some people have been hesitant about using the cloud because of the talk of costs, especially egress. Tyrell Cloud now provides an industry-leading solution to the cost problem that no media and entertainment vendor, nor even AWS, can answer: ‘How much will this really cost me?’ Customers can now know exactly how much a given service – or suite of services – will cost by our technology accessing that information live from AWS while combining this with each specific vendor’s unique licensing model on Tyrell Cloud. This then produces a per-day (eight hours) or per-month (21 days) accurate cost, based on customer parameters. This means they benefit from the inherent flexibility and scalability provided by Tyrell Cloud and, with absolute confidence, know how much they will pay. It’s our AWS experience and close vendor relationships that allow us to do this.”
These close vendor relationships and Tyrell Cloud’s capability means that Tyrell is now able to provide customers with hourly billing rather than annual license fee charges for certain products. Tyrell Cloud is the first platform worldwide to have hourly billing for Cinedeck and its video ingest service is easily scalable in either direction as customer needs evolve.
This is also made possible by the expansion of Tyrell Cloud Capture. As well as being central to new pricing certainty, the application now benefits from greatly enhanced flexibility with users able to simply key in the IP address of a given SRT stream and have the choice of where that’s directed to, be it Cinedeck, Sienna or V-Mix, as examples.
Tyrell is also announcing the availability of two additional applications on Tyrell Cloud, both accelerated file transfer solutions: Jetstream and MASV.IO. The former is directly available and uses a fixed monthly cost model or customers can opt for a usage-based model with MASV. MASV is a SAAS option, which can transfer into Tyrell Cloud.
Muchmore added, “We’ve seen many customers do not fully understand egress costs or how to create workflows that avoid unnecessary expense and, as a result, we’re now providing cloud consultancy services alongside bespoke project work. Excessive egress costs are, in reality, a bit of fallacy because it’s really about architecting efficient workflows, both technologically and financially. The benefits of the cloud are clear across multiple use cases, often in combination with on-premise technologies. While the technical elegance of Tyrell Cloud is clear for all to see, there has been, and is still, real concern about cloud costs. We understand this and have now removed this concern via the work we have done using our AWS expertise, combined with our overall market understanding. Customers know what they are getting and exactly what they will be paying for it.
“The demand for cloud use is increasing and the market is crying out for cloud-capable system integrators who also understand media. We are using our 23 years of experience in on-premise system integration, workflow design and advance cloud expertise, alongside our formidable cost estimation and automation toolsets, to create cloud solutions tailored to each customer.”
For more information visit https://web.tyrellcct.co.uk/tyrell-cloud/
by Tyrell | Apr 18, 2023 | Blog, Cloud, News
The biggest problem facilities in Ireland are facing is talent. And it’s a big issue. According to the Creative Media Academy Ireland (CMAI), which was established last year) there’s around 500 graduates annually who specialise in animation – whether that’s VFX, 2D or 3D, who leave university without the real-world skillset that facilities actually require.
Having carried out an in-depth assessment of the situation, CMAI was born to address this problem, with well-known industry figure Brian Gilmore as Course Director. A key priority was to establish a way to bridge the equipment/training gap to close this skills gap, with the aim of being able to fast-track graduates into the industry.
Gilmore says, “Without the right equipment to provide this real-world graduate training, we could not move forward. How do we build the technical infrastructure to cater for a range of courses from 2D/3D/VFX to video editing and live production? This requires differently specified machines, applications, storage and so on and trying to cater for all course types using traditional workflows and technologies would create a cost burden that simply isn’t viable.” Enter Tyrell Cloud.
Tyrell Cloud provides a set of services powered by AWS and leading manufacturers that allow anyone involved in content creation to take advantage of the power and agility of the cloud without the often-associated runaway cost or steep learning curve. Tyrell Cloud provides companies with a turnkey managed service based on their project workflow requirements, which gives instant access to solutions from multiple vendors. It redefines system integration across the media and entertainment industry.
The fact that Tyrell Cloud is a next-gen, fully automated virtual production environment is crucial to what CMAI is now doing. It provides instant access to solutions from multiple vendors, all in the cloud, and allows CMAI to create and deliver courses without having to find the capex to fund the course infrastructure. Gilmore says, “We can provide training for any course, at any time, with multiple courses running concurrently without having to build infrastructure to match that concurrency. More students being trained at the same time means more open headcounts being filled to help fuel the skills gap. For the students, it’s the same creative tools they are used to. For CMAI, technical and financial agility are primary requirements to help a next generation training academy deliver technical and creative courses to the next generation of creatives.”
The courses take place either at a central training location or students can complete courses from home and this is where the huge flexibility and speed of deployment of Tyrell Cloud, is also critical.
Looking in more detail at an example of how CMAI matches supply with demand, it had been receiving feedback from broadcasters last year that there weren’t enough editor graduates who had the skillset to start work. CMAI discussed this with funding partner Screen Skills who were also aware of this problem.
Gilmore explains, “As a result, we created a specific video editing course. We set up 12 edit systems, landed all the project assets, the e-learning collateral by and by 8am on a Monday morning, we launched the systems on Tyrell Cloud. Tyrell Cloud really made it that simple. Using Tyrell Cloud, we could spin up the instances we needed in the morning and then down again at the end of the day. We don’t face any costs when the students aren’t using the systems as we use Tyrell’s dynamic scheduling feature.”
During the first editing course, several students wanted to work later on a Thursday evening before their exam on Friday. All that was required was to simply extend the up time of the cloud workstations with a few, easy button clicks. This was extended until 8pm and by 8:10pm, those workstations were shut back down. Of course, using Tyrell Cloud no information is lost, workstations and servers are simply hibernated. Gilmore adds, “There are two sides to the benefits of this workflow: it’s highly cost-effective while also being technologically elegant; and, equally as important, it’s a brilliant demonstration of the benefits of cloud for the future of post and 2D/3D/VFX production. For a training facility like ours, it offers absolute agility to offer any course, any time without the traditional capex burden.”
Gilmore concludes, “Having launched CMAI at the end of last summer, we have had 70 students enrol on our courses, with 70 per cent of them already finding employment, which is a tremendous achievement. This is an initiative by the industry, for the industry powered by the flexibility, dynamism and cost-effectiveness of Tyrell Cloud.”
Click here to find out more about CMAI’s courses.
Speak to Tyrell’s cloud experts to see how you can take advantage of the flexibility of Tyrell Cloud- sales@tyrellcct.com.
by Tyrell | Feb 8, 2023 | Blog, Cloud, News
Tyrell Cloud Takes Virtual Events Company E2 360 to New Heights
E2 360 is a London-based digital experience company that offers virtual site visits, 360-degree live streaming and virtual events. It launched in summer 2020 amidst the first UK Covid lockdown when live events were being cancelled and streamed online. In October 2021, as E2 360 was beginning to make serious inroads within the industry, its Director Nick Robinson purchased an AVIWEST BeOnAIR live streaming solution from Tyrell to ensure that it could deliver solid video streams even in the most challenging situations.
Once lockdown restrictions were lifted, E2 360’s customers began returning to on-site events and the scope of the company’s requirements grew. Robinson explains, “We work with a lot of companies now that want to do multi-location or multi-region streaming. They may have team members in Europe, America and Asia, and we have to be able to link everything together.”
E2 360’s traditional model included multiple on-premise laptops and workstations all handling different parts of the virtual production workflow, which didn’t support an efficient way of growing the business. At the start of 2022, Robinson and Tyrell’s Sales Director Dan Muchmore discussed plans for the year and Robinson mentioned he needed an AWS expert to help him create virutalised workstations to further his goal of true virtual production and scale. The Tyrell Cloud platform was introduced followed by several demonstrations of Tyrell Cloud Tyrell’s new Cloud platform allows anyone involved in content creation to take advantage of the power and agility of the cloud without the often-associated runaway cost or steep learning curve.
Robinson identified a project that he knew would be a perfect fit for the Tyrell Cloud workflow, a multi-city, multi-country livestreaming event for a global charity. He says, “I needed to have operators anywhere in the world, or anywhere in the UK that could operate our events without leaving their home, their office, or their studio.”
Using Tyrell Cloud, he was able to run several virtual workstations. Creating them as and when needed, configuring them with the desired software and scheduling them whenever they were required to run. This level of flexibility and agility is a huge benefit to small companies like E2 360 as it allows them to take on any production without worrying about massive capex costs.
Each workstation hosted vMix live video streaming software instances, Teams (x2) and PowerPoint sessions, and had a cloud hosted NDI network to manage routing between workstations for mixing in vMix. They could also deploy Adobe Premiere in the cloud for VOD edits in post. Tyrell Cloud automatically deploys a load balanced, dual redundant Teradici system in each Tyrell Cloud project which allows secure, low latency control of each workstation regardless of a user’s location.
Robinson explains, “This meant that we could have an operator in Europe doing the editing and another operator in the UK doing the live streaming. It allows us to really scale and spin up as many instances as we like. Traditionally, if we’d had a very large event the operator may not have had a heavy enough spec machine for what we were trying to achieve. Tyrell Cloud enables us to scale up, scale down and create the right piece of infrastructure that we need for any set project.”
AWS Media Connect provides Tyrell Cloud with a powerful and flexible way of managing remote contribution feeds and routing into the Tyrell Cloud account. It provides Robinson with a contribution route into his virtual production environment anytime he needs. He can also offer post-production services to his clients without needing any capital outlay; he simply runs up another workstation for an NLE, and using Tyrell Cloud Capture, he can capture the production streams and ISOs. Between productions he uses Tyrell Cloud to turn off the workstations and services he doesn’t need, giving him full control of his monthly costs.
Robinson says, “Using Tyrell cloud and AWS combined allows us to bill clients for every hour that the equipment is used. Another example is that a client may want to do a project just for one or two hours. This way we simply spin up an extra resource or an extra instance of a server and that means we can scale into the hundreds or thousands if we really needed to.”
This virtual production setup also means that he doesn’t need to send as much equipment out to the production site, giving him a faster setup and greener production credentials. Using Tyrell Cloud, every project has its own virtual workstations and infrastructure and users schedule projects to run as and when required providing a much more flexible and sustainable way of working. Robinson says, “Clients want us to be on location, on site, and traditionally that would mean putting a lot of boxes on a van or a truck and travelling to a venue. Now we’re able to cut out the amount of transport and deploy larger systems. It’s easier to scale and we’ve got that sustainability element, which a lot of companies are driving toward.”
AWS provides the most comprehensive set of services for media and entertainment and Tyrell Cloud provides the user with a virtual facility to take advantage of this power without the technical knowledge required. Anyone on the production project team can access and manage content in the Tyrell Cloud environment without needing technical cloud skills. It allows freelance editors working remotely to edit content in the cloud; they simply need the workstation address to log in.
“Using Tyrell Cloud Control web interface, we can create a really simple way that’s not time consuming and easy to understand to deploy multiple servers at the click of a couple buttons. The other important point to mention about Tyrell Cloud is scheduling. From a cost standpoint, I don’t have to worry about accidentally leaving a server on. Using the scheduling tool I can say, I need these machines turned on between eight and six and these specific machines between ten and eleven at night. It’s that easy.”
With Tyrell Cloud, E2 360 has really been able to hone its offerings and further define its vision and services all by using an opex model. Tyrell Cloud really is ‘Making Cloud Simple’.
by Tyrell | Nov 20, 2022 | Cloud, News
We are delighted to announce that Tyrell Cloud has reached the AWS status of ‘Select Tier Services Partner’.
Year on year AWS led the way in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (CIPS) report for their innovation, scale, and their ability to execute. For Tyrell Cloud, AWS’s knowledge and focus on the media and entertainment industry is the reason why they are at the forefront and make it easy for us to develop solutions for our customers.
Achieving the Select Partner status is a huge technical effort and puts us firmly on the path to be the market leading service provider and really pioneer the mass migration and adoption of public cloud in media and entertainment. We firmly believe that over next few years we are going to see a mass change away from the tried and tested on-prem model and side step the half way house of capex, private data centre alternatives.
Today Tyrell offers cloud consultancy, bespoke projects, and a fully managed service for post production and livestreaming. The public cloud offers our customers the chance to pivot, evolve and rethink their business direction and along with AWS we are ready to lead the way with our dedicated team of AWS engineers and developers.
To find out more about Tyrell Cloud services contact us at sales@tyrellcct.com.
by Tyrell | Aug 23, 2022 | Blog, Cloud, News
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Live Sport Production
Since we launched Tyrell Cloud at MPTS in May, we’ve been going from strength to strength. Recently, TVB Europe published an article explaining how Tyrell Cloud – a turnkey managed cloud service – is being used by UK-based production company Mallinson Sadler Productions (MSP). At MPTS, we also demonstrated Tyrell Cloud Capture, the ingest of live SRT streams with AWS MediaConnect and Cinedeck directly to EditShare shared storage. In this blog we want to elaborate on this so that producers creating fast turnaround TV, news, and sports can see the benefits that Tyrell Cloud brings to their productions.
For those who are unfamiliar, Cinedeck originally came to market with a digital deck that allowed users to capture from camera straight to disc. What was clever about this solution was that it allowed for a master file and a proxy file to be captured at the same time, bypassing the ingest and transcode process ready for immediate editing. Although quick and clever, this solution was very much about being on premise, where the deck digitises to itself or to network storage. More recently, Cinedeck has launched Capture2Cloud, an ingest server in the cloud supporting the recordings of ISO streams directly to the codec required for editing, making it simple for users to carry out on-demand cloud encoding of edit ready formats.
By adding Cinedeck into Tyrell Cloud we reduce the emphasis of on location infrastructure and capture live NDI or SRT streams to EditShare storage for immediate editing. Tyrell Cloud with Cinedeck, EditShare, NDI and SRT reduces geography, our value is making live events simple.
Tyrell Cloud Capture
The power of Tyrell Cloud allows users to login to their Tyrell Cloud portal, their virtual machine room and add the Tyrell Cloud Capture service without any cloud or vendor experience. Once launched the user enters the details of the stream to start securely ingesting from anywhere in the world. SRT is a secure low latency video stream; you can be an outside broadcaster using an SNG truck for example, a full OB, or even a small flight case with cameras feeding a video encoder. Because that video encoder is sending streams via SRT, all those cameras are going to land in Tyrell Cloud, synchronised and locked together. That content is available immediately in the cloud for editing and no one is having to shuttle drives or servers, back and forth between sites. Not only is it quicker and easier, it’s also a much more sustainable and greener way of working.
Making Cloud Simple
Backing up our motto ‘Making Cloud Simple’, we really do want to make it as quick and easy as possible for users to access and start editing live SRT streams. With Tyrell Cloud we have removed the requirement for our customers to have cloud knowledge, removed the user on boarding complexities and removed the fear of run-away costs. Our platform has revolutionised post production and streaming, productions can experience all the positives the cloud has to offer without the negatives. Anyone on the production project team can access and manage content in the Tyrell Cloud environment without needing technical cloud skills. It allows freelance editors working remotely to edit content in the cloud; they simply need to log into the virtual workstation as they would do a physical workstation. Customers can also choose a hybrid version. MSP, for example, has an EditShare both on-prem and in the cloud. The EditShare on-prem is used to land rushes and the team then choose which rushes go up into the cloud.
Tyrell Cloud provides huge flexibility; the customer can be running an edit facility in Tyrell Cloud and add an ingest server as a service as and when required. Customers can also decide when their service runs aligning operational costs with project cycles.
If you want to discuss further, don’t hesitate to give us a shout. We can have your Tyrell Cloud service up and running in a matter of days.
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