Originally driven by the need to move to remote workflows during the pandemic, Mallinson Sadler Productions worked with Tyrell Cloud to keep their editing teams working during Covid and beyond.
The media and entertainment industry’s evolving rapidly. When Covid struck two years ago, the production community had to come up with new ways of working to not only film and ensure safe practices for talent and crew, but also to adopt new workflows so that content could be edited and managed remotely. Despite the massive challenges that the pandemic created, we’ve witnessed the use of incredible technical innovations (think remote production and remote working) that have resulted in quantum creative leaps across our industry.
UK-based production company Mallinson Sadler Productions (MSP) was started in 2002 by childhood friends Crispin Sadler, a multiple award-winning documentary maker and Simon Mallinson, a multiple award-winning advertisement and film maker. They produce factual, ocean-themed programmes for a wide range of broadcasters all over the world with technical innovation at the forefront of their productions.
Over the years, MSP successfully took care of its own editing. In the early days as its production grew, it needed more engineering and the support of post houses. During lockdown, the team created 20 episodes of one of its popular shows and was heavily reliant on the post house during this time. Ken Robinson, technical manager, MSP says, “The pandemic and lockdown was a difficult time for everyone. The post house had to go through radical change and we found ourselves part of the teething problems in the workflow challenge that they had. As in all post houses there is never just one client, so delays were further compounded by lack of booking slots to complete important tasks. Staff aren’t assigned to one client and so little things such as file labelling could go wrong, causing problems later when auditing content.”
Time for change
MSP started looking for alternative workflows that would help resolve these issues. It needed six edit suites spread across two buildings in Bristol. Robinson says, “I was trying to figure out how to connect everything together and how to make it work reliably. It’s fine to say, ‘let’s build our own edit suites’, but you have to understand what that really entails without spending a fortune.” Luckily he didn’t have to pursue this idea any further: “A colleague of mine said his supplier Tyrell might have an interesting solution. I jumped on a call and was pretty much sold straight away.”
Robinson was referring to Tyrell Cloud, a set of services powered by 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. Earlier this year the company successfully demonstrated the ingest of live SRT streams with Cinedeck directly to EditShare storage and more vendor solutions will be announced soon.
Tyrell Cloud Workstation
Bryan Malone, Tyrell’s MD says, “The cloud is the new technical frontier that allows us to rethink how we approach the next-generation of content creators. Using Tyrell Cloud, media companies have a turnkey managed service based on their project workflow requirements, which gives instant access to solutions from multiple vendors. Today, a Tyrell Cloud customer can enjoy an offline editorial experience with EditShare FLEX and AWS (Storage), FileCatalyst (File transfer) and Teradici (Virtual workstation control).
“AWS’ values are closely aligned with Tyrell’s. We did try other public cloud providers, but none have the media and entertainment customer and market focus that AWS does. Also, it’s our preference to be multi-region rather than multi-public. We believe it provides more value to our customers to support a production in any country. We want to be able to offer file or stream ingest at the closest AWS point and provide the lowest latency editing experience possible with multi-region support. Security is our absolute concern. By employing the latest AWS secure architecture, we can offer our customers the confidence that their content is more secure than an on-premise solution.”
The efficiency of Tyrell Cloud
Tyrell Cloud provides MSP and other clients with a way of facilitating remote working in a more sustainable way, bringing technology closer to the talent rather than the traditional travel to the centre of the city and completely turns the economic model of post production on its head. Tyrell Cloud allows facilities to expand and contract its technical estate freely when required and migrate their workflows to the cloud without ever seeing the cloud or needing any experience in the cloud.
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 server address to log in. Robinson says, “It doesn’t matter where the editor is if they’ve got at least a 20-50-Mbps connection. Our editorial is extremely important, and my goal is to make the technology work so that editors can focus on the creative task. We don’t need editors who have deep technical knowledge; we need editors who have very good storytelling abilities.”
Tyrell Cloud 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 store the proxies on watch folders to be uploaded to each edit. It allows Flow to scan, so all the material is available to see on the Airflow web interface. Robinson adds “This whole story was an alignment of the stars. We’d already invested in EditShare, because we’d previously edited in house and are using the Airflow MAM to allow remote access to hundreds of terabytes of material. In addition we use an LTO 8 library to back up as we ingest. Using Tyrell Cloud, we were able to limit six edit suites to 13-15 terabytes of total storage. Plus, content only goes one way to the cloud; we send it up, but we don’t pull it back down because we have everything on prem. The content on the cloud is only used for editing.”
For the editors themselves, they don’t notice any difference. Robinson says, “It’s the same as if they were in an edit suite. The other beauty is we have one edit assistant who’s able to ingest, transcode and look after each of those six cloud-based edit suites. Because we’re our own client, unlike a post facility, we’re not dealing with 20 other customers all screaming to have their content ingested. We’re able to receive shoot drives at 9am, sync, transcode and have everything available for the edit by lunchtime the next day.”
The Tyrell Cloud platform allows customers to determine when services run down to the hour, removing the fear of runaway costs. Customers are always in full control. Using Tyrell Cloud, media companies can migrate away from the annual capex and align production costs to their specific production schedules running production servers when they are required rather than investing ahead of time regardless of commissioning cycles.
For MSP, Tyrell Cloud gives them back control of their productions. Robinson adds, “At the end of the production, I have peace of mind knowing everything is there— knowing it’s labelled accurately and stored and that we can quickly and easily find it at any time.”
Want to find out more about Tyrell Cloud contact our experts at sales@tyrellcct.com
Tyrell’s very own Dan Muchmore and Nick Soper sat down with the KitPlus TV Team to discuss the newly released Tyrell Cloud Platform.
Tyrell Cloud simplifies the migration to the cloud for production workflows. It redefines system integration by automating the deployment service of all AWS infrastructure and manufacturer services. Meaning our customers don’t have to. Tyrell Cloud is also a fully managed production service giving our customers complete control over when their cloud infrastructure runs, resulting in ultimate control of their costs.
Cloud adoption is a very emotive and often a confusing set of topics. For a risk averse community such as production, taking the first step into the cloud is undoubtedly pulse raising. Factors such as cost control immediately spring to mind, as well as risking client relationships and the liability for assets that aren’t necessarily your own. Considering we are used to very predictable timetables and airtight outcomes for deliverables using on-premises solutions. Why add more stress, and risk budget overspend by going into the cloud?
Well, not wishing to boil the ocean with a single sweeping statement or approach, cloud when introduced cautiously and carefully, can greatly increase productivity and throughput at various stages of the average production workflow. For example, restrictions for content ingest from set are usually tied to the horsepower of the one or two computers we have in our racks to process rushes into an offline edit ready state. Yet, when applying the infinite horizontal scale of parallel compute available in the cloud, ingest processing can be hugely accelerated.
As many of us already appreciate the dreaded cloud egress pretty much always features when trying to devise a workflow modification in production using cloud. Ingressing bulk rushes content from a shoot into the cloud is free. The cost comes when egressing the relevant files the edit needs back to ground. But one must consider the benefits of the cloud when we are not reliant on just the one or two machines being available for rushes ingest. Potentially ten’s if not hundreds can add a game changing effect to your production’s labour budgets and turn-around times.
For example, egressing 1 hour of DNx36 1080p25 proxy (~16GB) can cost as little as £1.75. This may sound high when you counter that with, “I’ve already got machines that can do this overnight”. But when you throw infinite compute breadth at your rushes processing, as well as then intelligently and automatically transferring them to your nearline or even online storage ready for a Dailies assembly to start, your project lead times can really be reduced.
Also stepping backwards up the workflow pipeline, the cloud can assist with the offload from set without having to rely on the usual transport drive overhead. Content is invariably written to disk directly on set. So, if the upload to cloud ingest processing is directly configured on this set storage, then a download of rapidly produced offline proxies can occur automatically. Mitigating the whole transport drive wrangling process, purchase, and even potential loss. Plus, an added benefit is that all content stored in the cloud is underpinned by SLAs more watertight than your own on-premises equipment.
Another fringe benefit may be to create a production specific archive on the most applicable type of storage for the duration of the project. This can avoid the cost centre of investing in an on-premise archive strategy using technologies such as LTO, which also dictates its own labour and engineering overhead.
As mentioned at the start of this blog, there are many topics that can be touched when considering a move to cloud. Major take-aways from this would be that any cloud resource usage can easily be aligned to productions. The previous examples have focused on how technology can accelerate stages of the workflow. Another reason that cloud is the future for production companies is that it aligns itself with the economic fluctuations that a production company faces when managing the business between commissions.
The traditional CapEx model requires you to build infrastructure to suit a project’s requirement. How does this model align to the business when its quiet or when you need to expand? The ultimate argument for cloud production is that it allows you to take advantage of the expansion and contraction. Expand your production architecture when the commission requires it and contract in the fallow period. With technology such as Teradici and SRT streaming from Haivision, an editor will have no idea that they are working on a virtual cloud environment. So, align your tech to an OpEx model.
By using simple techniques in AWS such as Cost Allocation Tagging, deployment of cloud infrastructure being conducted with fully orchestrated platforms such as Tyrell Cloud can greatly assure you of success. As all cloud consumption billing and costs incurred can be reconciled against a particular production, again further advancing towards OpEx.
Nick Soper, Tyrell Cloud Platform Owner [/av_textblock]
We all know workflows in M&E can be challenging. Especially considering aspects such as project shooting ratios and the necessity of rapid content ingest to cope with project deadlines. These can be compounded further with other factors including new acquisition and deliverable formats, as well as the geographies that many projects straddle. Bringing tremendous pressures to a business.
Often the simplest route has been a capital purchase of on-premise hardware solely to achieve a project requirement. This not only increases the project’s cost base but also increases engineering resources, potentially reducing margins. Once these new on-premises solutions have been implemented, an increase in planning and resource management is required as an on-going overhead to the business. There is an alternative economic and technical model for M&E and that is the public cloud.
The cloud can help address this constant project resource allocation battle vs profitability. One of the major benefits of using public cloud is the massive economies of scale. Cloud providers invest vast sums in infrastructure, storage and compute. By letting them take the strain of high-cost CAPEX infrastructure investment means these economies of scale can be applied to an organisation’s own infrastructure demands and allow granular accounting and technical planning at a project level.
Beyond the tremendous efficiencies and cost savings of cloud computing, there is another economic benefit; business agility. Businesses can utilise cloud computing resources to deploy workflows faster and ramp up storage and computing power on demand. This I.T. agility allows businesses to respond quickly to market and project changes as well as customer demands. Leading to more efficient working and faster routes to revenue.
There is an obvious and warranted concern over run-away costs when considering the leap to the cloud. Businesses should analyse the economic pros and cons to get a detailed picture of costs and savings and ask whether it will lead to long-term savings and efficiencies. This type of question is often difficult to answer and will differ depending on the organisation’s needs and circumstances, as well the cloud solution that is being considered. The goal is to avoid a cloud adoption strategy that drives up cost, complexity and staffing resources.
Testing the waters with a smaller piece of the workflow puzzle is a good way to run an analysis to help identify and rationalise these costs. Migrating a component such as an integral file transfer facility to a cloud hosted infrastructure may seem illogical, even with the ominous cloud egress data charges, but on-going running costs can decrease. Service uptime is also significantly increased, as there is a separation from the underlying infrastructure that you’re no longer responsible for.
Fringe benefits such as massive cloud backbone network bandwidth can further enable decreased project processing times. Gone are the bottlenecks of an on-premise ISP connection which is often saturated during day-to-day operations. Locating a core capability on the public cloud can lead to many more efficiencies with downstream workflows being more easily constructed for specific projects or more of a company wide technical standardisation.
Another migration opportunity to consider is locating backup, DR or archive to the cloud. If carefully planned with a well-managed process, infrastructure costs and management overhead can be greatly reduced. Cloud egress or Data Transfer Out (DTO) is a very hot topic in the industry right now. Migration to cloud storage does require analysis to fully understand the operational and technical use cases. Each will require clearly defined success and failure criteria, so that any implemented workflows won’t prevent the business from moving forward. Designing processes and workflows can be factored and optimised so when DTO is required the capacity of data transferred out is greatly reduced.
The last 20 months have shown us that we constantly need to re-evaluate the agility of our businesses. Our economic and technical strategies will be affected by how well we adapt to the rapid changes that are taking place in the industry. The cloud presents us with amazing potential and although cloud adoption and migration of key workflows is a progressive one, the rewards are clearly visible.
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