by Tyrell | Jan 25, 2024 | Animation, Cloud, News
ERA Ltd has announced that Giant Animation is set to kick it up a notch by implementing ERA’s innovative and dependable infrastructure to support its growing needs.
Giant Animation based in Dublin, joined forces with Tyrell, an ERA partner, when they took on a large animation project and needed to scale up their infrastructure. Tyrell, a media technology partner with offices in Dublin and London worked with ERA to provide on-demand infrastructure to Giant including workstations and storage enabling them to quickly gear up for their imminent project.
Giant Animation are an independent CG animation studio dedicated to creating and producing world-class content for TV and Film. The talent of their award-winning artists, production managers and technical wizards landed them with a large animation project, however their existing infrastructure was simply not up to the task.
Giant partnered with Tyrell and ERA to ramp up for the project starting with 20 workstations and storage for the initial pilot. The pilot progressed quickly into a longer-term, episodic project which is set to last for 18 months. The team has already grown significantly, and that growth is expected to continue in the coming months, with Tyrell and ERA ready to step in when further expansion is required.
Giant are also using ERA’s rendering infrastructure on-demand which can be quickly and easily deployed to meet the growing demands of the global workforce delivering the project.
Commenting on this latest customer project, Sean Baker, Managing Director of ERA said “We’re delighted to have partnered with Tyrell on this exciting project for Giant Animation. Our aim is to support Giant by providing them with infrastructure and services they can rely on and trust. It was imperative that Giant were able to scale their requirements as and when they needed to, and our operations are fully set up to facilitate this quickly and seamlessly enabling the delivery of the commissioned episodes”.
Ben Harper, Managing Director of Giant Animation commented “We approached Tyrell to help us with our challenges around storage and infrastructure. We were looking for infrastructure we could rely on and was future-proofed for our evolving needs. We needed to be able to trust in the technology to enable our creative output and Tyrell found the perfect partner in ERA. We are confident that ERA can deliver on our needs for secure and resilient infrastructure while also providing us with significant cost savings with their on-demand render burst solution”.
ABOUT ERA
Based in Chesham, Buckinghamshire and delivering IT and workflow solutions since 1999, ERA is one of the UK’s leading independent providers of IT workflow solutions for clients in the media, VFX, post-production and broadcast industries. Solutions cover all aspects of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), cloud archiving, remote workstations, storage, maintenance support and other managed services to meet the needs of complex and demanding media workflow projects.
By taking a vendor-neutral design approach and understanding no two customers are the same, ERA has developed a large and strong customer base. With customers including Jellyfish Pictures, The Look, Evolutions, The University of Salford and Vice Media; ERA have helped with challenges around storage, impractical infrastructures, accessibility issues, scalability, and integration.
ABOUT GIANT
Founded over ten years ago, Giant is an animation studio dedicated to telling great stories and creating amazing animation the whole world can enjoy.
Driven by the passion of their award-winning team and guided by their unwavering commitment to quality, Giant bring something special to every project they work on. Whether it’s TV series, film, or commercials, they put our hearts into every pixel.
They are a family of artists, technicians, business partners, storytellers and filmmakers – and together they are Giant.
ABOUT TYRELL
As a media technology partner, Tyrell empowers its customers with leading solutions for broadcast, television production and live performance with end-to-end solutions, ensuring they are supported in the future.
Established for over 23 years, Tyrell understands the unique pressures of the media and entertainment industry. Tyrell provide both on-premise and cloud solutions for content creation and live broadcast. Understanding their customers’ requirements and providing industry-leading professional services are key Tyrell values. Tyrell is proud to be an official partner for ERA Ltd.
by Tyrell | Dec 15, 2023 | Cloud, News
ERA Ltd a leading independent provider of IT and workflow solutions and Tyrell a media technology partner today announced their partner agreement to further strengthen Tyrell’s offerings to the media, broadcast and production markets.
With this partnership ERA and Tyrell will work together to deliver hosting, cloud services, infrastructure and storage to the media and entertainment industry. With extensive experience in broadcast, television production and live performance, Tyrell understand the unique pressures and the fast pace of the industry making them an ideal partner for ERA.
Tyrell, a well-established business in London and Dublin with more than 20 years of experience boasts an impressive customer base with organisations such as DAZN, QVC, Giant Animation, Boulder Media, Paddy Power, Pinewood, Linney and many more. They’re proud to work with the best in the business as a trusted resource and partner.
The collaboration with ERA will ensure Tyrell can maximise their offerings and commitment to both the UK and Irish markets empowering their customers to continue to be the best in the business.
Commenting on this recent partnership, Sean Baker, Managing Director of ERA Ltd said “Having a partner that understands the market and the challenges these sectors are facing, ensures the customer not only gets the right solution but they can also enjoy a consistent and long-lasting relationship with an outstanding partner. We’re delighted to be able to expand our offerings through Tyrell and see this a critical step in our growth journey and long-term success”.
Bryan Malone, Managing Director of Tyrell said “By partnering with a specialist such as ERA, we are confident that we can deliver innovative and dependable solutions to our customers for their demanding projects. We are delighted to have signed our first joint customer earlier this month ‘Giant Animation’ to provide them with storage and remote workstations. ERA have already proved that they can be relied on as a partner and are committed to providing our customers with state-of-the-art technologies.
With the signing of this partnership agreement, ERA aim to elevate its status as a key player in the market recognised for its excellence in delivering complex and demanding IT and workflow solutions.
ABOUT ERA
Based in Chesham, Buckinghamshire and delivering IT and workflow solutions since 1998, ERA is one of the UK’s leading independent providers of IT workflow solutions for clients in the media, VFX, post-production and broadcast industries. Solutions cover all aspects of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), cloud archiving, remote workstations, storage, maintenance support and other managed services to meet the needs of complex and demanding media workflow projects.
By taking a vendor-neutral design approach and understanding no two customers are the same, ERA has developed a large and strong customer base. With customers including Jellyfish Pictures, The Look, Evolutions, The University of Salford and Vice Media; ERA have helped with challenges around storage, impractical infrastructures, accessibility issues, scalability, and integration.
ABOUT TYRELL
As a media technology partner, Tyrell empowers its customers with leading solutions for broadcast, television production and live performance with end-to-end solutions, ensuring they are supported in the future.
Established for over 23 years, Tyrell understands the unique pressures of the media and entertainment industry. Tyrell provide both on-premise and cloud solutions for content creation and live broadcast. Understanding their customers’ requirements and providing industry-leading professional services are key Tyrell values. Tyrell is proud to be an official partner for ERA Ltd.
by Tyrell | Sep 28, 2021 | Cloud, News, tyrell's take
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
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by Tyrell | Aug 3, 2021 | Cloud, News, tyrell's take
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.
Nick Soper, Tyrell Cloud Platform Owner
