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HITS Spring: The Significant Role Played by In-House Data Center Infrastructure

In-house data center infrastructure assists producers and creatives in optimizing workflow efficiencies to maximize on-set virtual production outcomes, according to a panel of industry experts who spoke May 19 during the Production + Workflow breakout session “On-Set Virtual Production and Data Infrastructure” at the Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS).

No matter how much preparation has been done, once on set, adjustments within the virtual environment imagery are likely going to be requested. Making artistic changes during active production is an “all hands” effort. Artists across multiple vendors, operating from disparate locations and LED stage technicians delivering high resolution digital assets and environments to a volumetric stage, need no-nonsense inter-connectivity.

Meanwhile, getting updates to the stage as quickly as possible saves money and maintains creative flow. This exchange and more (camera to cloud) are supported by a facility’s in-house data center infrastructure, which is the fundamental layer of any data-centric workflow.

The digital imagery displays and reacts in real-time on a VP set, integrating live action photography with in-camera visual effects (ICVFX). But the high computing demands of the process are only as capable and reliable as the data center infrastructure that supports them.

“What we’re going to be talking about for the most part is the infrastructure that supports all of this,” moderator Eric Rigney, MEDCA EVP, told attendees at the start of the panel session.

“At the end of the day, it is the on-prem data center, or [what] we call digital infrastructure, that’s supporting all of this virtual production,” he said.

COVID’s Impact

“One of the main things we found, especially working in the middle of COVID, was having to rely heavily on remote teams,” according to Tom Thudiyanplackal, a virtual production producer and senior M&E executive.

“Some of our people were located as far off as London, and we needed heavy compute power for that. And of course, a lot of bandwidth too to access these things. And so, if somebody was working with their own machines at their home, for example, It’s okay to … keep version control and things like that. But [while] download speeds are good at home, sometimes the upload speeds are only 20 megabits per second…. And so they could have finished the work in 15 minutes but we’re waiting for hours … for that to basically be uploaded.”

That just was not acceptable. “So we found out that because we’ve got such a lot of data going back and forth, it was good to have a virtual machine in a region close to where the artist was and they could finish the work,” Thudiyanplackal said. “And pretty much, if the virtual machine sat in the same cloud environment … things were being transferred immediately. And there was a lot of time saved in that phase. And similar workflows were also followed on set during production where, because we had multiple … vendors, things had to be downloaded on-prem and then worked [on] over there.”

But he pointed out: “As the director walks on set, some things may change. We need to call some artists remotely and they have to do the same thing. And so having an architecture which could connect all of our computers, whether they were on-prem [or] remote and have a lot of bandwidth to communicate in as real-time as possible, that’s really what helped us.”

Every Stage is Different

One challenge is that “every stage is a little bit different,” according to Hardie Tankersly, VP of visualization products and marketing at Silverdraft.

On one end are the “super crazy cinematic production stages” for $200 million projects like those made by Marvel Studios, he noted. Those stages are “custom- built for [each] specific project” and there is a detailed script before you build a stage “so you know exactly what shots you’re going to get and you know what kind of budget you have and the kind of money you can spend,” he said.

But there is a “whole range of market sizes all the way down to small commercial production sets or people who build just shops for vehicle process,” he noted, pointing out there are people “building stages just for vehicle process and renting out to people making car commercials.” That is a “very specific market” but there is a different project every day and so “you never quite know what you’re dealing with so there’s a huge range of applications for these stages – and they have very different technology requirements, very different standards and very different ways of operating,” he added.

Therefore, he explained: “You kind of have to deal with each of these markets separately, whether it’s owned by a production, owned by a studio or owned by basically a rental shop [that is] trying to be as generic as possible and they just rent it out to whoever wants to do something on any given day and you try to fit into it.”

Jase Lindgren, VFX specialist and solutions engineer at Perforce Helix Core, and Edward Churchward, co-founder and CTO of Arch Platform Technologies, also participated in the panel session.

To view the entire presentation, click here.

The Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit event was produced by MESA in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), Media & Entertainment Data Center Alliance (MEDCA), presented by ICVR and sponsored by Genpact, MicroStrategy, Whip Media, Convergent Risks, Perforce, Richey May Technology Solutions, Signiant, Softtek, Bluescape, Databricks, KeyCode Media, Metal Toad, Shift, Zendesk, EIDR, Fortinet, Arch Platform Technologies and Amazon Studios.