AWS 2013 LA Media Event: Scalable Media Processing

Editor's Notes

• #2: Joined 2 years ago to focus on building a new media-related service.Couldn’t tell you what it was at last year’s eventNow it is Amazon Elastic TranscoderMedia credentialsWorked in event videoWorked on media technologies at MicrosoftTalk today about media processing in the cloud
• #3: We’ll cover:Media workflowsWhere and how AWS fits into those workflowsWhy scalability is importantApproaches for cloud media processingNext I’ll talk about Amazon Elastic TranscoderWhat it doesWhy we built itHow it fits into a media workflowThen we’ll have a media processing example for video effectsFinally, I’ll talk about a broadcast example where the broadcaster wants to take content from their playout system and publish it to their web-based VOD service.But first I’m going to talk about magic.
• #4: Movie aficionados often talk about the magic of film.After all movies are all about making the audience believe what’s taking place on the screen.And in fact as this well known director says, the history of film and magic is intertwined.Those of you who saw the film Hugo might recall, French magician Georges Méliès invented so many of the movie techniques that we take for granted today: stop trick (where an object disappears), multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves and hand coloring. What’s amazing is that he did this in the 1900s.
• #5: Cameras capture the on-set magic.Beautifully lit scene from a lighting masterclass at Mole Richardson.Glass = ArriAlexa. Light gathering magical box.Super 35 sensor generates almost 20GB for every minute that’s shot.Many of you will be familiar with shooting ratio: the ratio of how much material that’s shot on camera to makes it into the final edit.Conservative number is 10:1. 10 minutes  1 minute.Today’s features are about 140 minutes in duration.With that shooting ratio that’s 26TB before you even think about multiple cameras.100TB for a movie is not unreasonable. We’ll come back to that a bit later.
• #6: Now look at the glass at the other end: the screen.And it is a magical experience to watch a movie on a big screen.This one here is at the CGV Starium in Korea.Supposed to be largest in the world: 4000 sqft – almost a basketball court.They use a couple of Christie 2K projectors to power the screen so that’s about 3GB/minute.But I think the real magic is what needs to happen to get the beautiful big images to the beautiful big screen.
• #7: The media workflow or the glass to glass workflow is the real magic.Behind every great magic trick is science and engineering. Sorry to disappoint you but David Copperfield doesn’t really levitate: he uses a harnessThe disappearing Statue of Liberty? Stage netting and lighting.All of which requires science and engineering.So what about our media workflows?Media workflowss are part of the engineering that make the magic of the movies possible.
• #8: Well you probably all have at least dozen ways to get from camera to screen and then we have things like The Academy’s color workflow.So you’ve got your workflows and that gets you to one screen…
• #9: But now you’ve got all these other outputs.
• #10: But now you’ve got all these other outputs.And many of them have multiplesHow many online devices do you support?How many different edits, languages, and so on
• #11: And an ever increasing number of content sources.In fact we hear that over the course of its life, a particular asset may have been converted 1,000 times.
• #12: So where does AWS fit into media processing workflows?As you’ve heard today, we provide infrastructure services: compute, networking, database, storage and delivery and so on. We also provide application services and deployment and management services. Using these services, as your “software defined datacenter”, you can build media processing workflows.
• #13: Typical operations in a media workflow would run on top of the AWS services. These operations could be provided by software that you’ve developed or they might be from another vendor like Aspera for ingest or Tektronix for video QC.
• #14: On top of all that you’d have business level applications like what Ben’s team at Sony built.
• #15: Now one thing you’ve heard us talk about is scalability. I said earlier that you can think of us as a datacenter in software. You need another compute instance, you can create one at the click of a mouse or ideally through code that creates and destroys instances as it needs to. And that’s elasticity – the ability to not only scale up but also to scale down when you need to.We say that you pay for what you use, so build your media processing in such a way to take advantage of that.
• #16: So
• #20: So now that you’re convinced that AWS is the way to go to build your media workflows on, how do you go about it?
• #34: http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/features/motion-graphics/how-stand-out-in-vfx-animation/
• #38: All broadcast content available through catch up servicesSome content is file-basedSome comes from broadcast playout systemContent usually needs some editorial clippingLots of output devices including set top boxes and streaming devices