The process of making a film is highly complex, and comprises of multiple workflows across story development, pre-production, production, post-production and final distribution. Given the size and amount of media and assets associated with each stage, high performance infrastructure is often essential to meeting deadlines. In this session we will take a deeper dive at running a full cinematic production in the cloud, with a focus on solutions for each of the production stages. We will also look at best practices around design, optimization, performance, scheduling, scalability and low latency utilizing AWS technologies such as EC2, Lambda, Snowball, Direct Connect, and Partner Solutions.

1. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
November 28, 2016
High Performance Cinematic
Production in the Cloud
Richard Welsh, CEO, Sundog Media Toolkit
Konstantin Wilms, Principal Solutions Architect, AWS
MAE 304

2. What to Expect from this Session
Production on AWS
• Macro Perspective
• Building Blocks for Post-Production Pipelines
Sundog Media Toolkit
• Platform, Workflows, Scale, Production Techniques
• Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
• Challenges & Benefits

3. noun | film·mak·ing | -ˌmā-kiŋ
Filmmaking
The process of making a film incorporating five major stages:
Development, Pre-Production, Production, Post-Production, & Distribution

4. Benefit from massive
economies of scale
Adapt your media storage and
compute needs using AWS
Stop guessing capacity
Handle unpredictable & bursty
media needs programmatically
Trade capital expense for variable
expense
Pay for media you store and
process, as you go
Go global in minutes
Global availability instantly,
with no commit
Stop spending money on running &
maintaining data centers
Focus your resources on your media needs
Increase speed and agility
Shorten time to market,
test new approaches
Why AWS for Post Production?

5. Playout & Distribution
Visual Effects & Editing Analytics
DAM & Archive
Digital Supply Chain
Publishing
OTT
Acquisition
AWS Media Workloads

6. Media – ALL IN – to the Cloud
The New Normal

7. Media – ALL IN – to the Cloud
Where Do I Begin?
Buzzword?
Specific scope
Interoperable services
Allow for rapid innovation
De-Coupling
Micro & Composable Services
Performance Optimization

8. Storage
Render Farm
Transcode
Metadata
Pipeline and License
Manager
Graphics Artist
Workstations
• Content has gravity
• Network Bandwidth
• Hybrid/All-in Cloud
• I/O Performance
• Ability to burst at a very
short notice
• Cost?
• Performance
• Security
• License mobility/Elasticity
• Dependency Management
(hybrid scenario)
• Interactivity
• High-Performant Storage
• Hardware Support
Post-Production Components
All-In Cloud Enabled Domino Effect

9. PIPELINES
Mapping Studio Workflows to AWS & Partner Offerings

10. Ingest Storage Editing Processing
PUSH OR PULL
CONTENT & ARTIFACTS
ACCESS SOURCE FILES
LOCATED IN AMAZON S3
CREATE, EDIT, &
COLLABORATE IN THE CLOUD
SCALE OUT ON ELASTIC
CAPACITY FOR PROCESSING
Content production and post-production companies are leveraging AWS to accelerate and streamline
creative, editing, and rendering workloads with highly scalable cloud computing and storage.
Post-Production Pipeline

11. Ingest
PUSH OR PULL
CONTENT & ARTIFACTS
AWS Services
• Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration: Fast data transfer to S3
• AWS Direct Connect: Dedicated network connectivity
• AWS Snowball: Petabyte-scale data transfer
• Amazon CloudFront: Global content delivery network
• AWS Storage Gateway: On-prem-to-cloud storage connectivity
• Elemental Cloud Appliances: On-prem video processing for ingest
Partners
Post-Production Pipeline

12. AWS Services
• Amazon S3: Highly scalable, durable object storage
• Amazon Glacier: Secure, durable, petabyte-scale data archival
• Amazon EFS: Simple, elastic, scalable file system
• Amazon Elastic Block Store: Persistent block storage
• AWS Marketplace: Partner solutions for storage
Partners
Storage
ACCESS SOURCE FILES
LOCATED IN S3
Post-Production Pipeline

13. AWS Services
• Amazon EC2: Scalable CPU/GPU computing capacity
• Amazon Workspaces: Virtual desktops in the cloud
• Amazon EFS: Simple, elastic, scalable file system
• Amazon EBS: Persistent block storage
• Amazon S3: Highly scalable, durable object storage
Partners
Editing
CREATE, EDIT, &
COLLABORATE IN THE CLOUD
Post-Production Pipeline

14. Processing
SCALE OUT ON ELASTIC
CAPACITY FOR PROCESSING
AWS Services
• Amazon EC2: Scalable CPU/GPU/Spot computing capacity
• Amazon EFS: Simple, elastic, scalable file system
• Amazon EBS: Persistent block storage
• Amazon S3: Highly scalable, durable object storage
• Elemental Cloud: On-demand, scalable video processing
Partners
Post-Production Pipeline

15. STORAGE
Content storage options on AWS for post-production pipelines

16. 1 PB raw storage
800 TB usable storage
600 TB allocated storage
400 TB application data
Cloud Storage
Storage Capacity

17. Storage Services
Amazon EBS
Block storage for use
with Amazon EC2
Amazon S3
Massively scalable
storage & front-end
11 9’s of durability
IA for infrequent access
Internet scale
storage via API
AWS Storage Gateway
S3,
Amazon
Glacier
Integrates on-premises
IT and AWS storage
Amazon Glacier
$0.004/GB/month
11 9’s of durability
Multiple copies across
different DCs
Storage for archiving and
backup
EC2
EBS
Amazon EFS
Share File storage for
use with Amazon EC2
EC2
EFS
Massively scalable
Pay for what you use
High Performance
1000’s of hosts
Up to 16TB/volume
Up to 20K PIOPS
SSD-backed
Cold & Throughput
Encryption
BLOCK FILE OBJECT OBJECT
VPCVPCVPC

18. Asset Lifecycle
Long-Term
Archive
All tiers
accessible through
a single API
Oldest content trickles
down to Amazon Glacier
automatically to save cost
Amazon S3
S3 Infrequent Access
Amazon Glacier
LifeCyclePolicies
Near-Line
Storage
Frequently
Accessed

19. Shared Storage Shared Storage
On-prem Storage
AWS
Direct Connect
Storage Cache
Amazon S3
Lustre on EC2
Avere on EC2
EFS
AWS
Direct Connect
Hydrate workers
EC2 Spot
FXT on-prem
Access Models
Tightly vs. Loosely Coupled Storage

20. Post-Production tasks
NLE/Review & Approve/VFX
(Hybrid, on premises, or in Cloud)
Raw Assets
Secondary Copy
Amazon Glacier in another Region
Raw Assets
Primary Copy
Amazon Glacier
Finished (Golden Copy) Archive
Primary Copy
Amazon Glacier
AssetManagement(DAM/MAM)
(Hybrid,onpremises,orinCloud)
Active Archive
Amazon S3
(Standard)
Active Archive
Amazon S3
(Infrequent Access)
Secondary & Tertiary Copies
Amazon Glacier in another Region
A secondary offsite copy of the active archive – usually cold
Used for DR purposes
MediaSupplyChain
(Hybrid,onpremisesorincloud)
B2BDeliveryoverDXorInternet
Amazon Glacieringest
Affiliates/Third-Party Vendors
(Primary Copy) AWS Region 1 (Secondary & Tertiary Copies – optional)
AWS Region 2 or on-premises
Production Archive
deliver

21. Object Store
(Amazon S3)
Block Store
(Amazon EBS)
Shared FS
(Amazon EFS)
Performance
Per-Operation Latency Variable Lowest, Consistent Low, Consistent
Throughput Scale Multiple GBs per sec Single GBs per sec Multiple GBs per sec
Data
Availability/Durability
Across Multi-AZs Redundant Within an AZ Across Multi-AZs
Characteristics
Access 1-1000’s of Clients A Single EC2 instance 1-1000’s of Clients
Use Cases
Active Archive and
Lifecycle to Cold Archive
Media Processing
(Transcoding, Rendering,
QC, Farms) Depending on
Application Conformity
Databases
Boot Volumes
Media Processing
(Transcoding, Rendering,
QC, Farms) Singleton
Streaming
Data Analytics
Media Processing
(Transcoding, Rendering,
QC, Farms) Distributed
Content Management
Web Serving/Publishing
Workload Specific Storage

22. EDITING
Using AWS compute for content & media post-production

23. Editing in the Cloud
Amazon WorkSpaces
NVIDIA K520 GPU, 16GB RAM, 8 VCPUs
Heatmaps
H.264 vs. PCoIP

24. • PCoIP codecs were designed for interactive applications that are often static and are
dominated by computer-generated content
• Video codecs (like H.264) are designed for passive streaming of constantly changing, natural-
image camera-captured content
Designed for graphically intense cloud delivery
• The PCoIP protocol delivers
fundamentally better image
quality for text and 3D graphics
• The PCoIP protocol is optimized for
cloud delivery:
• Consumes 60-80% less bandwidth for
text and graphics
• Requires 50+% less server CPU,
leaving more cycles for the
applications
Cloud Editing Protocols

25. PROCESSING
Using AWS compute for content & media post-production

26. Reserved
Make a low, one-time
payment and receive
a significant discount
on the hourly charge
For committed
utilization
On-Demand
Pay for compute
capacity by the hour
with no long-term
commitments
For spiky workloads,
or to define needs
Spot
Bid for unused capacity
at a Spot Price -
fluctuates based on
supply & demand
For time-insensitive or
transient workloads
Consumption Models

27. Compute Intensive
Intel ES-2666 v3 (Haswell)
Optimized specifically for EC2
Memory Intensive
Lowest price point per GiB of RAM
GPUs
40K CUDA cores
192 GB of video memory
Enhanced Networking
Higher PPS, lower network jitter, low latency
I/O Intensive
SSD Storage, EBS Optimized
High Storage
24 x 2000 GiB per instance
Amazon S3
Amazon SQS Queues (orchestrated by Amazon SWF)
M4
M3
C4
C3 I3G2
R4
P2 D2
R3
X1
Task Optimization

28. Accelerated Computing
Rendering, Compositing, Encoding, Non-Linear Editing, VR
*12-core E5-2697-v2 Intel Xeon
Why GPUs?
• Ubiquitous – available at high scale to
application developers worldwide
• Enabling a high degree of parallelism – each
GPU has thousands of cores
• Consistent, well-documented set of APIs (CUDA,
OpenACC, OpenCL)
• Supported by a wide variety of ISVs and open
source frameworks
• Deploy as Spot for compute workloads
• Single K80 10x faster than CPU on applications*

29. CPU vs. GPU Rendering
Scheduling
• Multi-threaded, multi-process
• Select instance based on thread #s
• Or map across GPUs:
CUDA_0: Frame 1-25
CUDA_1: Frame 26-50
• Increase in Scheduler Complexity
Dependencies
• File loading - CPU/storage
• Package, meshes, textures - CPU
• 3D rendering - CPU/GPU
• Compositing - CPU
• Image export - CPU/storage

30. SUNDOG MEDIA TOOLKIT
An On-Demand Cloud-Based Post-Production Platform

31. Asset Management
Workflows
Collaborative Review
Playlist Mastering
3D Visualization
Services Platform

32. • Full Stack Public
• Hybrid
Storage Architecture

33. Tool Identity
Workflow Dependencies
Tool Handling / Reporting
Data I/O
Metadata Handling
Content Handling
Process
Core
Workflow Tool Shell

34. Encryption Points

35. Workflow Manager Worker (Primary)UI
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Primary)
Workflow Creation Workflow Analysis Worker Spawning
Availability Zone Spanning
(availability/outage)
Job Completion
Worker Flushing
Status/ProgressReporting
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Worker (Clone)
Primary zone (a)
ZonecZoneb
Scale Decisions:
Tool process
Dependencies (intra and inter-
tool)
Size
- bit depth
- resolution
- layers
Frame count
Elasticresourceexpansion
Workflow & Scale Decision Process

36. Iterate
Inspect
pixels
Vicinity (spatial)
Scene-Based
Object-Based
Including 3D
Colour (spectral)
Motion (temporal)
Analyse to sub-pixel level the statistical consistency
of that pixel with the expected value
Make a fine adjustment
Multi-Mode Analysis Super Pixel
Reconstruction

37. Spectral Reconstruction

38. Spectral Reconstruction

39. Temporal Reconstruction of Detail

40. Spatial Reconstruction

41. Spatial Reconstruction

42. Source

43. Blurred

44. Sharpened

45. TrueImage Processed

46. Original = Baseline
Blurred = PSNR high, SSIM low
Sharpened = PSNR low, SSIM high
TrueImage = PSNR high, SSIM high
Compression Efficiency

47. • 120 Frames Per Second
• 3D (240 real FPS)
• 4K (4096x2160 – not UHD “4K”)
• High Dynamic Range (16-bit float)
Uncompressed Data Rate
= 40 x average cinema
= 55 x average HD
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

48. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

50. Iterations
Datapointsperframe(4K)
Data points
per pixel
Trillion
(x1012)
10.1
21.9
28.0
56.1

51. Challenges
• Scaling to 120fps 3D 4K uncompressed data processing
• Breaking traditional workflows (i.e., traditional thinking)
• Staying Safe
Conclusion

52. Customer Feedback
“Sundog cloud based workflows have enhanced our ability to deliver
an improved product for our clients and are a massive step change in
how we go about our business.”
“TrueImage exceeded all expectations and is the primary reason that
the movie looks so good on the big screen … it actually had a powerful
effect on the editorial and story telling”
Conclusion

53. Find Us!
sundogtools.com
@sundogmt

54. Thank you!

55. Remember to complete your
evaluations!

56. Industry Pre-Day: Monday 11/28
• MAE303 - Discovery Channel's Broadcast Workflows and Channel
Origination on AWS
• MAE302 - Turner's Cloud Native Media Supply Chain for TNT, TBS, Adult
Swim, Cartoon Network, CNN
• MAE301 - Accelerating the Transition to Broadcast and OTT Infrastructure
in the Cloud
Regular Conference: Tuesday – Thursday 11/29 – 12/1
• ARC406 - Encoding Artifacts to Emmy Awards: Taking on Terabyte-Scale, 1-
Gbps, 4K Video Processing in the Cloud
• CMP312 - Powering the Next Generation of Virtual Reality with Verizon
• CTD305 - Media Delivery from the Cloud: Integrated AWS Solutions for
Premium Over the Top (OTT) Content
• STG302 - Deep Dive on Amazon Glacier
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