The making of “Race to the Cloud”

"Um bear with me Vegas allergies and air conditioning don't seem to mix with my voice. I'm sure everybody else knows what I mean.

Um so hello everybody. I'm Brandon Lindauer. I'm a specialist solutions architect at AWS. Uh and I am the global technical lead for content production with our media and entertainment division.

Um so AWS is a lot of industry professionals and this project race to the cloud is what happens when uh we're told carte blanche go create something. Uh I'm gonna show you this little video right now. We're gonna talk about it. I think I have to push play.

[video plays]

Yeah, thank you. So, like I said, this is what happens when you give a whole bunch of industry professionals and ext industry professionals carte blanche to go make something. Um so, oops, there we go. Yeah. Um I'm gonna talk a little bit about the process we did to make this film. Um it was a fun, neat little project. Uh the outcome is, you know, it's, it's a neat little film but um really the, the amazing part was what we did and how we did it.

Um so first off this short film was made entirely in AWS. Um we uh um we commissioned Fuzzy Pixel, which is our internal studio at AWS. They focus on R&D with cloud workflows. Um they produced other shorts like Spanner and uh Pu you can find those on, on YouTube. Um team of very talented artists, right? So they built this fully immersive world in Unreal Engine and they did that all on AWS.

Um building this in Unreal, building this in Unreal means that we can get the cinematic quality uh animations and then do the simulations in real time without needing to wait for rendering, which can be time consuming.

Um we acquired a Smart car, we wrapped it in AWS orange. You can actually see it over to your right about 100 ft. We've got this demo set up. Um and we filmed it here at View Studios in Las Vegas. So if you specializes in virtual production, we partner with them on this.

Um the car is rigged with cameras lighting. So we actually had several people around it, making sure the car shook correctly as she's driving down the the road full on film, uh filmmaking experience, the lighting matches and you see how we did all that.

Um we even make sure that the actor was leaning into it, by the way, our, our actor Georgia Berhe is one of our um one of our account managers here at AWS. So she's here somewhere. If you see her, ask for her autograph, she absolutely hates that. So it's great.

Um so we did the onset virtual production. Um here's Katrina, our director and executive producer, sitting in the director's chair uh watching in real time. Um and technology sure come a long way, right? I mean, we're sitting there with an iPad um um looking at these cameras in real time. What's great about this is we use the RED camera, uh RED Digital Cinema did, did has done a lot of development work with AWS to enable their cameras to go directly to the cloud. So the camera itself uploads S3, you no longer have to pull a card uh and, and stick it in a computer back that up. Uh simply configuring at the beginning of the day to connect to your S3 bucket as you shoot all those high quality images and uh clips get put into your bucket.

Um you can actually see Zach right here. Zach is also over at our demo right now, Zach was on set. Um uh as we would film something within minutes, it would get uploaded as three put on our working storage and we were able to cut d's um cut clips. Uh literally as we were shooting this, this was being done, no swapping out cards, everything is backed up to multiple regions using um S3 capabilities.

Um so it was, it was really cool because we actually had a rough cut of this before we ever left the set. Everything was just that quick. It accelerated the process.

Um this is uh one of our uh solution architects, Brian Kenworthy. So um the video editing was done in Adobe Premiere again all on AWS. Once that footage was shot, it was put up on AWS, it was accessible to our editors. Uh we would edit it. We made it available for um for uh uh downstream capabilities.

Um so the final, the final edit was done on a AG5 EC2 instance with Adobe Premiere. Um and we have that demo over here as well. Um Brian and I mixed the sound. So it was the first ever uh sound editorial and mixing done all in the cloud. So this is a step that's usually done in local studios. Usually downloaded. We actually, you can see us in an, in a conference room right there. We set up a little bit of a, a makeshift studio but we actually did the, the uh editing and mixing completely in the cloud which had had not been done before. And we were able to show that demo at NAB this year uh in April.

So the, the really cool thing is we were also able to um oh yes, sorry, I got a note here that's a picture of um us at 10 pm in the lab after a full day of testing gear. So that's why it looks a little rough.

Um the, the collaboration, we, we have people all over the world that were working on this. We crowdsourced the script from our people internally, everybody that did everything from editing, shooting um uh sound, all work at AWS. We're all part of our media team.

Um we were able to collaborate worldwide with uh uh software called Tota that uh that allows to, to play back in one place and see a full high quality image in another place uh without having to deal with, you know, massive compression over long distances. So again, everything, everything we did here is the same way that a uh uh other than being in the lab, um it's the same way that a film studio would do. We use all the same, same tools that a film or television studio would do that all of our customers use.

Um using Base Light and what we have is an uh uh an award-winning uh architecture called Color in the Cloud. We were able to actually have professional quality color grading again without ever downloading a single file all of this content living up in AWS. Uh we were able to access that with software running in AWS and stream only a high quality uh uncompromised image down where we could do color grading in 444, 12 bit.

Um once we have the completed version uh on our work in progress storage, it was sent back to um S3 for uh for, for QC uh where we use Colorfront. Excuse me, we use Colorfront. Uh Colorfront QC Player is the only tool in the industry that will take high quality video and play it directly from S3. You don't need a file system, you don't need a FSx or, or uh an intermediary work in progress storage, but you can take your files directly on S3 and play them back in full quality and stream that from the cloud directly to where your users are. Here is the remaining transcript formatted for better readability:

So getting our QC done there where we were all able to look at this and go ok. This looks the way it should, this sounds the way it should. The color is right, the cuts are right, everything's in sync, you know, again, the process is that the filmmakers go through.

Uh we were able to do that very effectively, very quickly and turn this film around uh in a matter of, of weeks while still doing our day jobs.

Um once that was done, uh we use an event driven workflow, kicked off transcoding, uh title and rights management, uh integrations localizations uh uh in other languages, things like that.

Um it's actually also um there's actually a, a, an entry in IMDb for this because uh AWS and IMDb work work well together, we were able to actually get this into IMDb where we did an automated upload of all that metadata.

Um so, uh at the National Association of Broadcasters in April, we did a demo of this whole process. End to end all of those steps, we were able to bring to the trade show floor and show them completely this demo right here.

How we shot it is here at re:Invent, like I said about 100 ft that way along with our editorial and our virtual art department uh talking about how the users uh created the virtual world that was immersive.

Um so, yeah, we, with the film complete, we tore down everything. We set it up in the Las Vegas Convention, Las Vegas Convention Center.

Um we were the only ones at this trade show with a rear ca real car in our booth. I know here at re:Invent, there's several but ours is the coolest and who doesn't love a little orange Smart car.

Um but the crowds there went wild for it. Uh we've had a lot of interest here. Everybody really enjoys uh seeing this.

We also left, left with not one but two Best in Show awards at our April trade show. Um so it was a huge congratulation to my teams um that uh that worked on this.

Um Patrick on the left is here. He's one of the architects of the virtual production workflow here and you can see us playing this out directly from the cloud today.

Um so in the, excuse me, I said, um so in these workflows, we did uh animation and rendering, we showed how this was, these models were created, how they were rendered out and they were built and Unreal.

Our virtual art department is the previ organization and the creation of that immersive world, including um you know, parts of creating those models and putting them into Unreal Engine that can render that in real time our virtual production with our camera, the cloud where it moves directly up into the cloud, um edit in the cloud color in the cloud, sound in the cloud QC in the cloud, right?

I don't know if you're noticing a trend here with the cloud, it's a thing.

Um and here's, I mean, a number of partners were involved in this, right? In, in the media and entertainment space.

You uh you almost can't do anything without having, uh, some of our best partners involved. And, uh, a lot of these names are, are just huge ones in the industry. Everybody leaned into this and said, we want to be a part of this. We want to be a part of making the first full production in the cloud, even though it's only 3.5 minutes. You know, we wanna be a part of that.

Um so, you know, walking away from that, right, we learned that um it's not only practical and possible but beneficial to work completely in the cloud.

So when you centralize in the cloud, you bring your applications to the media, it allows us to reduce the time and movement of data um in the real world. This translates to huge cost savings in terms of the the amount of time people spend on things.

Um we had crew in LA, Florida, Chicago and New York. I personally live in Idaho. Um we were all able to collaborate using these cloud based tools around the world.

Um and then, you know, the the agility, right? We we needed to re render some shots, we needed to generate some new clips, right? When we got to the final cut, some things weren't right. And we had to redo some things.

We, we simply added remote artists, we got some remote people and we said, hey, we didn't have to find somebody in the same geo as you're in New York, you're in Chicago, you're in Budapest. Cool. Here's a login hop in there. Fix this up, do it.

We could work around the uh around the clock doing that around the globe. These people immediately had access to all the content without the need to move or transfer anything around the globe. It was great.

So, um like I said, all actors, you know, fun little anecdotes. All the actors were AWS employees.

Uh Wendy, the voice of Wendy, who's the competitor, uh was one of our employees. The announcer is one of our employees. If you see Georgia around here, just get her autograph. Like I said,

Um there is a real IMDb entry here. Uh and you again can experience this today about 100 ft that way. Uh you can sit in the car, hop on in the car, take a picture, take a video, it's a lot of fun to play with.

Um but I really appreciate you guys coming out here. This is our whole production crew that worked on this. It's me over there with a beard that's a lot bigger than it was today. And uh thanks for, thanks for.