ADRIAN GRAHAM: Hi, and welcome to Building a Virtual Post
Production Suite.
My name is Adrian Graham, and I'm
a solutions architect for Media and Entertainment
at Google Cloud.
Today, I want to talk about content creation workflows
and how Google Cloud's products can support
these types of workloads for a creative workforce that
spans the world.
We're going to look at how artists such as designers,
animators, or editors can collaborate
across vast distances using a solution that takes advantage
of Google's global private fiber network
to reduce latency and improve the overall user experience.
Content creation is a global market.
And access to talent is essential for finding
the right artist for the job, even if they live
on the other side of the globe.
Companies who want to take advantage
of regional production tax credits
need to hire talent in these locations.
But building a new physical facility to house these artists
can be cost and time prohibitive.
It doesn't make sense to build a new facility in a new location
for every new production.
But on Google Cloud, it's possible.
Today, I'm going to show you a virtual post-production suite
that allows artists to work with their favorite tools,
but with the added flexibility and power of Google Cloud.
Consider the main components of a virtual post-production
suite--
people such as artists, producers, and engineers;
virtual workstations to create and manage content;
shared storage so users can collaborate;
compute clusters for rendering or transcoding;
media asset management systems and databases to keep track
of assets; and archive and disaster
recovery to ensure durability and to properly store data.
With a virtual post-production suite,
all members of a content creation team
can access the same assets and resources regardless
of physical location.
Cloud native features such as data encryption, identity
access management, and multi-factor authentication
ensure high-value content is secure and available only
to those granted access.
Google Cloud is authorized by major Hollywood studios
to host tier-one content.
We work with international security evaluators
and other third-party auditors to ensure compliance
with security best practices, local laws, and regulations.
To build a virtual post-production suite on Google
Cloud, we need three things--
a client so artists can connect from their local workstation,
laptop, or dedicated hardware device, a broker that
authenticates users with an identity service,
such as G Suite or Active Directory.
Once authenticated, the user traffic
is then routed to their assigned resource.
The artist is then connected to their workstation.
Here, artists can access common resources such as shared file
systems, asset management databases, archive workflows,
and other cloud-based resources to automate
tasks such as transcoding or rendering.
To connect to our workstations, we're
going to use PC over IP technology--
a remote display protocol from Teradici
PC over IP technology empowers artists, editors, and engineers
to display lossless, high resolution, high frame rate
images and video across multiple monitors
on a variety of endpoint devices,
from laptops to highly secure stateless PC over IP Zero
Clients.
Using Teradici Cloud Access software,
which is built on this PC over IP technology,
I can connect to a workstation running in the Los Angeles
region.
Once authenticated, I'm logged into my virtual workstation
running Windows 2019 server with Windows desktop experience.
This is an NVIDIA Quadro virtual workstation
using an NVIDIA P4 GPU, as well as
Teradici Cloud Access software.
On my workstation, I can open an existing project
in Adobe Premiere Pro.
According to GCPing.com, my latency
to this workstation in the LA region
is only around 20 milliseconds.
So the experience feels like a local workstation.
Audio is synchronized properly, and I can scrub the timeline
without lag or delay.
I'm going to upload some footage from my local workstation
to the cloud volume.
To do this, I'm using IBM Aspera on cloud.
Once uploaded, I can move this footage into my cloud volume.
I could also use other industry-standard file transfer
tools, such as Signiant or even Drive File Stream
for ingesting footage.
I'm going to add this footage to my edit
and drop it into the timeline.
Then I'm going to pass the modified
project over to another editor.
Let's bring in my colleague, [? Marku, ?]
a solutions architect who is based in Tokyo.
He's going to make some additional changes
to this edit, then send it back to me for rendering.
[? MARKU: ?] Hey, thanks, Adrian OK, on my cloud workstation,
I can see the edits that you made.
I can see the exact same project data
because we are using the NetApp Global File Cache.
And when I opened the shared Premiere Pro
Project, any assets or files that changed
will be read across Google's network
and cached locally to the Tokyo region.
I'm going to add my own footage from the game using
the same technique that Adrian did.
And once this footage is available,
I will add it to the edit.
I saved my changes to the team project.
And now, Adrian, you should get a notification.
ADRIAN GRAHAM: Thanks, [? Marku. ?]
I see those changes almost immediately on my workstation.
And the footage you uploaded is coming across now.
[? MARKU: ?] All right, thanks, Adrian.
See you later.
ADRIAN GRAHAM: I could render this edit
on my virtual workstation on a separate server running Adobe
Media Encoder or using any one of our partner transcoding
solutions on Google Cloud.
For this project, I'm rendering the video on another instance.
When the render is done, I can view the result
on my virtual workstation and play back the videos
I generated at full resolution.
This is a relatively simple example
of a virtual post-production suite.
We didn't cover asset ingestion or archive and disaster
recovery.
We also didn't explore how intelligent content discovery
can help content creators understand, organize,
and monetize their assets on Google Cloud.
This demo showed you connecting to and performing editing tasks
on a cloud workstation, uploading footage
from a local workstation for use in my edit,
collaboration with others sharing my project anywhere
in the world, and how data can be securely synchronized
across Google Cloud regions.
There's a lot of new and exciting projects
we're working on to take media and entertainment
workloads to the next level.
Check the documentation to learn more, and thanks for watching.
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