M+E Connections

In-house data center infrastructure helps producers and creatives optimize workflow efficiencies to maximize both on-set virtual and traditional production outcomes aligned with long-term evolution, according to industry experts who spoke Sept. 21 at the Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES).

On a virtual production set, the digital imagery displays and reacts in real-time, integrating live action photography with in-camera visual effects (ICVFX). As camera to cloud gains traction in onset technology stacks, the data associated with digital imagery multiplies exponentially.

And the high computing demands of the workflow and process are only as capable and reliable as the data center infrastructure that supports them.

During the panel session “Living on the Edge: Data Requirements for (Virtual) Production,” moderator Sean Tajkowski, technical director of the Media & Entertainment Data Center Alliance (MEDCA), pointed to the “difficulties that we’re having with data infrastructure and the amount of data that we are acquiring” and the need to “move that data and the tremendous amounts of infrastructure that it’s going to take in the future to support that type of data.”

Noting that his company is about six years old, Dane Brehm, production technologist at Cintegral.Tech, told attendees: “In some ways you could call it data transfer as a service, storage as a service, hardware as a service. Our main business is providing high performance enterprise storage for post production for the most part. But our specialty has been more in field deployable systems. These are systems that are going to Jamaica; they’re going to the U.K [and] New York.”

He explained: “What we’ve been trying to work towards is kind of having a better insight about how much data is consumed in a year across just our clients in general. So with 120 productions, we’re averaging somewhere around 50 to 200 terabytes per project. We have one project that’s currently somewhere in the realm of about 600 terabytes, and they’re only three quarters of the way through their production.”

Therefore, he said: “Some of this is about understanding how to better calculate …  those costs.” It’s the “actual crew themselves, the digital image technicians who are ultimately making these decisions about data and how much data we are going to consume,” he noted.

A lot of decisions come down to how much data a film’s director expects to use. Sometimes it “might be very small, “ he noted. “But at the same time, in production, if they see three cameras or four cameras and they want to understand how much data footprint that they’re going to have for a given project, they want to understand how much am I going to consume.”

Bradley Greenberg, senior director at data center firm CoreSite, went on to tell attendees that his company “traditionally was a third-party data center provider” offering companies the ability to rent space and power in a network dense cloud enabled data center.

However, that has “evolved” after CoreSite was acquired in late 2021 by American Tower, one of the largest cell tower owner operators globally, he said

The Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES) was presented by the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Institute for Entertainment, Media and Sports (IEMS) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and was sponsored by Iron Mountain, Signiant, Whip Media, Atos, Fortinet, FPT Software, invenioLSI, Perforce, Vision Media, and EIDR.