Cloud computing has a strong presence at this year’s NAB Show, with big companies such as Amazon and Microsoft touting its possibilities.
The cloud is being promoted to meet the capacity needs created by the ever-increasing demand for higher image resolutions. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Windows Azure Media Services are two solutions designed for broadcasters.
“With media production being a prime candidate for cloud services given its project-specific nature (think rent versus buy) and typically collaborative-approach, it comes as no surprise that the cloud industry is descending on Vegas and the broadcaster association put together a cloud-specific channel for the show this year,” reports Wired Cloudline.
“We’ve reached an inflection point in the industry where the studios — which have made do with just enough compute capacity that they could keep up but now that more of their work is going digital, scaling that infrastructure is difficult and expensive,” said Grant Kirkwood, CEO of Unitas Global, which is demonstrating its cloud-based rendering solution at NAB.
“With the increase of resolution from 2K to 4K being the standard, the amount of data to be rendered is through the roof. If I’m a visual effects studio, I’m going to have to render a film at 24, 25 and 30 frames per second [for TV, Blu-ray and movie formats.] At the resulting 79 frames per second, using 4K resolution, each frame is 24 gigabytes of data. Imagine what that means for a two-hour movie,” Kirkwood said.
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