2021 HPA Tech Retreat: Content in the Cloud

PostPerspective

The 2021 HPA Tech Retreat has a lot to live up to. It’s being billed as a never-before-seen demonstration showcasing how web-based technology can radically transform decades-old production methods.

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“We’re talking about a paradigm shift,” says Joachim “JZ” Zell, one of the event’s key coordinators. Seth Hallen, president of HPA, describes the experiment as “extremely bold,” and HPA board member Leon Silverman, who is also MovieLabs’ advisor for strategy and industry relations, calls it “a watershed moment.”

There’s every reason to believe them. The event begins this week and culminates in a two-day Supersession on March 24. Both essentially ask us to see cloud not as means of distribution but as a means of production.

Day one, called The Found Lederhosen in reference to last year’s live camera-to-post Supersession, proved remarkably prescient as the world entered lockdown a month later. The 2021 Supersession is even more ambitious, pushing to the very edge of what is possible today and what may lie ahead. “While it builds on the groundbreaking work of last year, this year’s presentation is an order of magnitude more challenging,” says Zell. “It’s very important we show the industry different variations on a similar theme: how do we solve VFX and post with a remote crew that could be anywhere in the world? We want to show technology connected and creating real deliverables.”

The HPA asked a series of filmmakers to make a short film under COVID-conditions and to document how they did it. This not only illustrates a whole set of different workflows for producing with Covid-safe guidelines but also points to how remote collaboration can leave a lasting creative impact.

Coincidentally, all the principal filmmakers are women and include Mexican DP and producer Sandra De La Silva, Saudi director and producer Abeer Abdullah, Australian director and producer Ruby Bell, Hollywood writer, director and actor Barbara Wilder, British producer writer and actor Bayra Bela and Mongolian filmmaker Azzaya Lkhagvasuren.

Pushing Limits  
The films range from 2 to 12 minutes long, made by filmmakers freely giving of their time and talent. HPA has organized access to high-end post production and a worldwide pool of artists, including Mandy Walker ASC, ACS, Christopher Propst ASC and sound mixer Tu Duu-Chih. A motivation for the filmmakers is that the IP they create is all theirs to put on a showreel or to enter into film festivals.

The films were shot in London, Dubai, Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia), Mexico City, Brisbane and Hollywood with key crew distributed in multiple locations. To test the remote cloud workflow to its limits, all were acquired at the highest resolution with cameras including ARRI Alexa LF (4.5K), Sony Venice (6K), Red Komodo (6K) and a Blackmagic Ursa Mini Pro 12K.

Each movie is also being made available in different deliverables from HD to 8K, different colorspaces, including Rec.709 and Rec.2020, in SDR and HDR and in a variety of sound mixes including stereo, 5.1, Dolby Atmos and DTS. Language versions and archiving will also be performed entirely in the cloud using distributed teams.

Lessons Learned 
“The biggest challenge was uploading the content,” Zell explains. “The mission was to use the private Wi-Fi or wired networks of the filmmakers or their friends and to upload rushes overnight. But this was a failure. Home broadband is not fast enough.”

Project partners local to each production, including Sohonet, Colorfront and Australian facility Cutting Edge, stepped in to provide high bandwidth services and complete uploads in seconds. “One lesson learned is that we still need a professional upload station with guaranteed bandwidth to facilitate these big data workflows,” Zell says. HPA had the support of Google Cloud Platform, AWS and Microsoft Azure to optimize sound and picture processing. The editorial teams for each project were able to work in Avid, Adobe and Blackmagic software in the cloud. “If your content sits in Europe and your render machine is in another continent you might not get optimal throughput, but if the machines are placed together the results are astonishing,” Zell says. “I set up an ACES workflow using Resolve in AWS cloud accessed via Teradici from my MacBook Pro. The virtual machine was loaded with Nvidia GPUs and CPU power and I was able to convert 12K frames into 4K EXRs at 30fps faster than real time. This is the fastest I’ve ever seen this workflow happen.”

Live Remote Links 
It was a stipulation that the productions be followed as they were being shot via a live video stream transmitted from one of the location cameras. This was achieved by taking a feed from Teradek wireless units on the camera to a receiver which tapped into the WiFi network. Qtake and Moxion video assist software were used to manage the signal to destination. In Mexico, the live TX was managed by 5th Kind and in Dubai the camera feed was routed directly over LTE and 5G networks managed by Samara.

The links provided a visual record of how each production managed COVID-safe circumstances as well as a means to connect directors and key crew to the shoot while they were remote, including in another time zone. The Brisbane shoot, for example, was viewed by Walker who was elsewhere in Australia, by Zell in Nevada, and by rerecording mixer Roy Waldsburger of Skywalker Sound in San Francisco. They were able to view the feed on iPads and chat on a private channel to each other and the crew in Brisbane.

“We were watching a scene set in a restaurant and Roy asked the crew to mic actors at a particular table because he wanted to capture that atmosphere. He told me how incredible it was that he could help make it a better movie right there and then instead of having to wait half a year to even hear the sound. This immediate collaboration was amazing.”

Raw camera images are also being taken straight to the cloud using a Frame.io application in another of the Supersession’s productions. “You could transfer full-resolution images from the Dubai set straight to a virtual production stage in Hollywood in real time,” Zell says. “Hollywood could request take another angle or a different camera move, and these could be fed live as background plates to the virtual production stage.”

Demo of the Possible 
The Supersession is a giant demonstration of the possible supported by a multitude of leading vendors and cloud providers. Given that high fees to ingress, store and egress out of the cloud are one of the factors holding cloud production back, everyone will want to know just how much all of this might cost.

“These are absolutely key questions but not the focus of the Supersession,” Zell says. “I wanted to take everything to its limit to stress test scenarios and not to worry about cost. What it has done is thrown up other questions such as, if the data gets lost then whose fault is it? If the company that hosts your data goes bankrupt what happens to your content? We will need to do another major investigation of this in time.”

To avoid Zoom fatigue, the Supersession will be divided into three-hour blocks with plenty of supporting video and documentation available for digging deeper on the HPA website.

“We are deliberately showing the latest and most amazing technology still in development,” says Zell. “Some of it may never be used. Some of it may be commercialized in a different form. All of it will, hopefully, guide and inspire the audience and by extension our industry to invent new possibilities.”