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What proved most precious to the production of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power proved to be its use of cloud. The first eight hours of a planned five series adaption of JRR Tolkein’s fantasy contained nearly 10,000 VFX shots, a staggering number for which the producers corralled 12 VFX shops around the world who in turn farmed work to 1500 artists all linked online by cloud.
“That was the key,”
said series producer Ron Ames,
speaking at AWS re:Invent 2022. “When we were on set, and a director was
chasing the light, we had every possible asset at our fingertips. We had crews
spread across New Zealand, a studio in LA, artists all over the world, we were
able to connect, communicate efficiently, scale as necessary, and meet all of
our goals and deadlines, cost efficiently.”
He added, “This is
not about technology as a standalone thing, it is actually practical, useful
and efficient. AWS is creating the future of filmmaking. The future of
filmmaking is cloud-based production.”
YouTube video of the session here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGRMlNznQcY from 14.42 if you
want to skip the AWS advert.
What is left unsaid is the cost of all of this. Many other
content producers have been reluctant to move wholesale to cloud principally
given the cost of ‘hot’ storage of assets in an online production environment
and the cost of egress (download) from the cloud.
Given that Amazon is also the show’s commissioner, funder of
its rumoured $1 billion budget (spanning all 5 seasons) and exclusive
distributor you wonder if say, a Disney or HBO Max show would have been
allocated quite the same terms of engagement should they have wanted to work in
AWS.
We don’t know since this Amazon hosted session at an Amazon
hosted event didn’t pose the question.
We did learn that the production had planned to work with a cloud-production pipeline from the
get-go. This was doubled down on when Covid
shut filming three months into the location shoot in New Zealand. Covid made cloud use a requirement “and sent us to the next level of development,”
Ames said.
Areas including scripts to showrunner and director
iPads, pre-viz and camera
capture, Avid editorial and the color pipeline, VFX, and final delivery to Amazon were
made in part or wholly in the cloud. QC
and localization was also performed in the cloud and the whole project is
archived there also, not least because assets need to be reused for future seasons.
The cloud pipe for VFX alone integrated 12 global vendors, including DNEG, ILM and
Company 3 together creating
a massive 9,146 shots: “the equivalent of four feature films the size
of Avengers: Age of Ultron,” Ames reckoned.”
“The price of admission to join us was a
willingness to explore new technology, to share assets in a standard way so
that every visual effect could be used by a different vendor. By creating a standard, and everybody
knowing they would be working together, we determined that we could actually do
this.”
Part of that standard was use of a common metadata recorded for every single frame and added to throughout the entire process. Many
productions now do this of course, but few on such a giant scale.
They ended up with 786
hours of 4K camera dailies
all sent to S3 storage buckets. It’s not clear from this publicity if the Raw
(original camera negs) were routed straight into the cloud or whether proxies
were used with conforms made to the OCN after VFX and editorial had done their
work. It would be costly indeed to route OCN to the cloud, but with Amazon’s
backing it could well have been done here.
“We never lost a
frame, we never lost an asset,” Ames said. “It was trackable and easily shared with vendors.”
The color pipe at least seemed to be made with full
resolution files in the cloud and involved the Company 3 colorist in Idaho
liasing with the show’s directors of photography while they were shooting in
New Zealand.
Although this was not a virtual production in the sense of
using a volume stage, the use of cloud seemed to enhance collaboration and
collapse the traditional linear sequence of filmmaking.
Ames called it “dynamic”
because set drawings, tests,
and materials were being created dynamically and shared amongst each team via
the cloud.
“The ability to
share in this democratic way changes everything. Keeping all of the assets in
the cloud meant that when we started filming season two, every single piece of
artwork, every piece of cut footage from season one was all at our fingertips,
easily tracked, easily shared.”
He added, “This is
filmmaking of the future, people making art with technology as a support.”
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