interview and words for Sohonet
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EngineLab launched earlier this year as a premium technology consultancy focused on providing cutting-edge cloud-based solutions for the creative industries. It is notable for being led by the team that wrote the blueprints for cloud-native studios helping to shape how creative technology operates today.
Sam Reid, CEO, EngineLab was CTO of Untold Studios where he
built its infrastructure from the ground up, enabling 500+ creatives across
London, LA, and Mumbai. He now guides EngineLab’s vision and growth with a
focus on creative impact through technology.
EngineLab CTO Matt Herman led Psyop’s migration to a fully
cloud-based workflow and co-founded Trace VFX, scaled to 1,200+ artists before
its acquisition by Technicolor.
Third co-founder Daniel Goller, CRO, drives AI innovation
and R&D. He holds a PhD in Engineering and worked on infrastructure
efficiency and AI integration at Untold.
As premium postproduction shifts dramatically from
on-premise hardware to data center-based power and compute, EngineLab acts as
the interface between cloud superscalers and the creative front end.
Hey Sam - Let’s start from the beginning - what sparked
the idea for EngineLab?
S: My history is building studios and cloud
technology and evangelizing in that space. After having done that for
eight years with Untold, I felt it was the right opportunity to recreate that
for other budding studios wanting to spin up or people wanting to modernize
their technology.
The market opportunity was right too. We could see larger
studios being downsized or folding completely as a result of the pressures from
Covid, the 2023 strikes and knock-on squeezes on production. Small groups would
splinter away to do their own thing. I guess my colleague and I were a part of
that churn happening in the industry.
Our idea was to take our expertise and experience into the
market for all those other studios who are starting up, and potentially do not
want to spend lots of money on equipment at the start.
At EngineLab we offer the ability for these studios to easily access Next
Generation technology at a far more affordable rate than they would be able to
do if they had to procure it all themselves.
And when it comes to the tech, what exactly does
EngineLab offer studios?
We offer everything that would go into building a
traditional studio. Let's say, you’re leaving a big business to start your own
studio with five to ten people. You’re going to need high-powered workstations
and machines with a high-quality graphics card in them and a decent amount of
RAM and CPU. Not only are they pretty expensive to buy but they would take a
while to arrive after you order them. Each of those workstations needs
central storage so everyone can work off the same files together. If you’re doing
complex simulations like landslides or water simulations then you’re going to
need a much bigger group of computers with the power to process the data. Then
you need to connect them together so that every asset and file is synchronized
where necessary and secure always.
These are the elements that comprise any studio. What we’re
saying is that you don't need to buy anything. You can just rent them. When you
get the work then you pay for use and when you enter a quiet period you don't.
This opex model is replacing the traditional capex model.
At Engine lab we’re helping studios build studios tailored
to their requirements. We’re onboarding them. We’re teaching them how to work
in this new way and how to leverage new technology so that they work quicker
and get a better result in terms of creativity. Because your machines are
running faster and everything is just happening quicker you can produce more
iterations on your content. More iterations, I would argue, gives a better
creative outcome.
The story behind Arc Creative is an interesting one, can
you tell us more about how that came together?
Our first customer is Arc Creative based in Los Angeles.
When Technicolor Creative Studios closed its offices and its constituent
studios in February, a number of the creative leadership and around 100 artists
found a lifeline with a new venture with multi-studio VFX house Dream Machine,
dubbed Arc Creative.
All of this all happened really quickly. They needed to
build a studio from scratch and in very short time in order to be able to
continue to work on the projects that they had been working on. That presented
a good challenge for EngineLab in terms of helping them create the technology
framework for them to maintain continuity of work.
Arc’s artists needed extremely high-powered workstations to
perform bespoke finishing workflows with Flame. The timeline for us to set this
up was aggressive but because we don't need to go out and buy anything we were
able to provision machines and connectivity and have it spun up within a matter
of days as opposed to the weeks or months that it would take to try and procure
and implement this hardware themselves.
When you're building out a virtual studio, where does
something like Sohonet’s ClearView Flex come in?
Sohonet offers a wide range of tools that a lot of our
clients really value. The one we’ve focused on initially is the virtualised
version of their review platform, ClearView Flex (VFlex) - which is a vital
piece of the puzzle for us because it presents a way to get video out of the
cloud. That has always been one of the biggest challenges in terms of cloud
technology. In a traditional studio you’d have dedicated cables for this but
over the past few years this connectivity has been virtualized and Sohonet hooked
into that advance and created a product around it. We deploy VFlex in AWS,
which gives us the flexibility and performance needed to meet demanding
postproduction workflows.
Now you don't need a physical cable plugged into the back of
a Flame going into a monitor in the room, because you can now do it over IP.
You can send video over huge distances. The stream is a lot more stable and
much more efficient. IP technology is also maturing, so it's just getting
better to the point where I feel extremely confident going into a customer like
Arc who operate with demanding deadlines and specifying Sohonet. I know they
need something that works straight away and we don't have time to make this a
science experiment. We need to know that we can buy something, plug it in and
it will work instantly for the customer because they have projects depending on
it. ClearView Flex fits in really nicely to that. I can install it quickly and
it provides great value for the client because they have a robust and efficient
method to view work in progress at an extremely high value point in the chain.
So once a studio is up and running, like Arc, do you stay
involved?
Exactly right. I see very little value in us going in and
doing a big build of something really complex for a customer and just leaving
it there. We help studios make smart, scalable technology decisions. From
CTO-as-a-service to custom software development, we deliver hands-on technical
leadership and solutions that integrate with any standard toolset.
Our model is to provide Next Generation technology for them
to work on and an extremely capable top tier support team to maintain it. We
make sure that it keeps running because the risk of downtime for a studio is
that all those hundreds of artists just sit there idle. The clock is always
ticking for a studio and downtime means no work but you still have to pay your
team and cost can soon balloon. We should be able to do it better and cheaper
relative to a studio hiring their own permanent technology team. And, as we
grow our customer base we should be able to achieve some economies of scale
which we would pass on to customers as well.
What does the immediate future hold for EngineLab?
Our bread and butter is building cloud technology for
studios and I don’t see that slowing down at all. It’s something we are
probably always going to do but it won't always necessarily be our core focus.
That’s because the technology business is constantly changing and right now it
is being continually shaken by artificial intelligence. As a tech company we
can quite easily pivot to do different things and create different products. We
can build custom AI tools that integrate seamlessly into creative pipelines,
enhancing workflows, automating time-consuming tasks, and unlocking new
possibilities. From prototype to production, we can help studios harness the
latest advancements in AI. So going forward, it’s likely AI is going to form a
big part of our offering that we'll be able to use to further empower studios
and create more efficiencies.
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