HITS

Demands have never been greater for studios as content needs continue to be at an all-time high, deadlines are tighter than ever, and the rapid shift to remote work has changed how creative organizations work.

As a result, it has become clear that yesterday’s approaches to productivity just aren’t keeping up, according to data storage company Qumulo.

Isaac Roybal, head of product, cloud and solutions marketing at Qumulo, introduced Qumulo Studio Q during the Audiences and Platforms breakout session “Build Post Production Platforms in the Cloud” at the July 21 inaugural, all-virtual Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES) event, Qumulo Studio Q is a post-production platform for creative teams that replicates collaborative editorial production in the cloud, enabling Adobe Premiere Pro-based workflows on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with Teradici.

Roybal used the session to explain how Studio Q users can move terabytes and petabytes of video to the cloud, edit video easily with their favorite Adobe tools, connect files to AWS cloud services, manage video files, and secure the most important file data.

With Studio Q, organizations can deploy new ways to produce content quickly by harnessing the power of a global talent pool, rapidly deploy workstations, and leverage remote workflows in the cloud, he said.

Why Qumulo Created Studio Q

“The COVID era actually created a huge demand for content,” according to Roybal. “So teams were really struggling to figure out ‘how do I meet these tighter deadlines… and really figuring out how we scale those workflows and collaboration overall?”

After all, “the more content you create, the larger the data management burden becomes apparent as well, and they really need to invest in these tools to help them do that,” Roybal explained. Production teams also need to make it portable to share with people around the globe because of how dispersed talent has become, he noted.

Content Creation Challenges

Content creators must scale their workflows, collaboration, teams and data management and invest in tools to help them do so, according to Qumulo. Meanwhile, when it comes to data growth, portability and management are table stakes.

The cloud can solve those challenges but creates its own challenges, which include:

*Adoption can be slow and cumbersome for on-premises studios.
*It takes time to ramp initial deployments.
*It can be a manual vs. automated process.
*Deployments are complex.
*IT teams need to learn new technologies.

IT teams “need to learn a ton of things in a very short amount of time,” Roybal pointed out.

Studio Q Solves the Challenges

Studio Q solves the challenges because it: is a turn-key, high performance remote video editing studio in the cloud; combines best-in-class technology products into a single remote post-production platform; runs Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects anywhere in the world; and creates a low-latency virtual workstation via Teradici, according to Qumulo.

Studio Q uses AWS Quick Start, which Qumulo says is the fastest way to get a studio in the cloud, noting it is an automated reference architecture using Cloud Formation Templates and based on AWS best practices.

“You can literally set up 10 remote workstations in less than an hour from scratch,” Roybal said, adding Qumulo partnered with Adobe and Teradici “to make sure it’s a seamless process all the way through.”

Qumulo Studio Q is especially useful for the M&E sector because it powers media and entertainment workflows in the cloud at petabyte scale, according to the company.

“The media and entertainment sector is a huge customer of [ours] on-prem,” Roybal noted, saying customers using Qumulo on AWS include Cinesite, Industrial Brothers and FuseFX.

Production and post-production deal with a lot of large and small files, and all of it can be kept in one spot using Studio Q instead of being spread out across different areas of an organization’s IT infrastructure, he explained.

Users can create a studio on AWS, on demand, and easily spin up editorial or post production environments, he said.

During the brief Q&A, when asked if Studio Q can handle 3D workloads, he replied: “As long as Adobe Premiere can support it, we can support… the massive amounts of data output that come out of that.”

The Entertainment Evolution Symposium event was produced by the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), Pepperdine’s Graziadio Business School, and MESA. The event was sponsored by Whip Media, PacketFabric, 5th Kind, Qumulo, EIDR, Klio and the Trusted Partner Network.