MovieLabs Details the Future of Media Production

MovieLabs, the non-profit technology research lab run by the major Hollywood studios, published today a milestone white paper presenting a vision for the future of media creation. The paper also delivers a call to action for Hollywood’s tech community to immediately work together to eliminate the “inherent inefficiencies in our production and distribution workflows that threaten to limit our future ability to innovate.”

In the paper, MovieLabs paints a clear picture that cloud services will serve as the home for future media production, with all assets (from scripts to captured images to computer-generated materials) ingested straight to the cloud. By employing a cloud-first strategy, M&E producers will overcome the considerable duplication and physical transfer of files that happens today between editors, artists and vendors – all of which is time consuming, costly, difficult to track and prone to loss by human error or malicious intent. In the new production world, the content files do not move from their cloud storage repository and the software tools would come to the content instead of the other way around.

MovieLab’s vision of a complete cloud-based production workflow is well served by Wasabi hot cloud storage and aligns exactly with Wasabi’s company mission to deliver high performance storage at utility-type pricing. Designed for exabyte-scale and “eleven-9s” data durability, Wasabi delivers write/read speeds up to 6x faster than Amazon S3 which is critical to serve the hundreds of virtualized workstations that may be accessing the stored assets of a particular project. Wasabi also delivers a flat fee per TB pricing model with no ancillary charges for data egress and API calls so content producers aren’t taxed every time they need to touch an asset or move a file to a particular processing service.

Since our founding, Wasabi has been pushing the notion of Cloud 2.0, where production workloads can be stored cost effectively in the cloud, accessed without friction or added expense, and protected in the most diligent manner. Our goal is to enable creators and storytellers to deliver the best finished product at the lowest possible price and in the shortest timeframe. At Wasabi, we applaud MovieLabs bold vision of the future and look forward to working with all relevant stakeholders to deliver a more efficient, capable and cost effective production workflow in the cloud.

“The Evolution of Media Creation” whitepaper is available today on the MovieLabs website www.movielabs.com. The publication of the paper will also be supported with a panel discussion at the IBC Conference in Amsterdam, titled “Hollywood’s Vision for the Future of Production in 2030”. Interested parties attending IBC are also encouraged to visit Wasabi in Hall 7 at stand 7.A48.