A feature length animated movie takes up to 100 million compute hours to render. 100 million.



When you hear the two words “Google” and “media,” what pops into your mind? YouTube, right? Well, as I’m excited to explain, media means much more than “YouTube” at Google. The media and entertainment industry is a key area of focus for Google Cloud Platform. As I’ll be sharing in my keynote address for the cloud conference at the 97,000-attendee NAB Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday, we’re rapidly expanding our platform and our partner ecosystem to uniquely solve media-specific challenges. In addition to my keynote, Patrick McGregor and Todd Prives from my team are participating in panel sessions on cloud security and cloud rendering. And as part of the recent Virtual NAB conference, Jeff Kember and Miles Ward from Google shared their insights.



We’re witnessing massive changes in the ways media companies are creating, transforming, archiving and delivering content, using the power of the cloud



We recognize that Google Cloud Platform best supports the media industry when we deliver capabilities that are tailored to specific workflow patterns. Great examples of these capabilities are our services for visual effects rendering. Aside from the skilled work that an artist puts into modeling, animating and compositing a realistic scene, the compute demands required to produce these images are often staggering. Even a relatively simple visual effects shot or animation can take several hours to render the 24 individual frames that make up one second of video.



Google Cloud Platform can greatly accelerate and simplify rendering while charging only for the processor cycles and bits that are consumed. For customers looking for an end-to-end rendering solution, we offer Google Zync Render. Beta launched in the first quarter of 2015, Zync is a turnkey service for small and medium-sized studios. It integrates directly with existing on-premises software workflows to feel as natural and responsive as a local render farm. Also, through our collaborations with The Foundry and others, Google Cloud Platform provides tools used in the creation of some of the highest-grossing movies.




Zync Render Workflow







By using Google Cloud Platform’s cost-efficient compute and storage, studios can seamlessly extend their rendering pipelines to handle burst capacity needs and remove the bottlenecks typically associated with production deadlines. We’re already seeing great successes from media customers like Framestore, RodeoFX, iStreamPlanet, Panda, and Industriromantik.



We’ve also built compelling general platform capabilities that help media companies with all stages of workflow and the content lifecycle. One example is Google Cloud Storage Nearline, which is a service that allows a virtually unlimited volume of data to be stored at very low costs with retrieval times on the order of seconds – not hours as you would experience with tape. This is ideal for media content archiving. We also recently launched 32-core VM instances for compute-intensive workloads that crunch large volumes of content. And, yesterday, we announced a collaboration with Avere Systems that enables us to bridge cloud storage and on-premises storage without impacting performance. This opens huge opportunities for creative collaboration and content production.



Please join us this week for NAB, we hope to see you in Las Vegas!



-Posted by Brian Stevens, VP for Google Cloud Platform