Here at BeBop, we’ve always got our ears to the ground to keep close track of strategic shifts in our industry. Whether it’s the overall shift to cloud-based workflows or the granular best practices for them we’ve developed over the years, BeBop’s approach to innovation has always sat squarely at the intersection of cloud technologies and post-production workflows.
This week MovieLabs and its member studios published a vision paper that takes a stab at defining what production and post-production will look like in 10 years. I was personally excited to see this message from the leading content creation engines in the world. Defining clear and direct principles for our industry makes it possible for the ecosystem of vendors within it to find meaningful intersection points. Unsurprisingly for a global post-production ecosystem, BeBop already delivers directly or indirectly on all of the core principles defined by MovieLabs. This level of alignment is an incredible validation of the work BeBop has done over the past 4 years and confirms the market’s readiness to shift towards cloud native workflows.
When Bruce and I were starting BeBop in late 2015, we set out with lots of goals… some lofty, some immediately achievable, and some just over the top completely! At the center of everything were these key ideas:
- Bring the applications to the content, not the other way around
- Limit content movement wherever and however possible
- Secure the hell out of the cloud environments to offer a fully segregated and auditable offering
In late 2015, we achieved these goals with the first deployment of the BeBop platform on Amazon Web Services. BeBop was the first fully managed platform of its kind for Media & Entertainment, leveraging NVIDIA GPUs in a public cloud environment to deliver high-powered virtual workstations for post-production use cases. BeBop continued to be first on many fronts. We introduced multi-monitor capabilities, multi-cloud service provider (CSP) support within AWS, Azure and GCP, OTS/Over the Shoulder collaboration, and BeBop Rocket for file transfers. All of these solutions were designed specifically with our core ideals in mind.
- Multi-monitor creates an exact and familiar review environment for editors and artists. This replicates a typical environment that any artist is accustomed to using today, but in the cloud.
- Multi-cloud deployment and consumption options in the three of the largest CSPs creates a BeBop option for every customer, large or small. We can specifically tailor a solution for any use case with the battery of tools we have at our disposal today.
- BeBop OTS is a truly revolutionary feature that we added to our platform to solve a simple problem that our users brought to our attention: “If the editor does not need to be in the edit bay anymore… where does the producer/director/reviewer go?” After getting that feedback we created a way for editors to securely invite another BeBop user into their workstation session to review their video output with real-time audio communication. This base functionality became the foundation for how BeBop enables users to collaborate globally and seamlessly across the range of clouds, from public CSPs to BeBop private cloud hardware solutions.
- BeBop Rocket file transfer is the bedrock of our overall strategy to ensure that the lowest-cost storage possible is used for all content. Fully integrating Rocket into AWS S3, Azure Blob and GCP Cloud Storage enables us to implement any logic that a customer requires or that BeBop establishes is appropriate. In either case (or a combination of both), the net effect is a significantly lower overall TCO for a customer’s storage footprint.
The core principles MovieLabs and its studio partners outlined for the industry were already in place at BeBep and have been from the beginning, which makes us even more excited to see what the future holds. Our commitment to pushing the envelope will continue and keep us at the forefront of the unprecedented transition we are all witnessing in our industry.
Come join us. We look forward to BeBopping together!
