The cloud.
You’ve looked into it. You’ve scanned some forums, and maybe heard a talk or two about it. Other industries are doing it, but is it a reality for media and entertainment?
Creating in the cloud is definitely a change from how you’ve used the technology at the office, and a drastic shift from the way we’ve been creating locally for decades. But is creating in the cloud right for you? Let’s take a look at some of the more popular reasons the cloud can enhance your creative process.
Be Creative Where You‘re Creative.
The immediate benefit is the removal of geography as a limiting factor in your creativity. Manipulating media in the cloud affords you the freedom to create from wherever you do your best work. This could be your home office, your kitchen table, or perhaps while visiting friends and family hundreds or thousands of miles away. This flexibility allows you to work in an environment that is most conducive to where you are the most creative and most productive. Anywhere, anytime!
Timing Is Everything.
The average person in the U.S. spends 26 minutes commuting one way to work. Each way. That’s nearly 4.5 hours a week and nearly 30 8-hour work days of travel a year. That’s a whole lot of wasted time (and stress) – not to mention the wear and tear on your car! Recouping that lost time and unneeded stress not only allows you more time to create, but also alleviates a chunk of the stress that can lead to burnout!
Cut Out What Ails You.
Rendering and exporting can take a bite out of your schedule. Often, there is not enough horsepower (let alone machines) to complete your project without a significant loss of time. Cloud computing allows you to use high powered machines that are often faster than what you have on prem. Not only are these machines faster, but you access to more of them. Concurrent computing – that is, rendering or exporting on one machine while you work on another, is commonplace and can make your creative work a bit more efficient.
Money, Money, Money
The traditional model has been to buy the tech you need, use it for as long as you need it, and upgrade when the tech is no longer performing as well as it once did. This model – CAPEX (Capital Expenditure) – ensures you keep the money for when you need it but means the one time outlay of cash can be too heavy to bear. Paying incrementally as you need it in the cloud (OPEX – Operating Expense) allows the burden of cost to be spread out over long periods of time… or even put on pause, when the technology is not needed. OPEX also allows you to increase the technology available as you need it and shrink it when you do not. This model is much more in line with the ebb and flow of the daily media business.
Collaboration
Working with other creatives and professionals is only the tip of the iceberg. While creating in the cloud affords multiple users to access the same media, it also allows you to work with partners outside your direct team. This includes receiving and delivering media faster than your current system, without impacting the available bandwidth of your current internet speed. Since all transfers are being done in the cloud, the data doesn’t need to go through your local system. In addition, the move to cloud-based solutions for software providers in the media industry is only growing. By having a workflow that is cloud centric, the ability to tie in and interoperate with other cloud solutions only increases.
A Warm Blanket
DR (Disaster Recovery) is normally an afterthought… until you’re in a jam. An on premises solution of single backup drives or RAIDs is risky at best. A drop of a drive, a power surge, or a simple mislabel can lose media forever. Cloud providers adhere to the rule of “five nines.” This means high data availability of 99.999%. This is less than 5 minutes of downtime a year. Can you say the same for your on prem solution?
