The Future of Production Amplified: Bringing Finishing to the Cloud

Remote cloud production has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years — partially driven by the COVID-19 pandemic — but workflows must include every step of the content production cycle for cloud production to truly reach maturity.

Finishing, with its need for precisely calibrated monitors and other considerations, such as security, has presented a number of challenges to cloud-based workflows. But now Amazon Web Services has introduced it new cloud-based “Color in the Cloud” workflow, which aims to provide a truly end-to-end solution for film and television production in the cloud. As part of NAB Amplify’s video series, “The Future of Production Amplified,” NAB Amplify content partner Jennifer Wolfe chats with Katrina King, global strategy leader for content production at AWS, about the Color in the Cloud workflow and the problems it attempts to solve.

King spearheaded the AWS Color in the Cloud workflow, which received an HPA Engineering Excellence Award in 2022. She is a motion picture technologist and production technology executive with more than 20 years of experience supervising production and technology for motion pictures, television and live events, and has authored nearly a dozen patents in film and TV production, interactive streaming and cloud-based post-production.

“To be able to color grade, you need a reference monitor, which is a high-fidelity monitor that allows you to see in the true pixel without any compression, artifacting or encoding. Traditionally these activities have been done in light-controlled rooms with a lot of very expensive equipment, very specific calibrated monitors, and workflows that allow for that true original pixel to be transmitted from the original camera files through to the final pixel,” King explains.

“Traditionally, it’s been virtually impossible to connect a reference monitor to a remote instance without heavily compressing the signal, which kind of defeats the purpose of doing it in the first place,” she continues. “So what we set out to do was to develop a workflow that would allow us to be able to connect a reference monitor to a remote instance, which would unlock really high-fidelity color grading in the cloud.”

King says AWS is excited about scaling the workflow to other applications and workloads as well. “Now that we have a viable method to decode the signal and transport the signal, really it’s just a matter of a variety of different applications integrating the Cloud Digital Interface software development kit that would allow them to leverage the same workflow with the same hardware and the technology that’s been developed,” she notes.

“We’d like to see the technology start to be moved and used in quality control, in VFX compositing, other color grading finishing applications. Really any workload that requires really high-fidelity reference monitoring, we’d love to see adopt the Color in the Cloud workflow.”

In Part 1 of our Q&A, King explains why ingesting assets to the cloud without the ability to finish is “essentially a bridge to nowhere.” She also describes the primary challenges to finishing in the cloud, the main requirements for a viable cloud-based color and finishing solution, and how the Color in the Cloud workflow enables faster image processing, low latency, and even monitor calibration.

Watch Part 1 below:

In Part 2, King talks about the biggest developments in cloud production she’s observed in recent years, how advancements in faster image processing and low latency can help production teams achieve their creative goals, and what she sees for the future. She also discusses how Company 3 supported Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings series, The Rings of Power, which was fully produced in the cloud.

Watch Part 2 below:

Connect with Katrina King on LinkedIn, or head over to the AWS blog to learn more about the Color in the Cloud workflow.