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Netflix’s Media Production Suite

netflixtechblog.com

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Re: Netflix’s Media Production Suite

#91

Post by dkh »

sagacity wrote: post #82
dkh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collateral was not the first fully digitally shot feature film. In fact, Collateral was not even fully digital. (The first major , all-digital, HD feature film was Attack of the Clones , but there were other fully-digital feature films before that, just not as major, and/or not always HD. Robert Rodriguez' Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2001) was fully digital.) But you are right that Collateral did do something very ne…

Around 2004 I worked for a company in The Netherlands that owned a Viper camera (one of the few in NL, I guess because they were based in Breda and Thomson had an HQ there). The company actually had a big Mercedes van that contained a Quantel iQ system just to record and postprocess the video coming out of that Viper. In the years after that I worked with them to write a custom application based on a Bluefish444 card…

A Mercedes van to lug it all around is both hilarious and also probably the coolest way to do it.

While working on set between 2012-2014, we were shooting all RED, and I had a 12-disk ATTO FC RAID10 rig on set at all times borrowed from RED. Not needed for speed of frames by this time of course, but for the ridiculous total storage required shooting 6.5k raw and the time needed to copy it all. On paper this system should've been good/safe enough. In practice, we almost lost it a handful of times within a month, each in a unique way, including the time a stunt driver messed up, veered off course, and plowed directly into video village, striking the RAID and killing exactly the maximum number of disks in one mirror it could tolerate, but thankfully no more. (Needless to say the shoot was a massive learning experience and I have never managed data the same ever since.) By the time the shoot was over, the RAID was alive, but it was absolutely beat to shit, and I was afraid of how the guy from RED would react when he came to pick it up. When he did, he was completely unphased. He chuckled and said, "You should've seen how messed it was after Ridley Scott's crew borrowed it!"

Very cool background though, I was not quite old enough to get into it all quite that early! When the Viper came out, I was still in high school, just exceedingly nerdy. I believe to this day I have PCs with ATTO Disk Benchmark on them

Re: Netflix’s Media Production Suite

#92

Post by pritambarhate »

barrkel wrote: post #89
gcanyon wrote: post #33

I read through that whole article thinking, - I wonder what the UI looks like compared to tools I use now - I wonder if there will be a free tier, since my video needs are modest It never occurred to me until I reached the end that this wasn't a "enjoy this tool we made" post, but instead a "look how awesome we are" post. :-/

The purpose of these articles is to promote the brand among engineers, help hire engineers, and help the careers of the authors both internally ("I'm helping the company hire") and externally (you can point at what you built because it's now public).

Also creates an image that Netflix is a tech company!

Re: Netflix’s Media Production Suite

#93

Post by mschuster91 »

alwinaugustin wrote: post #71

I can see this evolving into something like AWS — a platform that offers high-end production tools to anyone willing to pay. That would democratize access to cutting-edge tech, effectively solving the tooling problem. But it still wouldn’t address the real bottleneck: compelling storytelling.

> But it still wouldn’t address the real bottleneck: compelling storytelling.

The problem is, storytelling is risky. Either you stick to something bland (adaptations of popular books, cartoons or videogames) and it usually gives decent returns, or you go for something completely original - at the risk of it either going boom or going bust.

As your average cinema movie is a triple-digit million dollar business these days just in pure production and actor cost and double that in promo cost, it's hard to find banks to finance the production, and so the banks prefer to go with something "proven and bland" over something risky.

Re: Netflix’s Media Production Suite

#94

Post by gabriel666smith »

> “… automation became imperative. The intricacies of color and framing management, along with deliverables, must be seamlessly controlled and effortlessly managed by the user, without the need for manual intervention. Therefore, we cannot lean into humans configuring JSON files behind the scenes to map camera formats into deliverables.”

I’d often thought (critically) about the lack of visual diversity in Netflix output - and this is something I often see stereotypical film-enjoyers complain about.

I’d never considered it as a consequence of Netflix’s sheer scale. It’s always really interesting when I discover that something I’d previously put down as an (unimaginably unimaginative) aesthetic choice might in fact be an operational choice. It makes me check myself!

It sounds an incredibly complex and clever system; I can’t help but feel that applying such a strong vertical to the more creative aspects of film and tv production - such as colour grading - will ultimately prove short-sighted.

Re: Netflix’s Media Production Suite

#95

Post by chedabob »

shubhamjain wrote: post #76

With the asset sizes they are talking about (hundreds of terabytes), how does it make it feasible to do this over the wire? Even with 1Gbps connection, it will take ~10 days to upload a single 100TB original camera file. And there could be several.

Wouldn't surprise me if they had something like this in a few cities with big production teams. There must've been pipelines in place from when 35mm was the standard for movies, and crews needed to get hours of footage developed and over to various people for review each day.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-physical-aws-data-trans...

Re: Netflix’s Media Production Suite

#96

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

gabriel666smith wrote: post #94

> “… automation became imperative. The intricacies of color and framing management, along with deliverables, must be seamlessly controlled and effortlessly managed by the user, without the need for manual intervention. Therefore, we cannot lean into humans configuring JSON files behind the scenes to map camera formats into deliverables.” I’d often thought (critically) about the lack of visual diversity in Netflix out…

This. “the medium is the message” Marshall McLuhan.

The actual content is invariably a result of the infrastructure behind it. And it’s not just the image, it’s also what kind of scripts are written, what kind of audience insights are passed on to creative producers, what kind of creative teams are selected.

Is it proving short-sighted? If you’re optimizing for cinematic art, then yeah. But they’re optimizing for subscriptions and global reach. That vertical will likely move to live-streaming, sports and other forms that retain subscribers. And on multiple global markets at the same time (not just U.S.)

It’s a weird vertical, they’re quite sophisticated in their approach, but it’s surprising how they sometimes contract entire chunks out. I’ve read academic papers talking about how Netflix is a very strange disjointed thing.

Re: Netflix’s Media Production Suite

#97

Post by diab0lic »

penultimatename wrote: post #46
gcanyon wrote: post #33

I read through that whole article thinking, - I wonder what the UI looks like compared to tools I use now - I wonder if there will be a free tier, since my video needs are modest It never occurred to me until I reached the end that this wasn't a "enjoy this tool we made" post, but instead a "look how awesome we are" post. :-/

I’ve sat through a few Netflix talks and they’re all the same flavor of “look what you can achieve with millions of dollars and hundreds of engineers.” They’re somewhat interesting from an architectural perspective, but even scaled down versions aren’t feasible in most environments and it leaves a taste in your mouth that you just sat through a recruiting pitch.

Until a few years ago most projects at Netflix were done with a handful of engineers ( <= 6 ). A dozen people working on something would have been considered very large. Four dozen would have been considered a company wide effort.

Re: Netflix’s Media Production Suite

#98

Post by fidotron »

dkh wrote: post #73
gcanyon wrote: post #33

I read through that whole article thinking, - I wonder what the UI looks like compared to tools I use now - I wonder if there will be a free tier, since my video needs are modest It never occurred to me until I reached the end that this wasn't a "enjoy this tool we made" post, but instead a "look how awesome we are" post. :-/

For people in within the industry or the tech side of it, Netflix’s engineering blog has always been fascinating and extremely useful because of the insane amount of stuff in this space they have solved or reworked. They have put more into tech side of modern-day TV/film than anybody else, and it's not even close. In a technical/workflow sense, working on a Netflix show is unlike working on any other. I have my issue…

Netflix get away with it because they own the result at the end of the process. If you were to suggest these workflows to other studios they'd balk at the idea of having the raw stuff being uploaded to the cloud etc. If they tried selling this as a solution do we think people outside Netflix would buy and use it?

One of the people I worked with that is now at Netflix on this stuff was so violently opposed to not owning his own in office render farm and drive array it verged on ridiculous.

Re: Netflix’s Media Production Suite

#100

Post by persedes »

Gshaheen wrote: post #38
gcanyon wrote: post #33

I read through that whole article thinking, - I wonder what the UI looks like compared to tools I use now - I wonder if there will be a free tier, since my video needs are modest It never occurred to me until I reached the end that this wasn't a "enjoy this tool we made" post, but instead a "look how awesome we are" post. :-/

Ha! Yes sure, but it does make sense that they’d keep something like this to themselves. Creating massive amounts of high quality content efficiently, on a global scale, with seamless global distribution is an incredible competitive advantage. I don’t see why they would provide it to anyone outside of their ecosystem. It’ll be interesting to see if they translate this to games as well.

They've been pretty great about pushing for open standards. In the last article their argument to provide these tools for free was along the lines of "A rising tide lifts all boats".
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