MUPPITS is a research and development project set up to address the ever increasing challenges faced by the Post Production Industry today, caused by the adoption of increasingly complex processing requirements and the adoption of tapeless workflows.
MUPPITS brings together key players in the UK post-production value-chain to investigate, develop and demonstrate a new service oriented approach to film and broadcast post-production that will catalyse collaborative working and enable new business models. This contrasts with today’s practices, in which the scale, complexity and turnaround time of post-production work, especially at high resolutions, mean that post houses must make huge investments in in-house infrastructure to maintain the high resource capacity needed. The result is high costs, wasted power and organisational inefficiency, a situation that is rapidly becoming unworkable.
One area in which the project aims to make a different is that of rendering. This is the final process of creating an image from a prepared scene. With the increasing realism and resolution demands of the industry, rendering may take from seconds to days to produce a single image/frame. To meet increasing scale and complexity demands coupled with decreasing turnaround times, huge investments are required by each company just to maintain the resource capacity needed. Rendering is also an open ended process; there are no tools which can accurately estimate the requirements of any particular job.
Another area is for supporting production workflows as they migrate to using tapeless/filmless acquisition. This requires many large media files to be created, viewed, transcoded, processed and transferred in a timely way.
With power and cooling costs rapidly coming to a point where they will outstrip the costs of the hardware itself it is clear that a fundamental change in underlying IT infrastructures are required.
The very nature of the project based workflow in post-production dictates that there are 'peaks and troughs' in work levels and so all resources are not fully utilised by all companies at all times. Sometimes post production facilities do not have enough resources to do the work currently in hand (meaning they lose work), and at other times their resources are sitting idle (meaning they waste money). If a post production facility could rent resources from others when they needed them, and sell spare capacity when it was available in a secure and trusted environment, all parties would benefit.
The MUPPITS project aims to provide a route where organisations can share resources in a service oriented environment permitting seamless expansion of IT based capacity when required by utilising another company’s periodic excess capacity. Conversely value can be gained from underutilized resources by making these available to the wider post community. Further to this MUPPITS will investigate the feasibility of extending this capability in a cross industry capacity.
Our approach allows end-users, facilities houses and service providers to come together in a secure environment to plan, manage and combine their collective resources (people, hardware, applications) in a more dynamic and flexible way.
The MUPPITS project is co-funded by the Technology Strategy Board's Collaborative Research and Development Programme, following an open competition. It is led by the UK Digital Television Group (DTG), an industry body with over 120 member companies from throughout the television industry, comprising broadcasters, manufacturers and regulators. There are a further 8 partners with specialist skills who will work closely together to enable this vision to take place. The project started on January 1st 2008 and will continue for a period of 33 months.
Contact information
In the first instance please contact the MUPPITS Project Manager – Nikie Piper