MUPPITS Production Scenario Models
The MUPPITS project is currently addressing two important scenarios:
1. Tapeless Production
The Tapeless Production scenario model addresses how multi-camera studio production can be carried out in a service based environment.
It makes use of BBC's open source tapeless acquisition system Ingex. This records multiple channels of video and audio as MXF-wrapped files, with associated metadata. These files are delivered to a MUPPITS destination and stored in the Data Warehouse, from where they can be accessed by production and post production users. Links between the studio and the post production community are managed by Service Level Agreements set up in GRIA. Content is automatically routed from the Data Warehouse to the chosen facility and then the finished work can be returned.
2. Remote Rendering
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 Remote Rendering model was created to lessen the financial load and improve efficiency for companies who operate large render farms. Power consumption and obsolescence are major impediments to starting new businesses in this area and staying profitable for existing businesses.
MUPPITS enables the possibility that companies across the UK can buy and sell render resource as required according to automated service level agreements programmed into GRIA.
A key problem when quoting for work is to accurately estimate the number of processors and the time needed to render a sequence of pictures. MUPPITS is developing a Render time estimator to facilitate more efficient business.