AWS for M&E Blog
Creative studio HOPR uses AWS Partner TrackIt to migrate its entire production workflow to Amazon Nimble Studio
Authored by Brad Winett, President and Partner at TrackIt. The content and opinions in this post are those of the third-party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.
Telework was essential to helping businesses adapt during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, with around half of all paid work hours between April and December 2020 taking place remotely. Many businesses—including boutique production company HOPR—continue to see the benefit of being ready to collaborate from anywhere.
HOPR adopted a cloud-based workflow on Amazon Web Services (AWS) so that its team of artists could stay connected while working remotely. The company now runs its creative studio applications and production pipeline using Amazon Nimble Studio, a service that empowers creative teams to produce visual effects, animation, and interactive content entirely in the cloud.
To achieve successful implementation and onboarding, the company used AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner TrackIt, a cloud consulting company with special expertise in media and entertainment workflows. In collaboration with TrackIt, HOPR seamlessly migrated its production workflow from its legacy on-premises infrastructure to AWS. Now, HOPR’s artists have the tools that they need to do their best creative work—in and out of the office.
Using TrackIt to implement Amazon Nimble Studio
Based in New York City, HOPR specializes in using creative storytelling to connect brands with their audiences. Among other services, the company is known for its animation and visual effects—complex projects that require a team effort. When citywide lockdowns early in the COVID-19 pandemic made collaboration difficult, HOPR decided to become a cloud-based studio and chose Amazon Nimble Studio to achieve the security, availability, and high performance that it needed to confidently run its entire production pipeline in the cloud.
The HOPR team sought support from TrackIt to make sure the process went as smoothly as possible. “You need a trusted partner like TrackIt to work with you through the implementation, the onboarding of your artists and your company, and for the ongoing maintenance because there are always changes and updates you are going to make to your environment,” says Tom DiFiore, chief operations officer at HOPR.
Achieving better security, availability, and collaboration on AWS
After successfully migrating to AWS in 2020, HOPR quickly resumed business as usual. The company’s artists can now collaborate just as effectively using Amazon Nimble Studio as they could in the office using on-premises infrastructure. With access to the latest software, the creative team at HOPR has what they need to complete all projects—including long-term productions—in the cloud.
On AWS, HOPR can provision compute resources and storage across different Availability Zones to achieve the high availability it needs to keep its services up and running at all times. By using Amazon Nimble Studio, the company also attained secure cloud infrastructure on AWS and can encrypt and move data as well as manage data retention.
To achieve better file management, HOPR implemented robust file backup and archiving processes. The company uses various storage services on AWS, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Specifically, HOPR uses Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes, which are long-term, secure, durable storage classes for data archiving at low cost and milliseconds access.
Finally, HOPR accelerated the process of onboarding new artists by using Amazon Nimble Studio. As HOPR welcomes new talent from around the country, getting everyone up to speed is much simpler, and the growing creative team can collaborate more productively and efficiently. “Recently, all the postproduction work for a 15-minute pilot was done on AWS,” says DiFiore. “We could never have done it locally because there were too many artists spread across the country, and we would not have been able to access the same level of performance, availability, and collaboration without Amazon Nimble Studio.”
Empowering artists from around the world to work remotely
By migrating its production workflows to Amazon Nimble Studio with support from TrackIt, HOPR was not only able to adapt during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the company also thrived and discovered new ways to collaborate. HOPR can confidently and efficiently run its postproduction processes on Amazon Nimble studio, and its growing team of artists are equipped to collaborate from anywhere. The company can also stay flexible by using a hybrid on-premises and cloud studio approach going forward.
“The cloud-based pipeline infrastructure is the future,” says DiFiore. “This will always be a part of HOPR studios going forward. We will always have a part of our studio that will be cloud based because it opens up the door for artists all over the world.”
About TrackIt
TrackIt is 7-year old cloud management, consulting and software development solutions company based in Marina del Rey, California. The company specialize in Cloud-Native, Modern Software Development; DevOps, Infrastructure-As-Code, serverless, CI/CD and containerization with special expertise in Media and Entertainment workflows, High-Performance Computing environments and data storage.