HPA 2021: HDR and video streaming distribution workflow with Bitmovin

This blog was co-authored by Joshua Shulman (Bitmovin), Manfred von Runkel (Bitmovin), and Raul Vecchione (Amazon Web Services).

Each year the HPA Tech Retreat focuses on highlighting the most innovative approaches to content creation, management, and distribution. It also focuses on creating educational materials and connecting professionals in the Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry. Faced with the impact of COVID19, the 2021 HPA Tech Retreat aimed to create six short films at locations around the globe to demonstrate innovation around remote workflows.

The creation of the “Found Lederhosen” movie was the kick-off keynote experience of Tech Retreat, a two-day interactive exploration of cloud-based workflows and technology of multiple productions taking place around the globe. The “Found Lederhosen” filmmakers, led by Joachim “JZ” Zell, highlights real-world examples of the technology, workflows, and more than 200 artists who worked remotely to complete the short films during the worldwide COVID 19 quarantines.

AWS collaborated with the HPA and technology companies to create remote cloud workflows, including a high-dynamic range (HDR) and OTT distribution workflow that enabled video streaming and supported emerging technologies and standards that improve the viewing experience, like Dolby Vision. For this specific workflow, AWS collaborated with Bitmovin, an AWS Advanced Technology Partner. They provided a fundamental transcoding solution to enable the HDR and over-the-top (OTT) distribution workflow for the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA).

Bitmovin’s Encoding is a chunk-based cloud encoding approach that enabled the Found Lederhosen film to be delivered at up to 100x real-time. Bitmovin creates optimal video quality at the lowest bitrates, meaning that the HPA was able to stream high-quality videos to viewers while achieving significant bandwidth savings.

Bitmovin said “We were honored to be a part of the HPA Supersession event: Found Lederhosen. To support these creators, we provided our Per-Title Encoding–a form of encoding optimization that customizes the bitrate ladder of each video, based on the complexity of the video file itself. As the first Dolby Pro partner to integrate Dolby Vision and Atmos encoding in the cloud, Bitmovin included Dolby Vision in the HPA encoding workflow to highlight the importance of high-quality audio and video to really bring the creators’ end vision to life.”

Bitmovin Encoding SaaS-enabled workflow started by automatically looking for an Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) ladder based on the complexity of the source video files. This is thanks to Bitmovin’s per-title technology, which uses machine learning to select the most optimal bitrate based on the type of content that will be streamed. With Found Lederhosen, the content was encoded at subjectively lower bitrates and higher efficiency due to the comparative motion in a given scene. Content with more complex scenes (such as sports or action sequences) would require higher bitrates to maintain perceptive quality; typically measured using the PSNR (Peak to Signal Noise Ratio) analysis. Bitmovin used AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances to create Dolby Vision, HDR10, and SDR files for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) streaming in a fast and cost-effective fashion. Upon completion of transcoding, it was possible to publish streams into the video service platform that allows media playback of the Found Lederhosen, and the other movie creations from the HPA Tech Retreat this year.

If you would like to learn more about the HPA, and the solutions media partners provided for this workflow please visit amazon.aws.com/media (http://amazon.aws.com/media).