HPA 2021 streams ‘The Found Lederhosen’ content to multiscreen devices in 4K HDR 

The Found Lederhosen is a thought leadership content production project done with the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA), Amazon Web Services (AWS), creatives, subject matter experts, and other technology companies. The HPA Tech Retreat 2021, led by Joachim “JZ” Zell, focused on the most innovative approaches to creating, finishing, and distributing creative content for six short films from locations around the globe.

The transition to remote content production cloud workflows can be daunting for content creators. However, in 2020 AWS and HPA collaborated on a proof-of-concept that showed how you can produce content remotely while reducing the overall timelines.

This year, I collaborated with HPA to include new workflows and technology companies supporting emerging technologies and standards that improve the viewing experience, like Dolby Vision. The new cloud-based workflows included support for high-dynamic range (HDR), and over-the-top (OTT) delivery for multiscreen consumer devices, media quality control, distribution and packaging of master files, and Dolby Vision dailies for remote team collaboration.

These new workflows drastically increase the user’s quality of experience by delivering an expanded color palette, sharper contrasts, and bright pictures not possible with conventional 4K media. The proof-of-concept also showed how media companies can effectively collaborate remotely using AWS services from content production, to final multiscreen delivery, at an optimal video quality.

The proof-of-concept consisted of several remote workflows:

1. Media capture from digital video cinema cameras to AWS Cloud workflow. Blackmagic Design’s Davinci Resolve pre-processed raw content for editing in the cloud to eventually create the master Dolby Vision, HDR-10 and standard-dynamic range (SDR) media files.
2. Moxion’s platform provided Dolby Vision dailies to remote review teams, that enabled frame-accurate annotation and comments.
3. Colorfront’s Transkoder was used as a multi-disciplinary army tool and created mastering files using JPEG2000 encoding, and trans-wrapping.
4. Ownzones’ Connect cloud-based supply chain platform created the final distribution of IMF files including the integration of multiple audios and localized content playlists (CPLs).
5. GrayMeta’s Iris Anywhere provided professional eyes on glass Quality Control (QC) check of the master packages in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) without egress.
6. Bitmovin used multi-chunk and parallel video processing in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances to create optimal Adaptive Bitrate Rate (ABR) streams in H.264 and H.265 video codecs in a cost-effective way. With Bitmovin’s fast processing speed, we were able to turn around last-minute videos uploads quickly.
7. Accedo, and castLabs worked together using Accedo One and PRESTOPlay to create a branded content portal with a customizable UX and a custom player logic that supports specific Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) streams, with a global edge distribution thanks to Amazon CloudFront Content Delivery Network (CDN). This approach allowed castLabs to create a video player logic that automatically selects the best type of media content the user’s device can support from the Dolby Vision, HDR-10 and SDR versions included in the manifest files.

This cloud-based proof-of-concept was led by HPA with the help of AWS and Dolby, Moxion, Blackmagic Design, Colorfront, Bitmovin, Accedo, castLabs, Ownzones, and GrayMeta. If you would like to learn more about HPA, and the solutions provided for this workflow visit https://aws.amazon.com/media/.