Scaling production capacity using Avid on AWS with WBITVP

In Spain, WBITVP ran postproduction from two offices with approximately 20 workstations each and a handful of shared storage systems. That footprint supported two- to two-and-a-half concurrent productions in one of its offices, but demand rarely stayed within that ceiling. About once a year, a 3-month peak forced the team to rent external office space and hardware on fixed terms. And any change would reopen the vendor negotiation and require rebuilding the budget.

WBITVP Spain had standardized its editing and shared storage on Avid, an AWS Partner and industry-standard nonlinear editing software for professional film and TV. When Avid made its products available to run on AWS, the team saw a way to add capacity without moving editors onto new editing workflows. Meanwhile, workstation hardware prices rose 300 percent year over year as AI demand drove up GPU and RAM costs, weakening the case for renting or buying. Ahead of a major production peak, the team in Spain set out to prove the Avid on AWS model.

WBITVP Spain adopted Avid Media Composer and Avid NEXIS Nearline, both available in AWS Marketplace, where organizations can find their perfect match from over 30,000 cloud solutions. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which provide secure, resizable compute capacity, serve as the virtual workstations. Editors connect remotely through a session broker and open the same interface that they use on premises.

Adapting to its editing needs, the team can switch the virtual workstations off when the work is done. The team can also scale them up for more memory, virtual CPUs, GPUs, network bandwidth, or local nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) solid state drive capacity. “We’ve raised the ceiling a lot,” says Raimundo García, head of postproduction at WBITVP Spain. “We can think about automating some processes, do more production. Avid on AWS has increased our ability to take on more productions and given us a new perspective.”

Using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), the team defines and launches AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network. A connection broker routes each user to the right workstation, and a gateway restricts access to the authorized users through Amazon DCV, a high-performance remote display protocol.

WBITVP Spain uses Avid NEXIS systems on AWS, which are based on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service, so the team can scale capacity dynamically in response to growing footage volumes and production needs rather than continually expanding its on-premises shared storage. Moving content to and from Avid NEXIS on AWS is limited to project and proxy files, minimizing data transfer. “Data rates are rising across all productions,” says Matt Okotie, technical manager of postproduction engineering at Skydance, parent company of WBITVP. “In a virtual environment, you can scale without buying workstations.”

The regional production team in Spain can now create and edit content, scaling compute and storage on demand and collaborating globally in near real time. By spinning up workstations only when needed, the team has removed upfront hardware investments and accelerated time to delivery. “You can shoot something today and upload it to the cloud, and overnight an assistant editor in another part of the world prepares everything for the next day,” says García.

WBITVP Spain’s editors were in production within 2 months of the team’s first AWS training. “We can now do four productions at the same time without renting other offices, with a faster, more agile and flexible workflow,” says García. A comparable ramp-up 2 years ago had required renting two offices. Now, 35–40 people work across cloud-based productions at peak.

Ten editors can work a 16-camera shoot without waiting on playback. Latency to the AWS Europe (Spain) Region is 20–30 ms, providing a user experience that’s equivalent to using on-premises infrastructure, and the shared storage in Amazon S3 sustains a throughput of 100–140 MBps per virtual workstation.

WBITVP has since deployed Avid on AWS in three more territories, completing each build faster than the last. The company is now building toward a shared system that its studios can draw on from virtually anywhere.

“The real value comes from bringing together industry-proven creative workflows with the elasticity and scalability of AWS,” says Danny Hollingsworth, director of postproduction product marketing at Avid. “Together, they give production teams the flexibility to rapidly adapt to changing demands, scale resources as needed, and collaborate without compromising the creative experience that editors rely on every day.”