It's no secret: video has become an integral part of the modern marketing and broadcast arsenal. Rising costs and current events have forced traditional marketing and media organizations to become more flexible in the way they produce and deliver video. But with so many options, how can you be sure that you're choosing the right video production method? We've got all the answers you need to make an informed choice about your strategy.
Here are just a few of the benefits of cloud video production:
- Cost savings: Cloud-based services are less expensive than traditional video production because they don't require large upfront expenditures on equipment like servers, render farms, and desktop editing workstations. Additionally, it’s a pay-as-you-go model; need 3 editing stations this week, 5 the next, then 3 the week after? No problem! AWS provides an elastic pay-for-use model.
- Faster time to market: You can get your videos into action faster when they're hosted on a cloud platform since you don't have to wait for them to be uploaded or downloaded onto your own computer or device before being viewed by users on theirs.
- Greater flexibility: With cloud technology, you can easily access and use footage from anywhere in the world—even if it has been stored on someone else's servers! This means that if one location goes down due to an outage or natural disaster, your video will still be available.
Traditional video production is time-consuming due to file transfer and waiting for clients to see the finished product. It also requires expensive workstations and a render farm. AWS offers a cloud-based solution that allows for direct work, scalable resources, and fast delivery of final content, eliminating waiting time for clients and the need to pay for unused resources.
Are you ready to take advantage of all the benefits the cloud has to offer for your video production? Does it seem daunting? Another set of tools to learn and stumble through becoming proficient at?
The best way to get the most out of AWS is to use the right tool for each job and lean on professionals like those at Trek10 to shepherd your journey to the finish line.
To help you do that, we've put together a list of our favorite tools for specific uses, first, we will start with a quick description of the service and then dive deeper into how you can leverage those services for your productions.
Amazon Nimble Studio
Amazon Nimble Studio is a great way to create, modify and manage content on a number of different platforms from one place. It supports all major animation formats and can be used with other AWS services like Amazon Elastic Transcoder and Amazon Video Direct. So that’s great, another video editing and VFX platform, but why should you care? Well, there are some striking differences between the way you have used editing and VFX suites and Nimble Studio. Here are the top five differences:
- No need to purchase expensive desktop workstations
- Pay-as-You-Go pricing
- Onboard new artists in minutes, and offboard just as easily
- Keep your content safe in your private cloud network by eliminating large file transfers with contractor artists
- High Availability: your editing capabilities are available 24/7
AWS Thinkbox Deadline
AWS Thinkbox Deadline is a powerful render farm management tool that makes it easy to set up and manage render farms at scale using AWS instances across multiple regions. It also integrates with other services like Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Lambda, Slack and more! Users of the cloud are no longer troubled with purchasing render farm subscriptions or purchasing a rack full of equipment to handle rendering that may happen once or twice a day or week and then sit idle. You pay for what you use, without the burden of infrastructure and hardware maintenance or renewals. If you need more render power for a specific project you can scale your cloud resources up temporarily and then back down when no longer needed, as AWS services are elastic.
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is an excellent CDN service that allows you to distribute video content quickly and easily across the world using edge locations in multiple regions around the globe. CloudFront also supports HTTP/2 protocol delivery acceleration through Edge Locations. Deliver your content like the large media organizations who have leveraged expensive private CDN networks for years, now you have this capability in a pay-as-you-use model at your fingertips.
Cloud video production stores and delivers files via a cloud server and CDN. This provides increased storage capacity and delivery control. CDNs are networks of secure servers distributed globally, ensuring availability and optimal content delivery even in the event of server downtime or maintenance.
