MUPPITSMultiple Users for Post Production IT Services

DTG, IT Innovation, BBC, Ovation Data Services, Smoke & Mirrors, Molinare,

Pinewood Studios Group, SohoNet, HDDC

Muppits Origin

• Circa 2002 MPC London Installed a 1 Megawatt Substation in Wardour Street Soho

• Within 3 years overloaded• Original Project concept was to delgate

rendering and storage both in and out of town creating a marketplace for resources

• 2008 Muppits project created with support from the UK government

Rendering

• Scene is rendered using a multi-processor render ‘farm’

MUPPITS IN CONFIDENCE

Problem Statement:

• UK Post production houses have to keep buying hardware & software to address their peak requirements– Means that most of the time they are not earning their keep– At peak times there is still never enough

• UK talent is hampered by the high cost of post production hardware and software– Some potential users are completely excluded because they cannot

afford the entry cost• This is all leading to a growing demand for outsourced services in

the media industry• File-based workflow has introduced new, or exacerbated existing,

problems:– How to capture and manage content– Tracking of content (where is it? who did what to it?)– Retaining ownership (files can be distributed easily)– Storage and indexing of content on disks– Many tasks are labour-intensive and tedious

MUPPITS IN CONFIDENCE

Partners

5

Demo Roll

Muppits Offers

• SECURITY• MANAGEMENT• SERVICE CONTROL• COLLABORATION• AUTOMATION• MARKETPLACE• Over the whole production lifecycle• It facilitates workflow not dictates workflow• & Its non proprietary

Muppits Innovations

• Determined and evaluated the concept of the Media Services Marketplace– Enables participants to trade media services– Infrastructure comprising business, technical and commercial aspects

• Detailed investigation into how to create and offer a MUPPITS media service

– Find out how the marketplace will work in action• Render time & cost estimation

– How long will the processing of a 3D CGI render take?– Before MUPPITS all we had was guesswork– Now we can predict render time & cost with good accuracy

• High-end video capture• Data management, processing & collaboration

– Viewing content, sharing content with others, moving content, processing content• Automated processing• Metadata-based tracking

– Location and processing status of media– Provenance of media

MUPPITS IN CONFIDENCE

Muppits Core

• Multiple Data warehouse capability• GRIA Services oriented architecture from

industry http://www.gria.org/ • Rule Engine facilitating the generation of custom

production specific Service level agreements and workflows

• Resource tracking to facilitate direct production budget control and billing

SOA

• It regards everything you do to your media as SERVICES

• It allows productions to choose the SERVICES they want

• And whoever they want to provide these SERVICES from whatever location they need

• This is called Service Oriented Architecture or SOA which is a phrase you may have heard about recently

MUPPITS Data Warehouse

MUPPITS IN CONFIDENCE

Client

MUPPITS System

Facility A

Facility C

Data Storage

Production companyFacility B

MUPPITS Media Marketplace

MUPPITS IN CONFIDENCE

Buy Services

Sell Services

Sell Services

Buy Services

Buy Services

Buy Services

Buy Services

Buy Services

Sell Services

Buy Services

Collaborate

Sell Services

Project Concentration

• Rendering as a service– The Project developed an accurate render

time and resource estimator

• Tapeless Production– The project in conjunction with the BBC Ingex

team developed an automated tapeless workflow

Render as a Service

• Demonstration of the MUPPITS Marketplace in action

• In-depth investigation into “how to create and consume a MUPPITS service”

• Video rendering is a good case study– Demanding on hardware

– Expensive software

– Extra resource needed at time-critical moments

– Many occasions when there is spare capacity

MUPPITS IN CONFIDENCE

Tapeless Production

• MUPPITS demonstrated semi automated workflow between the BBC, Molinare, Smoke and Mirrors and Pinewood studio’s

• MUPPITS integrated Ingex which is used on East Enders and Dragons Den for multi-channel recording

• Ingex info can be found at http://ingex.sourceforge.net/

Summary of MUPPITS Benefits

• MUPPITS creates the Digital Marketplace for Media Services– Set up trusted trade partnerships with SOA’s– Geographic location unimportant– Put power intensive functions where they belong. Dinorwig not

Dean Street– Transparently interface with Clouds

• Rent resources rather than buying them– Users can rent in extra resource when they need it– Resource owners can rent out their spare capacity– Savings on electricity, maintenance and capital investment and

real estate in central and greater London

MUPPITS IN CONFIDENCE

Summary of MUPPITS Benefits

• Provides business opportunity– Enables dedicated specialist providers to set up services and

sell them– Small outfits can use high performance computing and high-end

software that they previously could not afford– Provides the ability to test run new business areas

• Lowers barriers of entry to creative organisations– No asset purchase– Pay for resources for as long as needed, no longer– Infrastructure provides business management (accounting,

billing) available as a service– Remote working is enabled by MUPPITS so people can work

from outlying areas or hotel rooms

MUPPITSMultiple Users for Post Production IT Services

DTG, IT Innovation, BBC, Ovation Data Services, Smoke & Mirrors, Molinare,

Pinewood Studios Group, SohoNet, HDDC