My SO’s brother works in the studio video recording industry, and is a very IT-savvy guy. We had a long discussion last holiday season about the state of cloud

My SO’s brother works in the studio video recording industry, and is a very IT-savvy guy. We had a long discussion last holiday season about the state of cloud adoption in that industry. He told me (this is obviously secondhand) that most of the movie industry is not only off the cloud, but exclusively working in the realm of colocating humans and data (footage). This is for many reasons. The one that comes back to me now is that the file sizes are HUGE, because resolution is very high, so bandwidth is a major concern. Editors and colorists need rapid feedback on their work, which demands beefy workstations connected directly with high bandwidth connections to the source files. Doing something like this over a long distance network (even if the storage was free) would be prohibitively expensive, and sometimes literally impossible. So the write loads are basically the antithesis of what cloud optimized for: “random sequential reads of typical short length, big append only writes”. The big production houses (lucasarts famously) are also incredibly secretive about their source material, and like to use physical access as a proxy for digital access. It leads to some seemingly strange (to me as a cloud SWE guy) decisions. He pretty much exclusively purchases top of the line equipment (hard drives/ssds), and keeps minimal if any backups for most projects because there simply isn’t any room. It’s a recipe for disastrous data loss, and apparently it’s something that happens quite often to this day. It’s just extremely prohibitively expensive to do version control for movie development. I don’t know to what extent cloud technologies can solve for this domain. I asked him if Netflix was innovating in this area, since they’re so famously invested in AWS, but he said that they mostly contracted out the production stuff, and only managed the distribution, which makes sense. The contractors don’t touch the cloud at all, for the most part. Again most of this is secondhand, I’d be curious to hear more details or reports from other people in the movie industry.