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Netflix’s Media Production Suite
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- fastball 2y agoThe tech is cool, but it seems like the main result of having such a pipeline is that Netflix has been able to produce an incredible amount of low-effort schlock that mostly lacks soul and artistic merit.
- sepositus 2y agoI barely even remember the last one that I watched let alone enjoyed. I guess it was Arcane which is a total fluke.
- theWreckluse 2y agoThat was probably the plan. Except they probably expect a higher fluke rate.
- klodolph 2y agoArcane is one of the most expensive Netflix series. Not that budget is a panacea.
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- pests 2y agoI remember reading once how all Netflix content is really meant for phones or smaller screens. Simple shots, not much background detail, lots of face closeups etc. I remember when being made by Netflix was a unique and cool thing, it didn’t last long until it meant probably-slop.
- ksynwa 2y agoA lot of them are also meant to "second screen worthy" where they run in the background while your attention is mainly focused on some other task like playing a video game.
- pests 2y agoI have never been able to second screen, I just can't focus on my PC while listening to something. It's literally white noise to me. I do understand people do this though. When I do watch media seriously, I pay attention and keep off my devices.
- whatevertrevor 2y agoYeah my attention during second screening is split such that I'm now doing two things _terribly_ instead of one thing well. I've decided to only have music or something equally non intrusive in the background instead of second screening a show/video/podcast.
- pests 2y agoI use music too but it can't have too many vocals. I will start to pay attention and get distracted. Similar to how I can't fall asleep with a TV on, I'm still going to listen to it.
- nthingtohide 2y agothe importance of picking a fight you'll never win https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-vWRLGnTGg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-vWRLGnTGg A filmmaker discusses their experience with Amazon, who bought the rights to their movie and decided to release it on their streaming service instead of in theaters. The filmmaker explains why they feel this is unfair and why they are fighting for their movie to be seen on the big screen.
- alpineidyll3 2y agoThis is exactly how I'd imagine the dreck on netflix is made :).
- mpalmer 2y agoYes, strange to have so much and still feel like you'e lost something.
- walrus01 2y agoSome C-levels have gone for the "quantity has a quality all of its own" philosophy of media production. My personal experience with netflix has been that a good filter for 'quality' is what specific TV series and documentaries various 'scene' groups in the warez/torrent community consider worth ripping and properly encoding. There's a certain amount of manual effort that's required to properly encode a ripped netflix or amazon prime series. People who do this strictly for street cred in the piracy community generally don't waste their time on schlock.
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- crazygringo 2y agoAre you serious? Have you watched Adolescence? It's got more soul and artistic merit than practically anything else I've ever seen. And that was just last week. Maid? The Queen's Gambit? Baby Reindeer? The Crown? Ripley? BoJack Horseman? Sure they make a lot of schlock too, because they're a business and that's what most of their audience wants. But I don't see how you could possibly criticize them for that when they continue to put out some pretty astonishingly artistic and soulful stuff.
- fastball 2y agoYou don't need this pipeline to produce 6 shows over a decade. Said another way, they almost certainly would not have bothered to build this system if the purpose was mainly to produce the shows you mention. The reason these systems exist is to enable the creation of hundreds or thousands of productions.
- sofixa 2y agoHouse of Cards, The Diplomat, Kaleidoscope, Lincoln Lawyer, The End of the Fucking World, etc etc
- crazygringo 2y agoThose were just six examples. There are many more. But OK yes, Netflix produces a lot of volume because that's also what its viewers want. Are you saying that's a bad thing? Sometimes people get home from an exhausting stressful day at work and they just need to relax with some mindless entertainment. And that's OK. Not everything has to be art.
- fastball 2y agoTwo problems with this argument / framing: 1. Consumers frequently don't know what they want, and will consume whatever is placed in front of them. Implying the consumption of Netflix shows (or other media) is a conscious choice they are making seems disingenuous to me. You see the same with doom-scrolling TikTok or Twitter (or even HN). Frequently it is less of a choice and more of a compulsion. 2. Even when they are making conscious choices, sometimes the things people choose to consume are objectively bad. e.g. sometimes people get home from an exhausting stressful day at work and just need to shoot up heroin. While you can respect the agency of those people to make those choices, most societies do various things to discourage such behavior. A drug dealer whose entire defense is "selling crack isn't bad because my customers want it, actually" is not gonna get exonerated.
- blinded 2y agoLincoln Lawyer?
- duped 2y agoI mean if we go by volume of awards nominations it seems like they're fine in the artistic merit department
- anigbrowl 2y agoHaving worked on both quality and junk film productions I assure you the editing workflow is not the determinant of artistic quality. No film or TV program has ever been improved by the editor(s) trying to build their own NAS or hack a version control system together.
- fastball 2y agoIt's not just editing though, right? This whole system makes it more viable to just film tons of b-roll quality footage without worrying about the end result. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and this system makes it much less necessary to worry about what you're filming and why.
- anigbrowl 2y agoI mean you could say the same thing about video cameras making it too easy to shoot footage compared to film.
- fastball 2y agoYes, and it is arguably true, right? That doesn't mean digital shouldn't exist, but everything is a balance. The quality and effort put into the "average" movie has almost certainly gone down over the decades since the normalization of digital cameras. If our ability (as a society or as individuals) to filter out the slop from the rest increases in lock-step, this is a non-issue. But it seems that this not what has happened, and instead we are inundated with mind-numbing content that absorbs our time and does little to impact us in any positive way.
- anigbrowl 2y agoIf you think something is bad, all I can advise is that you stop watching it. Of course if it's easier/cheaper to make content, more content will be made, and there will be proportionately more crap around. My point is that quality is not specifically a function of the technology or workflow.
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- mrandish 2y agoUsing faster, easier or cheaper production workflows aren't significantly correlated with end product quality, other than perhaps in the obvious sense that investing a large amount of money/effort into a production might cause the investing party to take more care to ensure ROI. However, there are so many counter examples of very expensive, high-effort productions lacking artistic merit that the correlation is weak at best.
- pjc50 2y agoThinking about this, and the reasonable argument below that Netflix have also produced a number of prestige films and series that are genuinely great, I wonder if the production pipeline has a side effect: flattening the quality signal. That is, it used to be (80s/90s) a lot more obvious what the prestige/not prestige boundary was. Cheap TV content (soaps etc) was shot on video, expensive content shot on film. Now everything looks the same. Perhaps the one remaining effort signal was lighting, but Netflix seem to have chosen very flat bright lighting styles for everything now. Bad news for us chiaroscuro lovers. And even when directors do try to do that, they've often over-estimated the HDR so you get the opposite: an entire series which is too dark.
- echelon 2y agoHaving a dozen different VFX departments using different file transfer methods like FTP seems like a nightmare. But then I realized that the banks do this, and probably worse. There's one that uses Gmail to exchange documents (not financial, but important nonetheless) and uses the read receipt to determine if it has ingested the data. Replaying ingestion is marking unread.
- nimish 2y agoThis is a sign they need deep reform and good management. Many such cases in technology these days.
- alabastervlog 2y agoThe only part of that that seems crazy to me is the Gmail part. I’d want to control the mail server.
- MarceliusK 2y agoIt's amazing how often critical workflows rely on duct tape and hope
- prmoustache 2y agoI've seen people in healthcare send patient data through whatsapp to other doctors in the same hospital. It was not allowed and they had reliable corporate tools to exchange patient data, but the UX probably felt so cumbersome they'd rather face legal risks than doing it the right way.
- ahmedfromtunis 2y agoIt doesn't make it any less worse, but that was my takeaway from the Signal scandal. Of course more secure channels exist, but I'm sure the UX sucked big time!
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- unethical_ban 2y agoI looked to see if this is normal behavior for the account thinking they got hacked... but they have troll comments from 10 months ago too. Missing required medications?
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- dang 2y ago"Don't be snarky." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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- jfountain2015 2y agoIsn't this what Frame.io does just without the markup tools? They have had camera to cloud for a while.
- _m_p 2y agoI was reading about the cinematography of _Collateral_, possibly the first large budget feature film to be shot digitally, and one of the issues back in 2004 when it was made was the amount of storage required for digital video and the risk of not being able to retrieve the images from the data stores: > “We did massive testing with the hard drives, and everything was great, and then we had an experience where we shot, and when we sent in the material, they couldn’t get the information off the hard drive,” said Cameron. “So the studio went ballistic and was like, ‘There’s just no way we can we can let you guys do this.’” > The compromise was the production would record to hard drives as well as SRW tape. And unlike today, verifying the digital footage was equally cumbersome and tension-filled. > “We recorded everything two or three times on decks that we carried with us,” said Beebe. “So we were backing up, two or three times.” https://www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/michael-mann-collateral-miami-vice-interview-cinematography-1235035511/ https://www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/michael-mann-c...
- progbits 2y ago> we were backing up, two or three times So they just rediscovered what IT world knew for decades, or what am I missing?
- wodenokoto 2y agoThat you don’t film on two or three wheels at a time
- progbits 2y agoI mean they should, film can get damaged too. The reason they don't are probably because it would be too expensive, bulky and film is single-use so also wasteful. Even hobby level DSLRs have two card slots with option to write to both. Professional cameras have tons of gear strapped to them, a second drive or some link to external storage is a no-brainer.
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- gcanyon 2y agoI read through that whole article thinking, - I wonder what the UI looks like compared to tools I use now - I wonder if there will be a free tier, since my video needs are modest It never occurred to me until I reached the end that this wasn't a "enjoy this tool we made" post, but instead a "look how awesome we are" post. :-/
- Gshaheen 2y agoHa! Yes sure, but it does make sense that they’d keep something like this to themselves. Creating massive amounts of high quality content efficiently, on a global scale, with seamless global distribution is an incredible competitive advantage. I don’t see why they would provide it to anyone outside of their ecosystem. It’ll be interesting to see if they translate this to games as well.
- VWWHFSfQ 2y agoI've worked at a few different FAANG's (including this one). I've participated in some of these engineering blog posts. They will never tell you anything that is real-world relevant for you. At best, you might get some kind of _theoretical_ insight. It's because they're operating at a scale that just isn't realistic for hobby developers. But they're still engineers just the same as you and me. So they write blogs like this. And it's interesting! I love to read them.
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- thecybernerd 2y agoI wonder if Netflix will offer MPS as a service in the future for shows that are not on Netflix.
- mrandish 2y agoProbably not. One reason is that this is a competitive advantage for Netflix but I suspect the larger reason is that they created this to optimize their primary business, while operating it for other productions would be a secondary business and not mission critical. Another reason is that productions not on Netflix have other commercial options for camera to cloud production workflows (Frame.io for example). This workflow and tool set is tuned for Netflix and is probably opinionated in a variety of ways to conform with Netflix production standards and requirements. If your production is being funded by Netflix then you're incentivized to learn and use their provided tools.
- ahmedfromtunis 2y ago> I suspect the larger reason is that they created this to optimize their primary business Wasn't this how AWS started at Amazon as well?
- BhavdeepSethi 2y ago15 years ago, the first start up I worked for provided APIs for music streaming in India. One of the founders who managed all infra was in US, and so the servers (bare metal) were in LA. I still find it amusing, that it was cheaper (and faster) just to fly to India, buy bunch of portable hard drives, upload the media, fly back to US and upload the data to the file server, than uploading the media directly from India to the US server. Obviously only applies when data is in order of TBs. Later saw the same thing with AWS Snowball and Snowmobile.
- VectorLock 2y ago"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 3rd ed., p. 83. (paraphrasing Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, University of Toronto Computing Services (UTCS) circa 1985)
- MarceliusK 2y agoHow much global infrastructure has improved… but also how physical logistics can still beat the internet when you're dealing with massive datasets.
- dkh 2y agoThe technical requirements always seem to increase at the same rate as the technical advances. I've found this especially true in film/TV. Sure, by 2014ish we were shooting on solid state and had giant RAIDs on set and storage was cheaper than it ever had been, but we easily negated all of that by shooting on multiple RED cameras in raw at resolutions of 6.5k+. Terabytes of new data each day, even duplicating it before leaving took a lot of time! And then storing it at the office while letting more than 1 editor work with it at the time meant building a 36-disk ZFS server with 10GbE to each client. Just playing the footage back on a computer required a dedicated PCIe card
- Foobar8568 2y agoWe had to transfer a few 10GBs, if not 100GBs between Europe and the US back 15yo. Bandwidth was of 100KB/sec at most, I suggested to do that fly over things if the systems team didn't want to raise the priority of that transfer, after prod tried 3 times over the weekend, sadly, they changed the priority of that flow, it took still like 40h? For the initial load.
- nimish 2y agoWhat part of this makes good stories?
- poisonborz 2y agoThe time and stress saved for users.
- nimish 2y agoDoesn't seem to be working that well tbh
- MarceliusK 2y agoThe part that struck me most was how much manual, error-prone work is still common in the industry. Still, I wonder how portable this is outside Netflix. It sounds like a very vertically integrated solution.
- dkh 2y agoThere is still a lot of manual, error-prone work, even at Netflix. Netflix just has workflows that ensure so many passes are of each task are done, with so many failsafes, fallbacks, tests, checks (both human and automated), and they start doing them all earlier in the production process than most other studios so they can handle things they still didn't account for. Yes, it's pretty vertical, but essentially every big streaming platform or production company is. There's a very specific Netflix way that governs how all Netflix shows are produced. There is a very different but still meticulously standardized way that governs how all Hulu shows are produced, one for all Warner Bros. shows, etc. This is an area where being vertically integrated is totally fine. It not only makes enormous sense for these studios, but nobody outside of those environments wants or needs these workflows. Netflix's workflows are there to aid Netflix even more than their shows, and while there's a lot of excellent stuff in their workflows that most productions should utilize for efficiency/safety/whatever, there's also a ton of stuff that would make no sense to use independently.
- perfmode 2y agoWhat languages are used? The screenshot of the desktop app looks native.
- dagmx 2y agoI know some of the folks who worked on this and a big chunk is Java with some Python afaik.
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- alwinaugustin 2y agoI can see this evolving into something like AWS — a platform that offers high-end production tools to anyone willing to pay. That would democratize access to cutting-edge tech, effectively solving the tooling problem. But it still wouldn’t address the real bottleneck: compelling storytelling.
- mschuster91 2y ago> But it still wouldn’t address the real bottleneck: compelling storytelling. The problem is, storytelling is risky. Either you stick to something bland (adaptations of popular books, cartoons or videogames) and it usually gives decent returns, or you go for something completely original - at the risk of it either going boom or going bust. As your average cinema movie is a triple-digit million dollar business these days just in pure production and actor cost and double that in promo cost, it's hard to find banks to finance the production, and so the banks prefer to go with something "proven and bland" over something risky.
- mrguyorama 2y agoNetflix doesn't make "stories" or "films" or "art" or anything that impressive. They make "content", and the distinction is super important.
- sluongng 2y agoMore on Netflix's Remote Workstation setup for artists https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix-workstations-reinvent22/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix-workst...
- shubhamjain 2y agoWith the asset sizes they are talking about (hundreds of terabytes), how does it make it feasible to do this over the wire? Even with 1Gbps connection, it will take ~10 days to upload a single 100TB original camera file. And there could be several.
- chedabob 2y agoWouldn't surprise me if they had something like this in a few cities with big production teams. There must've been pipelines in place from when 35mm was the standard for movies, and crews needed to get hours of footage developed and over to various people for review each day. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-physical-aws-data-transfer-terminals-let-you-upload-to-the-cloud-faster/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-physical-aws-data-trans...
- ancientworldnow 2y agoA single file isn't 100TB - an entire production of OCF is ~200TB. A single take is typically 10-200GB depending on a variety of factors.
- i5heu 2y agoSo.. it is just a NAS with transcoding?
- ryukoposting 2y agoTo be fair, it's a really, really big NAS with an interesting use case.
- Thaxll 2y agoA NAS with ffmpeg :D
- gabriel666smith 2y ago> “… automation became imperative. The intricacies of color and framing management, along with deliverables, must be seamlessly controlled and effortlessly managed by the user, without the need for manual intervention. Therefore, we cannot lean into humans configuring JSON files behind the scenes to map camera formats into deliverables.” I’d often thought (critically) about the lack of visual diversity in Netflix output - and this is something I often see stereotypical film-enjoyers complain about. I’d never considered it as a consequence of Netflix’s sheer scale. It’s always really interesting when I discover that something I’d previously put down as an (unimaginably unimaginative) aesthetic choice might in fact be an operational choice. It makes me check myself! It sounds an incredibly complex and clever system; I can’t help but feel that applying such a strong vertical to the more creative aspects of film and tv production - such as colour grading - will ultimately prove short-sighted.
- scyzoryk_xyz 2y agoThis. “the medium is the message” Marshall McLuhan. The actual content is invariably a result of the infrastructure behind it. And it’s not just the image, it’s also what kind of scripts are written, what kind of audience insights are passed on to creative producers, what kind of creative teams are selected. Is it proving short-sighted? If you’re optimizing for cinematic art, then yeah. But they’re optimizing for subscriptions and global reach. That vertical will likely move to live-streaming, sports and other forms that retain subscribers. And on multiple global markets at the same time (not just U.S.) It’s a weird vertical, they’re quite sophisticated in their approach, but it’s surprising how they sometimes contract entire chunks out. I’ve read academic papers talking about how Netflix is a very strange disjointed thing.
- gabriel666smith 2y agoThat’s interesting. I’d love to read those papers, if you remember what they were. I do wonder if an in-house aesthetic can become ‘tacky’ in the age of global media - can trends ‘die’ when there are still billions more people to reach? And will a creative org structure like this be able to move fast enough should that happen? I don’t think we know the answer to that yet. I personally believe (maybe optimistically!) that this will be an important question even though Netflix’s natural conclusion is to move towards the subscription-retaining, low-creative products like sports that you mentioned. The problem with those entertainment products is that they have intrinsic value: if the provider is adding little value besides distribution, some (or lots) of users will pirate that content. Super apparent in sports media. Maybe it’s a naive hope, rather than a belief, but I hope / believe that because of this, companies like Netflix will be ultimately forced by users to have more idiosyncrasy in their production pipeline and output. It’ll be really interesting to find out!
- Jean-Papoulos 2y ago>Netflix has been spinning up ingest centers around the world, where drives can be dropped off, and within a matter of hours, all original camera files are uploaded into the Netflix ecosystem. Netflix is looking to sell shovels to as many people as possible, it seems.