Real-time Production Workflows with Dell Technologies and Unreal Engine
Download PDFFri, 02 Feb 2024 22:58:16 -0000
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Content production has changed
Powered by technologies like Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, the creative landscape of Film, Episodic, & Live TV Broadcast has been changed forever.
With the advent of Virtual Production, which is essentially an extension of both Game Development and Post-Production practices, we have fundamentally changed the way that we create and interact with our content during production.
Due to this shift, many production facilities have been challenged by the exponential growth of content. Data continues to grow at an alarming scale, driven by increasing resolutions, expected quality of assets, and the sheer volume of content being produced to meet viewers’ insatiable demands.
Dell Technologies and Epic Games have come together to help solve this challenge, developing solutions that enable media companies to deliver massively scalable architectures that remain easy to manage, even at petabyte scale, and allow data to flow between datacenters, the edge, and the cloud.
How do we help?
This solution brings together one of the most trusted names in media storage – PowerScale OneFS – and one of the biggest names in Virtual Production technology – Unreal Engine.
In the past, when working on levels / scenes in game engines like Unreal, all data required for playback had to be localised (copied to) to the machine being used to get the response times expected. This meant tasks required lengthy copies down to the workstation and lengthy saves back up to the storage when complete.
Faster ethernet technologies (10, 25, 50, 100GbE) are much more common in both workstations and access level switching. When you combine this shift in network throughput with PowerScale OneFS All-Flash nodes, Unreal editors can access their content simultaneously on PowerScale storage while also enabling modelers, riggers, texture artists, and so on to create and amend assets.
While all this live creativity is happening, on-set editors and colorists can perform ultra high-speed editing tasks on the footage to allow the Director of Photography to visualize the shot they want in real time. Fundamentally, this solution keeps actors acting, creatives creating, developers iterating, and directors directing - without having to worry about the constraints of the technology behind the shoot.
Solution Benefits
Real-time edit
Enable more creatives to work simultaneously on more assets than ever before when using Unreal Engine with PowerScale All-Flash nodes, eliminating bottlenecks and driving creative productivity.
Build repositories
Build titles and levels quicker and more reliably using PowerScale All-Flash nodes as a lightning-fast centralized Artefact and Cache store.
Version control
Grow your production version control storage without causing downtime to your developers / editors by using PowerScale as the depot storage for your facility.
Unreal Engine
Unreal Engine 5 is the latest generation of Unreal Engine, a complete suite of creation tools for game development, architectural and automotive visualization, linear film and television content creation, broadcast and live event production, training and simulation, and other real-time applications. With UE5, game developers and creators across industries can realize next-generation real-time 3D content and experiences with greater freedom, fidelity, and flexibility than ever before.
Dell Technologies
At Dell Technologies, we believe great storytelling comes from creative people empowered by advanced technology. Our solutions for storytellers span the workflow, built with leading technologies across storage, servers, networking, workstations, displays, and partnerships with key media software and services vendors. These solutions provide media professionals with the foundation to continue driving innovation without technology getting in the way of the art, so they can deliver more powerful stories faster.
Author: Andy Copeland, Global Solutions Architect - Media & Entertainment