Staying in the picture
Staying in the picture
Nov 01, 2004: The Australian film industry has positioned itself to earn a greater share of work on blockbuster movies such as Lord of the Rings and The Last Samurai with the launch of a super-fast broadband network to link Australian post-production and digital content companies with Hollywood studios. Stuart Finlayson reports.
Australia has long been a desirable destination for movie moguls to film their big budget blockbusters, with the Matrix trilogy and the most recent Star Wars film examples of Hollywood decanting to Australia, with lower production costs, as well as the excellent locations, a key contributor to such films being made on these shores.
Until recently, the post-production community in Australia was at something of a disadvantage when it came to securing work on such big-budget extravaganzas, but that scenario is now being turned on its head, thanks to the introduction of a super fast broadband network that is designed specifically to meet the needs of the film production houses without breaking the bank.
cine.net is the brainchild of Tony Clark, a director of Australian visual effects specialist Rising Sun Pictures, largely out of frustration that the pricing models offered by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were making it nigh on impossible for companies such as Rising Sun to afford the high speed links so critical to their business.
"It is not the technology that is unique about cine.net, but how it is designed, deployed and charged," explains Clark. "cine.net is based on standard technologies. It's a Layer 2/3 network, with a combination of ethernet technologies and a routed layer.
What makes it unique is that the network has a pricing model that is geared towards users with very different demand profiles from the typical business.
"For instance, Rising Sun runs its 20 megabit per second link at a yearly average of sixty kilobits per second. However, when we're in production, we regularly burst the link to its full capacity for hours at a time as we deliver our completed work to clients.
Standard pricing models expect clients to create sustained loads for long periods. For example, at one stage, we were quoted $120,000 to install a 10 Mbps link into our Sydney office. Because it operates with shared infrastructure, cine.net now provides Rising Sun with Internet access and office interconnection that is much faster for a fraction of that cost."
Generally, telecommunications companies prices the kind of burst-oriented performance required by the film industry beyond the means of companies like Rising Sun. But what cine.net has done is aggregated the traffic from a number of like businesses to carry it over one network, thereby striking a deal that is extremely competitive for all those involved. Also, companies using cine.net do not pay for traffic between customers on the network which is a real benefit to companies that are collaborating on larger projects.
The nuts and bolts of it
Licensed carrier Agile Communications has leveraged its national Tier-1 broadband backbone into the cine.net project. Agile has provided cine.net project construction and network management services.
The network combines optical fibre, licensed microwave and unlicensed microwave assets with a gigabit switching core. All clients have a choice of either managed or unmanaged firewall services. They peer at a common point to exchange traffic without crossing a charged barrier.
cine.net's Adelaide presence consists of a fibre optic backbone servicing the Kent Town post-production district, the CBD and Mercury Cinema, 100Mbps microwave services to selected clients and a microwave radio system to support rapid deployment of services to 10Mbps within a 5km radius from the CBD.
cine.net's Sydney presence emanates from the AAPT data centre at Haymarket and connects to Points of Presence (POPs) in Moore Park, East Redfern and other screen media facilities.
"The network has a low cost path between Sydney and Adelaide over which we have predictable latency and guaranteed performance," adds Clark. "This makes it excellent for services such as streaming MPEG video for remote colour grading or previews.
cine.net has shared file serving between all connected companies with more than a terabyte of shared storage. This facilitates companies to work together to tackle projects that would ordinarily be beyond their reach.
"Also, cine.net has a WI-FI network that allows people to roam between facilities and yet stay online in their home networks. The film industry is very mobile, so people spend a lot of time working from other facilities for sound, video editing or other roles. We have very wide Wi-Fi coverage that reaches every connected company and a number of sites in the Adelaide CBD."
A generational leap
cine.net has already enabled a massive increase in business for Rising Sun. Last year, it delivered an immediate return by helping the company secure prestigious post-production work on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Indeed, in the short time it has been using the network, the multi-million dollar company has doubled in size.
Effectively, the substantial investment made by the South Australian State Government into cine.net has already more than paid for itself, virtually from day one, by nderpinning millions of dollars in business for the South Australian film industry.
The network is a generational leap beyond ADSL. With Internet connection speeds as fast as 1 gigabit per second (Gbps), cine.net is able to transfer massive film files from Australia to LA in a matter of seconds. It allows Rising Sun to transfer an average of 60Gb of data each day- equivalent to more than 90 compact disks-to meet the needs of its Hollywood-based customers.
"Nowadays Hollywood regularly looks beyond the post-production facilities that had clustered around its studios during the 20th century," says Clark. "The traditional method for transfer from facilities like ours to our clients was to send them on high density data tapes. This was slow and unreliable, as we frequently saw dropouts and lost frames along the way. It added a time overhead of 3-4 days to get the tape from Adelaide to LA, which saw us left out of all the work that was time critical in production."
The shift to electronic transfer has made a huge change in the type and amount of work Rising Sun is able to undertake and it now regularly complete projects in the last hours before the producers complete the film.
"The actual advantage of overcoming the distance barrier is that the time zone difference with the US becomes a benefit to Australia. We can take a brief in their afternoon (our morning), do work through their night (our business day) and deliver it in their morning (our close of business). This leads to a real advantage in getting the work done and client service as long as you can actually deliver the work to the client.
"cine.net gives us the means to deliver work to our US clients quicker than our competition across town from them, while not compromising the quality of work or service. The advantage of the time zone offset is something that you can't take away without moving the country into another time zone!" remarks Clark.
"This advantage becomes sustainable because early adoption embeds advanced business processes and deep skills within our companies. It can also build cine.net-enabled collaborations between them. This puts us a long way ahead of offshoring destinations that typically provide low-cost processing for low-complexity tasks," he adds.
The experts' verdict
Internationally successful director Scott Hicks (Shine, Hearts in Atlantis) has commended the State Government for supporting the development of cine.net. "It has removed a roadblock. We have a cluster of highly proficient digital effects and post-production companies that will collectively benefit from this piece of infrastructure.
These companies work at the highest level in the entertainment industry already, so this shared infrastructure improves their ability to share facilities and service clients internationally.
"For example, on Hearts in Atlantis, I had a composer in Toronto, a recording studio in London, the sound mix in Sydney, the picture edit in Adelaide and the studio in Los Angeles, so it was a truly global production. Over time, this kind of infrastructure will facilitate more communication at that level."
Award-winning filmmaker Mario Andreacchio has already factored cine.net into planning for his next film, Two Brothers Running, expected to start shooting in Africa before the end of this year. "cine.net provides a way for us to connect to South Africa and, once I'm back here editing, I can connect to international partners in London, Paris and LA," he says.
Rising Sun's Clark concludes: "The leading edge of filmmaking and post-production is always advancing, so cine.net equips Australian companies to stay at the forefront."
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