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Overview
📖 AWS re:Invent 2025 - Revolutionize media production: Field-ready cloud solutions (AMZ307)
In this video, Jason O'Malley and Greg Young from Amazon MGM Studios demonstrate their "Studio in the Cloud" transformation, showing how they've moved film and TV production workflows to AWS. Greg showcases real examples like the LOL comedy series, where 40 camera streams were directed to AWS with under one-second latency, enabling remote directing from Los Angeles 5,000 miles away. They detail the nine-stage production workflow from principal photography to mastering, and introduce their custom Rivian R1S mobile uplink vehicle with 205 kilowatts battery power and multi-carrier connectivity. This innovation reduced dailies processing by 50%, cut transfer times from days-to-weeks to near-instant, and addresses the industry's carbon footprint where 51% comes from travel and transportation. The team completed 70 cloud productions in 2025 and aims for over 100 in 2026, aligning with Amazon's Climate Pledge to reach net zero emissions by 2040.
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Main Part
Amazon MGM Studios' Journey to Studio in the Cloud: Transforming Film and TV Production Workflows
Hey everyone, great to see you all. I hope everyone's having a great time at re:Invent. We have a fun session today. This is part of something we call the Learn from Amazon track. What we do is we find interesting stories within Amazon and bring them to you as a little bit of a value add to re:Invent so that you can see interesting ways that companies within Amazon are using AWS. My name is Jason O'Malley. I'm a Senior Partner Solutions Architect. I work on our global media and entertainment strategy team. I'm here today with Greg Young, and Greg's the Worldwide Head of Production and Post-Production Technology at Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios. We've got a lot to get into, so we'll kick it off.
One of the things I mentioned is that this is about learning from Amazon. One of the things that's been happening this week, and something you can look out for potentially later today or throughout the week, is these tracks try to bring you those insights and best practices from the kinds of projects that Amazon and other companies like Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios do to innovate and use AWS. These are like chalk talks, lightning talks like this, and breakout sessions, so you can learn more about that. This is some of the scale and numbers that Amazon operates at. This is from a recent Prime Day, and you see the word trillion up there. Hopefully it's going to be interesting to take insights in terms of how Amazon's leveraging AWS internally as well.
What we're going to talk about today is we're going to kick things off with talking about Greg and his team's workflow at Amazon MGM Studios. What they do is they have been leveraging the cloud to optimize how they do film and TV production. What that ends up being is they're looking to optimize the entire content production lifecycle and really think about it from a cloud native way. That really helps to reduce some of the inefficiencies, and even one of the things we'll get into is about how it can even reduce some of the carbon hotspots within film and TV production. Greg's going to give you a bit of a firsthand look in terms of what he and his team are doing, from things like live cloud production all the way to scripted film and TV production in remote locations.
Then we're going to go into one example of one of the innovations that they've done that really gets into that film and TV production and thinking from a cloud native way. That's the mobile uplink camera to cloud workflow. Then at the end, it'll be conclusion and next steps for wrapping up and telling you, hopefully you learned a lot, and you'll actually be able to see one of the things we talked about in person. Before I end off, really quick, how many people are from film and media, and how many are just general? Okay, so we got one or two. Great. That's what we expected. It's a re:Invent conference, but this talk is going to be thinking about things about taking legacy business processes and applying them to workflow. It's going to be applicable, and you'll have learnings that you'll be able to apply regardless. With that, I'm going to pass it off to Greg to tell you a little bit more about his work.
Thanks, Jason. As Jason mentioned, today's talk focuses on Amazon MGM Studios' shift to studio in the cloud and how we further our sustainability goals, as well as reduce cost and time that it takes to produce content faster globally. What you're seeing on screen is a real world example of studio in the cloud in action. This show is called LOL. It's an unscripted comedy. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend seeing it. It's gone for over 70 seasons and it films worldwide. We call this a multi-camera format show. This one particularly is out of the Nordics, and the multi-camera format show means there's 40 to 50 cameras on a show, which means lots of broadcast trucks, local storage rentals, lots of equipment rentals, generators coming in, and lots of content being produced that needs to be shipped to partners all over the world through couriers or digital transfers.
How do we approach efficiency for this show? Normally these 40 camera streams would be directed to disc recorders or storage on premise, but instead we decided to direct these camera streams directly to AWS. This then allowed for a team back in Los Angeles to remote direct, playback, edit, and review 5,000 miles away. 40 camera streams delivered in under one second of latency. We were the first to prove this capability on this type of unscripted show, and essentially we're able to reduce days to weeks in transfer times, as well as our on-premise footprint. Our talent and creatives were back in LA doing some of the post work for this show, but nothing stops those talent and creatives from being anywhere in the world, even in the comfort of their living room.
I know there's some folks in the audience in media and entertainment. For those that aren't, maybe we stop and talk a little bit about what is Studio in the Cloud and then generally what is the production and post-production
process. So we start with really nine workflows and we start on the left in production. That's really principal photography and ingestion. That's where you're on location, your cameras are out and you're capturing that day's footage. And then we move to the dailies process where we're creating a lot of unedited raw footage and we need to do sanity checks on that footage each day.
As we move further down into the post process, we start to get into editorial, and that's where you're really taking that unedited raw footage and starting to craft the narrative of the show. Moving forward into conform, generally these media files are pretty large and they're tough to deal with unless you can deal with them in a low res format, but at some point we need to combine the low res back with the high res as we move forward into VFX or visual effects. As many of you have heard of, that's where you start to kind of enhance the story and add a lot of the aesthetics to it.
In color grading, that's really where you're ensuring that color and creative consistency aligns across the show itself. In sound, generally you have a lot of audio files that need to come together ultimately to create a soundtrack. And lastly in mastering and QC, that's where what you see on screen is the final deliverable and what's being delivered to your theaters or your streaming providers. Now that we shared a little bit about what looked like a really nice workflow across nine workflows, in reality, this is what it looks like. It's stretched across hundreds of vendors worldwide, trucks, generators, storage rentals, shipping, carriers, couriers, and it doesn't just go workflow to workflow. Sometimes it jumps between editorial to sound, sound back to conform, VFX, all over the place.
And so today, in our current world, we were doing a lot of the upload to AWS just in archives. So as the show wraps, let's upload to AWS and ensure we're archiving that footage for future use. Instead, we decided to flip that on its head and let's upload that content as early as we can, as close to principal photography as possible. What that allowed us to do was unlock a world of bringing global creatives into the cloud. It took a little bit more than that though, so we needed to work with our vendors like our Avids and Colorfronts and Adobes and Black Magic and others to take those applications and tools that creatives know and love and make them as performant in the cloud as if it was running underneath your desk, so we moved all those tools to the cloud. And ultimately the end goal was instead of shipping content all around the world to creatives, we brought the creatives to the content.
Cloud-Native Architecture and Sustainability: Reducing Carbon Footprint Through Remote Production
Now, I know that most folks aren't as maybe familiar with film and TV workflows, so we'll talk a little bit about what that can look like, especially from a Studio in the Cloud perspective. So from a legacy perspective, you can imagine you're filming a film or TV show and you're on location, so you're not going to be near your comforts of power, connectivity to offload it. So what that would traditionally mean is you're going to take the media, you're going to offload it to multiple hard drives, so that you can ship them in parallel so they don't get lost in transit. So you're going to spend a lot of time copying media, that's one card to another. Then you start to think about, then you're going to take it because you're not near a home base, you're going to transfer it back to a studio. And so that's going to take time, it's going to take resources, you're probably going to be using a gasoline-powered vehicle, and so it's just overall not very efficient.
And then, once it gets to its destination, then you're going to have to take that shuttle drive and then copy it back to say, like a SAN or a storage array, so that the creatives can start to work on it. And so you see, across that life cycle, there's just lots of opportunities for optimization from a business standpoint and efficiency. And so if we start to look at what does this look like if you take it from a cloud native perspective, and especially with a bit of a preview of an example of what we'll talk about with Greg and the team later. So if you look at a Studio in the Cloud workflow, obviously you're still going to be on location, but then one of the innovations that they've done is that instead of going from copying from media to media, there's an opportunity to then go direct to Amazon S3, to an S3 bucket, so you copy that media, it's automatically secure, it's durably stored.
And so the way that's possible is you can use cellular, you can use satellite internet connectivity when you're away from a core centralized location. And then it's in Amazon S3, as we said, durably stored, secure, and then creatives can start to work on it using a remote editing desktop. And so that's really that next form of evolution that Greg and team are going to work through. So we start to look at from an architecture standpoint of what this can look like. So obviously, we see our familiar elements from the previous slide.
We're on location, we've got our truck, and we're offloading. Then, from an architecture perspective, one of the things MGM Studios does is they have a shared services VPC, and so that is going to handle things like brokering, software licensing, and doing hash validation to make sure that content is arriving securely and it's not corrupted. Obviously, with a film or a TV show, that's very important. So that overall security and other shared services happens.
When we start to look at a production-specific account, you can spin that up so that the environment has their own virtual private cloud just for that production. One of the first aspects is going to be taking that footage and uploading it to Amazon S3. That could be either direct to S3 with a native client or with a partner solution like Aspera. Then what happens is you start to move that. You've got it in S3, and then you're going to move it to a shared storage system. What you're going to do is copy it from S3, and in this case, one of the solutions that the studios team uses is from a partner called Avid, and they have a Nexus shared storage.
What this does is it allows Windows computers to network attach to it in the cloud, and then they can collaborate. Some of those workflows that Greg talked about earlier, from the video editor, the colorist, and the person that's handling the conforming at the end, can all collaborate on that with an entirely cloud-based workflow. This also enables, because it's in the cloud, remote editors and contributors and freelancers to log in and start to work on it from wherever they are, rather than being as tied to a single location.
It also opens up that oftentimes you're not going to have everyone in a central team. You might have specialists like a visual effects house that is working with it as well. It offers the opportunity that then they can get access to the footage, do their specialty work, and then pull it back into the system. Now at the end, it started in S3, and then it can be archived in S3. You can either do that with something like a lifecycle policy, going to Amazon S3 Glacier, which is designed for affordable long-term storage, or you could potentially copy it to an archival-specific bucket.
Really where it comes end to end, as you start to see, is that it's been in the cloud the entire time, and then that's also where it's going to be delivered with the Amazon Studios feature delivery pipeline. Instead of going to that slide we showed before with Greg, where it's copying back and forth and it's repeating all these different on-premises workflows, you start to see how everyone can start to access that media in more of a centralized cloud, virtualized type of workflow and the benefits that that can come as well.
One of the benefits as well, we talked about efficiency from a business standpoint, from a cost standpoint, and the other is from actually a carbon goals and climate goals type of standpoint. One of the ways this comes into play, at least for Amazon, is that Amazon has the Climate Pledge, and so this is a commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions across all of our operations by 2040. That's going to include Greg and team at Amazon MGM Studios. But it's really, what we're seeing, this is also just a vision for the industry. That's what the Climate Pledge also speaks to, is that it's a collective effort for the whole industry to share best practices and to join together to move beyond and change workflows.
Where that comes into play is when you look at a classic film and TV production, 51% of the average carbon footprint is just from travel and transportation. This comes from a group called Albert, and they specialize in looking at the film and TV industry's environmental impact. One of the things they go on to say is that for what the production and the industry should start to do is that looking forward, they should look to reduce their usage of diesel generators and move to a way of rethinking, so you're constantly evaluating when and where can I start to reduce the amount of travel and transportation I'm doing. With that, I'll tee up Greg to talk about one way MGM Studios is thinking about that.
The Mobile Uplink Solution: A Custom Rivian R1S Enabling Studio in the Cloud Anywhere
Sure, thanks, Jason. We talked a little bit about challenges in our journey to studio in the cloud before. So I give you a custom upfit Rivian R1S, 205 kilowatts of combined battery power, 1,000 watts of solar power, mobile internet connectivity across multiple carriers and different technologies, and an onboard ingest computer, essentially giving you access to full studio in the cloud, full, just essentially a video village in a mobile sustainable offering.
But why did we build it? Well, it was built off of a real-world scenario. In our first season of Rings of Power, we were filming remote countryside, and again a big format show, lots of media being created, and difficulty and lack of bandwidth.
With that challenge, it also took us long delays in getting from principal photography to our other downstream workflows, sometimes from days even to weeks of shipping. We wanted to create an offering that could go anywhere, run on location for weeks at a time, provide multi-carrier bandwidth upload capability, and the ability to work directly within at any place in any location.
Let's talk a little bit about some of the benefits. Some early benefits that we've seen are really the ability to process dailies almost 50% faster. We talked about those nine workflows early on. We've also seen the shift in, I like this editor in Mexico and then maybe next week I like this editor in Madrid. Doing that when you're renting and shipping and delivering equipment and ordering and signing POs is very difficult to do. In these automated cloud workflows, it's easy to do and it really just takes minutes to spin up in your local region, wherever you're filming, doing principal or post.
We've seen days to weeks of savings in our production timelines overall. Coming with faster compute, we can run editorial faster, rendering faster, in various different workloads, and again we're light on our footprint of hardware on location and what we're needing to rent and deliver in terms of hardware, storage, generators and things of that nature. This year we've completed in 2025 about 70 productions worldwide across multiple different workflows. We've built out four to five workflows this year. We've got another, let's say four or so workflows that we're looking to build out next year and we're aiming to do over 100 productions in the cloud in 2026. I'm really excited for what's to come.
Greg, thank you so much for coming today. I hope everyone had, you know, hope you took away something even if you're not from a film and TV perspective, just as seeing things of like you probably have legacy business processes in your industry and taking a step back and thinking, how could I leverage cloud technology to skip some of those inefficiencies within the business. Now, my favorite part about this week is normally I would say, hey, here's this QR code, look at this website. But we actually brought this Rivian, modified Rivian that Greg's been talking about over here, and it's actually right over there. I can see it from there. So if you just look for the AWS sustainability cube in the sky, you can go over, check it out, see it firsthand. It's really impressive and really interesting to see in person.
And in case you're around for a little bit, the rest of the day, you can go over to Caesar's Forum, and if you want to hear about anything else from Amazon, there's a great house-like setup where you can see things about other Amazon companies using AWS inside of it. So with that, I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of re:Invent. Thanks for coming. Please do leave us a feedback in the app. Let us know what you liked. It helps us choose what to do next year. And thanks again. Thank you.
; This article is entirely auto-generated using Amazon Bedrock.
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