>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCube, covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. (techno music) >> Welcome back to NAB, live from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with theCube. Join me in welcoming our next guest, Rich Welsh CEO of Sundog Media Toolkit. Hey Rich welcome to theCube. >> Hi, thank you for having me. >> Great to have you. So, first and foremost, now that I got all my tongue twitches out of the way, I have to ask you, what is a sundog? >> A sundog is actually a weather affect. It's an optical illusion caused by ice crystals in cirrus clouds. And the crystals are hexagonal and they diffract the light and you get these two, they're called mock suns, or parhelians, and the aboriginal word for that is a sundog. And so, that's where that comes from. And because we're in the cloud and we're like hexagons, we have a hexagonal user inter-face in our system. So we thought this was a perfect name for the company. >> Very unique. So tell us a little bit more. Sundog is a cloud-native solution for post-production in the cloud. >> Yes. >> You were founded in 2013. Give us a little bit more of an understanding of what you're doing for post-production in the cloud. >> Okay, so the system is built around running the kind of processes that require a lot of heavy-lifting and need to scale, such as very complex image manipulation processes, restoration, format conversions, working with uncompressed content, high-dynamic range, 4K, high frame rate. These are things that become much easier in a cloud environment and you scale up and down with the workload, and how peaky demand of a production. Obviously productions come along, they do a load of work and then they shut down again. So it's really built around that kind of ability to scale in a very peaky environment. >> So given that, you mentioned 4K. There was the live stream from The International Space Station today via 4K here to Las Vegas, amazing. 4K, HG, UHG, AK, massive opportunities, generating massive content that requires agility, speed, et cetera, et cetera. Talk to us about really what the genesis was for Sundog. What opportunity did you see in the market to create this company? >> So my background is operations in post-production distribution. I worked for Dolby and then Technicolor, and while I was doing that work, I found that there was often issues again with the kind of workloads where the formats were constantly increasing, I mean, we see that now, more formats than ever in terms of not just the things people might think of in terms of downstream tablets, mobile, and so on, but even in the cinema, we have massive amounts of different picture formats, sound formats, and so on. And it makes that whole content creation process so much more complex. We felt, Chris Ralph, who is my business partner and the co-founder of Sundog, and we'd worked together in that environment, but we always had machines in a machine room in the basement. And that really was a big limiting factor to what you could do and how quickly you could adapt to new formats and new requirements for the customers, and just the workflows they may want to suddenly adopt. So we felt that building something in the cloud gave us a lot of flexibility to be able to adapt to those different workflows, to new formats very quickly because you don't worry so much about the actual difficulty of doing the processing, you're not buying boxes anymore, so speed of processing becomes a function of how much of the cloud you want to use. So it's very simple to be able to go well, if for a 4K show we have way more compute power just to keep us going at the same speed as we would have for an HD, when then as we move into things like AK, high-dynamic range, high frame rate, these things are all coming along. You can just adapt more or less instantaneously to those things as they happen without having the burden of capital expenditure and limitations of whatever you already have installed. >> So give us an idea, you mentioned cinema and I know that you work with Hollywood-level cinema organizations. You talked about the speed, the flexibility, the agility, that they get. Walk us through an example of a film studio. What's the transition like for them moving post-production to the cloud? Is it a straightforward process, multiple steps involved? >> No, there are definitely multiple steps involved. I wouldn't say it's straightforward. It's maybe not quite as difficult as people would think, but there are a lot of factors that you need to consider when you're moving to the cloud. I mean, the first obvious one is you have to move the data in. So traditionally, a broadband infrastructure is going to be something that you have to invest in over a fairly long period of time to get good cost-effective bandwidth when you're moving uncompressed data and particularly if you're now moving up and down to the cloud, but we're seeing telecoms providers moving to much more flexible business models basically. So they're installing very high bandwidth fiber, but then you have the actual amount of data that you want to move on-demand. These kind of models are enabling people to move their post-production to the cloud. And the next thing, obviously, is security. People do have concerns about security. But with that said, actually the really big cloud providers have worked very hard to lock down that element. And in fact, there are many other industries whose security requirements are very stringent. You know, military applications, pharmaceuticals, banking, oil and gas. You can imagine all these very high-value industries that require really good security. And the big public clouds are geared towards that, so actually, you can have a lot of confidence as a studio or a broadcaster that if you implement it correctly, you can have really good, I would argue better than facility security, in a cloud environment, because they're actually dealing with stuff that cannot be lost. >> Right. We were actually, theCube, just at the Amazon Web Services Summit in San Francisco last week, and that was kind of a recurring theme that the security concerns really have been quite mitigated in the public cloud. Give us an idea in terms of maybe reducing the time from shot to post-production to actually showing a cinema in the theaters. How much reduction can a cinema, or film studio expect by moving to the cloud? >> Well, I mean, you can get incredible amounts of reduction because now if you can scale to that workload, let's say a big international release feature film might have three, 400 versions that will go out to cinemas, those versions in their current kind of paradigm have to be made manually in boxes, and with operators and then they have to be watched and qualified to make sure they're going to work, and then they get shipped to the theater. If you imagine moving that workflow wholesale to the cloud and we have done that work with some of the studios, now if you can get all of the elements together up front instead of having several weeks of work to get that out of the door and into theaters, you can literally do it in hours. There's no real limitation to the amount of compute resource that you would use in that scenario, certainly not going to trouble a really big data provider like Amazon, AWS. So you can get the assets out very quickly, but then you're actually able to leverage other features of the cloud such as content delivery networks to push those files to the cinemas. So in a real like joined up workflow in that way, I mean, we're not doing all of those things yet, but we will get there I'm absolutely certain and these things can take the release cycle from weeks down to days or hours. >> So dramatic, dramatic savings. Talk to us about, before we talk about the underlying infrastructure of Sundog, walk us through where Sundog is in that entire production pipeline. >> Okay, well actually Sundog's quite a broad platform in terms of the feature set, so we find the systems used by different productions at various different stages and that can be upfront in terms of dailies, and visual effects approvals, it can be right back at the distribution end when you're making all your foreign language versions, dubbed subtitles, and so on. And then we have a lot of processes which would typically take place in the middle of the post-production phase with things like image clean-up, de-noisers, we have super resolution converters, and actually a lot of tools that aren't available in hardware, simply because it's been very difficult to get a hardware platform that could reasonably process those elements in any amount of time. Again, we're finding that the cloud is becoming an environment for productizing those really complex algorithms and image processing techniques that just have not been available to creatives up till now. >> So with the customer journey, this transition that we talked about, what does, under the hood of Sundog in the cloud, compute, storage, networking, tell us about this ecosystem? >> So we took the approach from the start that we didn't want to deal with the storage element, that was for two reasons. The one is that customers really want to control their content themselves. So we felt if we could simply point the system to their storage, then that would be a much easier way for them to have to confidence that they know where their assets are and they're in control of them. So we work in a hybrid setup where you can have your assets stored anywhere you want. In a cloud, it will have to be a cloud environment, and then our system authenticates to it. Now the system itself is in Amazon, so all the compute, and data-base resource, and then all the kind of dynamic features around automation and so on, are built on the Amazon AWS platform, but the data may exist elsewhere so it might be in Amazon, it might be in Amazon S3 storage, but it could equally be somewhere else in the world in a different data center, it be on-prem in a cloud store that you've built yourself. So our architecture really is to provision and orchestrate that resource and scale, to provide the tools, so we have all these workflows with different manufacturers tools in there that you can call on-demand. But then when it comes to actually processing it, the data starts and finishes where you want it to go and gives you complete control. So it's quite a different architecture to a lot of solutions that are currently out there where you really have a box in the cloud with the storage attached to the box, and that's kind of it. >> Well not only do you have a very unique name with a great meaning, but you also seem to have quite differentiated technology. We thank you so much for stopping by theCube, we wish you the best of luck with Sundog, and have a great rest of your day three at NAB. >> Thank you very much. >> We want to thank you for watching. Again we are live at NAB in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, stick around we'll be right back. (techno music)