At the National Association of Broadcasters Show last month, Dell launched “Dell Create,” a consulting practice dedicated to helping our media & entertainment customers transition to a new, groundbreaking datacenter model that will define the next generation of enterprises making and distributing content. We also partnered with Red Giant to premier their latest short film, Spy vs. Guy. The film and the behind-the-scenes movie showcased how Dell Precision workstations and our partners’ software democratize the content creation process by allowing Hollywood-caliber content (including whiz-bang visual effects) to be produced by small VFX shops.
For more about how Dell and Red Giant walked the walk, check out Behind-the-Scenes Spy vs. Guy and more from the filmmakers.
This is just the beginning. In fact, stay tuned to Dell.com/Precision for some exciting workstation news later this week. Over the coming year, we will continue to offer new hardware and cloud-based tools that empower artists even further. Meanwhile, we are working with some of the most prominent content creators in the world to design frameworks that make it easier than ever to quickly design and manage workflows comprised of the vendors that our customers choose. Because of our design approach, we also make it possible for our customers to change workflows and repurpose hardware projects on-the-fly, while avoiding lock-in.
Check out the presentation I gave at NAB that introduces the CoMPaaS Compute model and why it will be a game changer: Introducing Dell Create
In college, I had an internship at an old-school tape-based Post Production house, and remember an editor predicting that within a few years editing would be computer-based. He said it with an air of mystery and foreboding, and it seemed like a notion divorced from the world which still ran more on gears and levers than microchips. I found myself on the front lines of the revolution that followed, building technology for feature films and broadcasters for about seventeen years prior to joining Dell. I am one of those journeymen that founded and ran services companies and tells war stories of how my first editing system had 28MB of RAM and was considered cutting edge.
I’ve seen a lot change.
Moore’s Law dictated dizzying increases in compute power during my tenure in “the biz.” Along the way, advances in IT made it possible to tear down walls between Post Production and visual effects, and then between Post Production and Production – all over a decade or so.
Technically speaking, I’ve lived through a pretty profound era of change, and I’d like to think I helped push it along.
But like that editor who portended the coming of digital technology, I believe we are about to see something far more profound that will occur at a much faster pace. Much of what led me to join Dell was my gut feeling two years ago that we were about to see a radical shift in media and entertainment technologies to the datacenter. That shift is happening right now.
Dell’s Kevin Walker did a great job summarizing What " Metamorphosis" Means to Dell at NAB. In short, the rising expectations of the consumer are driving a need for more efficiency and flexibility in order to offer more content across more distribution channels…more, more, more! The ability to offer what the consumer wants is being dictated by the quality of the increasingly integrated datacenter technologies…the back-end IT, the datacenter.
Work needs to be done to enable an ecosystem of 3rd party hardware and solutions to work better together, and to form elegant harmonies.
With solutions like Dell Create, Dell is leading the charge.