[HN Gopher] Netflix's Media Production Suite
___________________________________________________________________
Netflix's Media Production Suite
Author : MattSayar
Score : 238 points
Date : 2025-04-01 01:02 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (netflixtechblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (netflixtechblog.com)
| fastball wrote:
| The tech is cool, but it seems like the main result of having
| such a pipeline is that Netflix has been able to produce an
| incredible amount of low-effort schlock that mostly lacks soul
| and artistic merit.
| pests wrote:
| I remember reading once how all Netflix content is really meant
| for phones or smaller screens. Simple shots, not much
| background detail, lots of face closeups etc.
|
| I remember when being made by Netflix was a unique and cool
| thing, it didn't last long until it meant probably-slop.
| ksynwa wrote:
| A lot of them are also meant to "second screen worthy" where
| they run in the background while your attention is mainly
| focused on some other task like playing a video game.
| pests wrote:
| I have never been able to second screen, I just can't focus
| on my PC while listening to something. It's literally white
| noise to me. I do understand people do this though. When I
| do watch media seriously, I pay attention and keep off my
| devices.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| Yeah my attention during second screening is split such
| that I'm now doing two things _terribly_ instead of one
| thing well. I've decided to only have music or something
| equally non intrusive in the background instead of second
| screening a show/video/podcast.
| pests wrote:
| I use music too but it can't have too many vocals. I will
| start to pay attention and get distracted. Similar to how
| I can't fall asleep with a TV on, I'm still going to
| listen to it.
| sepositus wrote:
| I barely even remember the last one that I watched let alone
| enjoyed. I guess it was Arcane which is a total fluke.
| theWreckluse wrote:
| That was probably the plan. Except they probably expect a
| higher fluke rate.
| klodolph wrote:
| Arcane is one of the most expensive Netflix series. Not that
| budget is a panacea.
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| This is exactly how I'd imagine the dreck on netflix is made
| :).
| mpalmer wrote:
| Yes, strange to have so much and still feel like you'e lost
| something.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Some C-levels have gone for the "quantity has a quality all of
| its own" philosophy of media production.
|
| My personal experience with netflix has been that a good filter
| for 'quality' is what specific TV series and documentaries
| various 'scene' groups in the warez/torrent community consider
| worth ripping and properly encoding.
|
| There's a certain amount of manual effort that's required to
| properly encode a ripped netflix or amazon prime series. People
| who do this strictly for street cred in the piracy community
| generally don't waste their time on schlock.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Are you serious? Have you watched _Adolescence_? It 's got more
| soul and artistic merit than practically anything else I've
| ever seen. And that was just last week.
|
| _Maid_? _The Queen 's Gambit_? _Baby Reindeer_? _The Crown_?
| _Ripley_? _BoJack Horseman_?
|
| Sure they make a lot of schlock too, because they're a business
| and that's what _most of their audience wants_.
|
| But I don't see how you could possibly criticize them for that
| when they continue to put out some pretty astonishingly
| artistic and soulful stuff.
| fastball wrote:
| You don't need this pipeline to produce 6 shows over a
| decade. Said another way, they almost certainly would not
| have bothered to build this system if the purpose was mainly
| to produce the shows you mention. The reason these systems
| exist is to enable the creation of hundreds or thousands of
| productions.
| sofixa wrote:
| House of Cards, The Diplomat, Kaleidoscope, Lincoln Lawyer,
| The End of the Fucking World, etc etc
| crazygringo wrote:
| Those were just six examples. There are many more.
|
| But OK yes, Netflix produces a lot of volume because that's
| also what its viewers want. Are you saying that's a bad
| thing?
|
| Sometimes people get home from an exhausting stressful day
| at work and they just need to relax with some mindless
| entertainment. And that's OK. Not everything has to be art.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| So you're their target audience, enjoy.
| blinded wrote:
| Lincoln Lawyer?
| duped wrote:
| I mean if we go by volume of awards nominations it seems like
| they're fine in the artistic merit department
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Having worked on both quality and junk film productions I
| assure you the editing workflow is not the determinant of
| artistic quality. No film or TV program has ever been improved
| by the editor(s) trying to build their own NAS or hack a
| version control system together.
| fastball wrote:
| It's not just editing though, right? This whole system makes
| it more viable to just film tons of b-roll quality footage
| without worrying about the end result. As they say, necessity
| is the mother of invention, and this system makes it much
| less necessary to worry about what you're filming and why.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I mean you could say the same thing about video cameras
| making it too easy to shoot footage compared to film.
| fastball wrote:
| Yes, and it is arguably true, right? That doesn't mean
| digital shouldn't exist, but everything is a balance. The
| quality and effort put into the "average" movie has
| almost certainly gone down over the decades since the
| normalization of digital cameras.
|
| If our ability (as a society or as individuals) to filter
| out the slop from the rest increases in lock-step, this
| is a non-issue. But it seems that this not what has
| happened, and instead we are inundated with mind-numbing
| content that absorbs our time and does little to impact
| us in any positive way.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| If you think something is bad, all I can advise is that
| you stop watching it. Of course if it's easier/cheaper to
| make content, more content will be made, and there will
| be proportionately more crap around. My point is that
| quality is not specifically a function of the technology
| or workflow.
| panick21_ wrote:
| That's just your avg elitism. The idea that the world is
| better by making the creation of art expensive so that
| only a small group of elite people is nonsense.
|
| Effort of course went down that's clearly a good thing.
| As for quality, before you needed to get enough return to
| pay for the expensive equipment and process, so likely
| you only do it for very few project. So on some abstract
| sense maybe 'quality' did go down, but that isn't bad as
| the total amount of high quality goes up far more.
|
| See the massive amount of great TV that have happened
| since digital cameras.
|
| > slop
|
| What's slop for you is somebody else's favorite show.
|
| Art doesn't have to 'impact us in a positive way'
| whatever that means. You are not a better person for
| having watched "Lawrence of Arabia". And in the past most
| people didn't watch "Lawrence of Arabia" but generic TV
| shows.
|
| Personally I can easily filter the 'slop' (ie thinks I
| don't care about) so given how much better the ability is
| to select what to watch. On demand media libraries,
| recommendation systems, digital word of mouth and so on.
| In the past there were few TV channels and only a few
| movies in theaters at the same time.
|
| So the total access to high quality content has gone up
| exponentially.
| mrandish wrote:
| Using faster, easier or cheaper production workflows aren't
| significantly correlated with end product quality, other than
| perhaps in the obvious sense that investing a large amount of
| money/effort into a production _might_ cause the investing
| party to take more care to ensure ROI. However, there are so
| many counter examples of very expensive, high-effort
| productions lacking artistic merit that the correlation is weak
| at best.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Thinking about this, and the reasonable argument below that
| Netflix have _also_ produced a number of prestige films and
| series that are genuinely great, I wonder if the production
| pipeline has a side effect: flattening the quality signal.
|
| That is, it used to be (80s/90s) a lot more obvious what the
| prestige/not prestige boundary was. Cheap TV content (soaps
| etc) was shot on video, expensive content shot on film. Now
| everything looks the same. Perhaps the one remaining effort
| signal was lighting, but Netflix seem to have chosen very flat
| bright lighting styles for everything now. Bad news for us
| chiaroscuro lovers. And even when directors do try to do that,
| they've often over-estimated the HDR so you get the opposite:
| an entire series which is _too dark_.
| echelon wrote:
| Having a dozen different VFX departments using different file
| transfer methods like FTP seems like a nightmare. But then I
| realized that the banks do this, and probably worse.
|
| There's one that uses Gmail to exchange documents (not financial,
| but important nonetheless) and uses the read receipt to determine
| if it has ingested the data. Replaying ingestion is marking
| unread.
| nimish wrote:
| This is a sign they need deep reform and good management. Many
| such cases in technology these days.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| The only part of that that seems crazy to me is the Gmail part.
| I'd want to control the mail server.
| MarceliusK wrote:
| It's amazing how often critical workflows rely on duct tape and
| hope
| prmoustache wrote:
| I've seen people in healthcare send patient data through
| whatsapp to other doctors in the same hospital.
|
| It was not allowed and they had reliable corporate tools to
| exchange patient data, but the UX probably felt so cumbersome
| they'd rather face legal risks than doing it the right way.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| It doesn't make it any less worse, but that was my takeaway
| from the Signal scandal. Of course more secure channels
| exist, but I'm sure the UX sucked big time!
| cssinate wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| jfountain2015 wrote:
| Isn't this what Frame.io does just without the markup tools? They
| have had camera to cloud for a while.
| _m_p wrote:
| I was reading about the cinematography of _Collateral_, possibly
| the first large budget feature film to be shot digitally, and one
| of the issues back in 2004 when it was made was the amount of
| storage required for digital video and the risk of not being able
| to retrieve the images from the data stores:
|
| > "We did massive testing with the hard drives, and everything
| was great, and then we had an experience where we shot, and when
| we sent in the material, they couldn't get the information off
| the hard drive," said Cameron. "So the studio went ballistic and
| was like, 'There's just no way we can we can let you guys do
| this.'"
|
| > The compromise was the production would record to hard drives
| as well as SRW tape. And unlike today, verifying the digital
| footage was equally cumbersome and tension-filled.
|
| > "We recorded everything two or three times on decks that we
| carried with us," said Beebe. "So we were backing up, two or
| three times."
|
| https://www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/michael-mann-c...
| progbits wrote:
| > we were backing up, two or three times
|
| So they just rediscovered what IT world knew for decades, or
| what am I missing?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| That you don't film on two or three wheels at a time
| progbits wrote:
| I mean they should, film can get damaged too. The reason
| they don't are probably because it would be too expensive,
| bulky and film is single-use so also wasteful.
|
| Even hobby level DSLRs have two card slots with option to
| write to both.
|
| Professional cameras have tons of gear strapped to them, a
| second drive or some link to external storage is a no-
| brainer.
| m463 wrote:
| probably 20 years and the switch from hard disks to flash
| drives.
|
| I remember when hard drives started getting big that it took
| a long time to get data on and off them. They got bigger
| faster than interfaces could keep up.
|
| I think about 2004, a "big machine" would be an aluminum
| powermac G5 with an 80gb sata hard drive. Or a powerbook G4
| with a 60gb ATA drive.
| fezz wrote:
| When Data/File based workflows started in movies (around
| 2004), 2-3 copies was the standard from the get go and
| ideally this was with MD5 checksums (currently xxhash is more
| common because it's alot faster). LTO backups are also
| generally part of the copy chains as the 3rd or 4th copy.
| Before that, duplication with tape was while recording wasn't
| as common, but it was more common to duplicate after
| recording. Although you'd have some amount of generation loss
| depending on the format, not so with recording to multiple
| decks with the same source video. With film it obviously
| wasn't possible but original negative (o-neg) was much more
| cautiously handled. You'd have copies made going to an
| interpositive for editing and dailies process. Those wouldn't
| an identical quality so to get a negative copy, you'd be 2
| generations of loss. By the time you're seeing a print in a
| theater, it would be 3 generations. (one->IP->IN->print)
| dkh wrote:
| 3 different copies driven to 3 different places by 3
| different people before you leave set for the day continued
| to be how it was when I was working on set. And believe it
| or not, there was still one incident in 2015 where Murphy's
| Law negated all 3 and I spent about a week file-carving the
| $60k worth of footage we didn't have the ability to reshoot
| again if we had to
| pier25 wrote:
| Weren't the Star Wars prequels the first big digital
| productions?
| dmbche wrote:
| Phantom menace used some (pioneering) digital shots but
| Collateral is fully shot on digital from my understanding
| pier25 wrote:
| Attack of the Clones (2002) was shot fully digital with an
| early Cine Alta camera.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CineAlta
| MarceliusK wrote:
| Back then, it was basically the Wild West with digital
| cinematography. No wonder studios freaked out at the idea of
| lost footage
| dkh wrote:
| _Collateral_ was not the first fully digitally shot feature
| film. In fact, _Collateral_ was not even fully digital. (The
| first _major_ , all-digital, _HD_ feature film was _Attack of
| the Clones_ , but there were other fully-digital feature films
| before that, just not as major, and/or not always HD. Robert
| Rodriguez' _Once Upon a Time in Mexico_ (2001) was fully
| digital.)
|
| But you are right that _Collateral_ did do _something_ very new
| /unusual at the time, and that was shooting scenes in higher
| frame-rates than 24, and mixing multiple frame rates in a film.
| (This might not sound like much, but until this time, pretty
| much every film was 24fps for the previous _eighty years_ and
| it had a very specific look that everyone 's eyes/brains were
| conditioned for, unbeknownst to them.)
|
| And the other thing that was very interesting thing about it
| (though not something very visible to a viewer) was that it was
| shot on the Thomson Viper FilmStream camera[1], which was the
| first major attempt at shooting not just digital, but very
| close to "raw". It was also a _huge pain in the ass_. The
| camera itself was massive, but due to the bandwidth, it
| recorded to an external storage array that had to be pushed
| alongside it at all times, and that was itself about the size
| of a shopping cart. (This device was hilariously referred to as
| the "Director's Friend.")
|
| In 2002, my friend and I, both cinema nerds in high school,
| drove an hour away to the nearest theater showing a film called
| _Russian Ark_ [2]. Why were journeying to to see a strange
| little Russian film where a never-named character walks the
| viewer through Russian history? Because just like each episode
| of the recently-released Netflix show _Adolescence_ , this
| _entire film_ was a single, very long, very complicated,
| unbroken shot. One shot. No trickery, no cuts that were just
| hidden to the audience, _one shot_ , through streets,
| buildings, snow, ballrooms with a couple hundred choreographed
| actors, it was crazy. This is easy now compared to how it was
| back then.
|
| As we've now established with _Collateral_ (and this film
| predates it by 2 years), digital cinematography existed, but
| the storage was a real problem, the power was a real problem.
| Since this film was one shot, it needed almost 100 minutes of
| both, unbroken. And since it was a very complex moving shot, it
| had to be operated handheld. So essentially they had an
| incredibly ripped director of photography who operated the
| camera on a steadicam the whole time while a giant array of
| daisychained batteries and hard drives were lugged behind him.
| And they did it something like 100 times until they had a few
| takes where there were no mistakes.
|
| None of this really means anything to anyone anymore, but at
| the time, to cinematography nerds at least, this stuff was all
| absolutely insane!
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20040103133953/http://www.thomso...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark
| pjc50 wrote:
| I saw Russian Ark! Definitely a piece of art made by film
| buffs for film buffs; impressive to see, but far more
| impressive when you understand the amount of work that went
| into it.
|
| I'm wondering why people would have chosen to do early
| digital if it was so inconvenient. When did the cost and
| flexibility advantages start to really kick in?
| dkh wrote:
| So in the context of this specific goal--shooting a feature
| film in a single unbroken shot--digital was a pain in the
| ass, but this was close to _impossible_ to do on film, and
| Russian Ark was the first to ever do it, on any medium.
|
| Simply shooting a feature film digitally was not _that_
| complicated by this time, or at least it didn 't have to
| be. The Sony CineAlta F900 was the camera developed to
| shoot the Star Wars prequels, and was revolutionary at the
| time, became the gold standard for years, and very
| convenient relative to film. Tons of things started to be
| shot in 1080p around that time, and it was very nice to
| work with. Collateral was insane because they wanted to
| shoot raw and at high frame rates. Russian Ark needed a
| single unbroken shot in a form factor that one human would
| be capable of holding for that long. Aside from very
| specific and/or boundary-pushing needs, the arrival of the
| F900 in 2000 was effectively when digital was more
| convenient than shooting film while also meeting the
| technical requirements of high-end production (though it
| was many more years before most cinematographers agreed
| that the image quality was comparable)
| sagacity wrote:
| Around 2004 I worked for a company in The Netherlands that
| owned a Viper camera (one of the few in NL, I guess because
| they were based in Breda and Thomson had an HQ there). The
| company actually had a big Mercedes van that contained a
| Quantel iQ system just to record and postprocess the video
| coming out of that Viper.
|
| In the years after that I worked with them to write a custom
| application based on a Bluefish444 card combined with some
| ATTO fiber channel storage _just to get the frames to disk
| fast enough_. A lot of custom code, overlapped I /O, that
| kind of thing. We had a beast of a JBOD RAID setup, must have
| been about 12 spinning disks.
|
| The only alternative in those days were systems that stored
| to tape, but could only do so in a compressed format (I think
| Sony had a solution that did 4:2:0 instead of the 4:4:4
| coming out of the Viper). People were scrambling for these
| storage solutions so much that we even got Arri to lend us
| their prototype D-20 camera (which turned into D-21 which
| turned into Alexa) just so we could make sure our storage
| system worked with their camera. We just had this amazing
| prototype camera sitting around our office for what must have
| been a year. They just lent it to us. Wild. I think our only
| main competitor at the time was Codex, which admittedly had a
| much slicker system.
|
| We visited the CINEC trade show and got a ton of interest. I
| think I still have a business card of the DoP that did all
| the miniature work in Lord Of The Rings. He loved the fact
| that we would store things uncompressed, which would make
| things like compositing a lot easier.
|
| Unfortunately, mismanagement caused the whole thing to
| collapse. Oh well. Nowadays you just use a CompactFlash card
| :)
| dkh wrote:
| A Mercedes van to lug it all around is both hilarious and
| also probably the coolest way to do it.
|
| While working on set between 2012-2014, we were shooting
| all RED, and I had a 12-disk ATTO FC RAID10 rig on set at
| all times borrowed from RED. Not needed for speed of frames
| by this time of course, but for the ridiculous total
| storage required shooting 6.5k raw and the time needed to
| copy it all. On paper this system should've been good/safe
| enough. In practice, we almost lost it a handful of times
| within a month, each in a unique way, including the time a
| stunt driver messed up, veered off course, and plowed
| directly into video village, striking the RAID and killing
| exactly the maximum number of disks in one mirror it could
| tolerate, but thankfully no more. (Needless to say the
| shoot was a massive learning experience and I have never
| managed data the same ever since.) By the time the shoot
| was over, the RAID was alive, but it was absolutely beat to
| shit, and I was afraid of how the guy from RED would react
| when he came to pick it up. When he did, he was completely
| unphased. He chuckled and said, "You should've seen how
| messed it was after Ridley Scott's crew borrowed it!"
|
| Very cool background though, I was not quite old enough to
| get into it all quite that early! When the Viper came out,
| I was still in high school, just exceedingly nerdy. I
| believe to this day I have PCs with ATTO Disk Benchmark on
| them
| tuna74 wrote:
| "But you are right that Collateral did do something very
| new/unusual at the time, and that was shooting scenes in
| higher frame-rates than 24, and mixing multiple frame rates
| in a film. (This might not sound like much, but until this
| time, pretty much every film was 24fps for the previous
| eighty years and it had a very specific look that everyone's
| eyes/brains were conditioned for, unbeknownst to them.)"
|
| Why was certain scenes in Collateral filmed in other frame
| rates than 24 fps (unless you are doing slow motion of
| course)? AFAIK it was never projected/shown in anything else
| than 24 fps.
| dkh wrote:
| Correct, theaters at the time could not really been project
| anything other than 24fps. So there were 2 parts to the
| shooting style, and one of them is what you describe,
| shooting at the higher frame rate used in order to have it
| play back slower when conformed to 24. But they did this in
| a pretty unusual way. During the action sequences, they
| would ramp up frame rate from 24 to 30 and back down. They
| would do adjust _during_ the shot, so the action scenes had
| these subtle but constantly-occurring increases and
| decreases in speed that looked very interesting and had not
| been done before.
|
| The other major part was the shutter speed. They of course
| could not actually shoot/project 48/60fps, but they a shot
| a lot scenes at the high shutter speeds one typically uses
| when shooting those frame rates, a lot of it had that
| "ultratrealistic" look that people had weren't used to in
| films, resembling more the look of video, TV soap operas in
| 60i, etc.
|
| I feel slightly absurd even writing about this considering
| how little of this really applies today, and how
| inconsequential changing the shutter speed on a camera is
| now. "I hit the '+ shutter' button a couple of times,
| _revolutionary!_ " But it's crazy how conditioned everyone
| was to these looks at the time due to how little variety
| there was. I taught this film class where I would
| demonstrate to everyone, with nearly 100% success, that
| they _all_ were influenced by and conditioned for these
| frame rates, even if they didn 't know what a frame rate
| was. We'd shoot a scene with multiple cameras side-by-side
| shooting at different frames rates, play it back to the
| class later, and ask which one looked "more like a movie"
| to them. Invariably, even if they couldn't explain why,
| everyone always picked the 24p version
| tuna74 wrote:
| "We'd shoot a scene with multiple cameras side-by-side
| shooting at different frames rates, play it back to the
| class later, and ask which one looked "more like a movie"
| to them. Invariably, even if they couldn't explain why,
| everyone always picked the 24p version"
|
| Isn't this the most expected result? How could it
| possibly be anything else?
| tuna74 wrote:
| "Correct, theaters at the time could not really been
| project anything other than 24fps. So there were 2 parts
| to the shooting style, and one of them is what you
| describe, shooting at the higher frame rate used in order
| to have it play back slower when conformed to 24. But
| they did this in a pretty unusual way. During the action
| sequences, they would ramp up frame rate from 24 to 30
| and back down. They would do adjust during the shot, so
| the action scenes had these subtle but constantly-
| occurring increases and decreases in speed that looked
| very interesting and had not been done before."
|
| Wouldn't this just lead to judder? Maybe that was
| something that had not been seen before in a movie shown
| at cinemas.
|
| I've heard that sometimes scenes like kung fu fights were
| filmed in a lower frame rate (maybe 20 fps) and then it
| got faster when it was projected in 24 fps. If you do it
| the other way around movement just get slower (which is
| what you want for slow motion).
| _m_p wrote:
| In the book _In the Blink of an Eye_ by Walter Murch
| (which is generally about film editing), there's a
| section that speculates that 24 frames per second somehow
| resonates with some innate constant of how human vision
| works, which is wild to think about!
| okdood64 wrote:
| > large budget feature
|
| What does this mean?
| pbalau wrote:
| A film that requires lots of resources in order to be made?
| herculity275 wrote:
| You parsed it wrong - it's a _large budget_ feature film. A
| feature film is a theatrical movie too long to be called a
| short film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_film
| gcanyon wrote:
| I read through that whole article thinking, - I
| wonder what the UI looks like compared to tools I use now
| - I wonder if there will be a free tier, since my video needs are
| modest
|
| It _never_ occurred to me until I reached the end that this wasn
| 't a "enjoy this tool we made" post, but instead a "look how
| awesome we are" post. :-/
| Gshaheen wrote:
| Ha! Yes sure, but it does make sense that they'd keep something
| like this to themselves.
|
| Creating massive amounts of high quality content efficiently,
| on a global scale, with seamless global distribution is an
| incredible competitive advantage.
|
| I don't see why they would provide it to anyone outside of
| their ecosystem.
|
| It'll be interesting to see if they translate this to games as
| well.
| nottorp wrote:
| High quality?
| persedes wrote:
| They've been pretty great about pushing for open standards.
| In the last article their argument to provide these tools for
| free was along the lines of "A rising tide lifts all boats".
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I've worked at a few different FAANG's (including this one).
| I've participated in some of these engineering blog posts.
|
| They will never tell you anything that is real-world relevant
| for you.
|
| At best, you might get some kind of _theoretical_ insight. It's
| because they're operating at a scale that just isn't realistic
| for hobby developers.
|
| But they're still engineers just the same as you and me. So
| they write blogs like this. And it's interesting! I love to
| read them.
| penultimatename wrote:
| I've sat through a few Netflix talks and they're all the same
| flavor of "look what you can achieve with millions of dollars
| and hundreds of engineers." They're somewhat interesting from
| an architectural perspective, but even scaled down versions
| aren't feasible in most environments and it leaves a taste in
| your mouth that you just sat through a recruiting pitch.
| LeFantome wrote:
| Mostly agree though I find VMAF useful
| diab0lic wrote:
| Until a few years ago most projects at Netflix were done with
| a handful of engineers ( <= 6 ). A dozen people working on
| something would have been considered very large. Four dozen
| would have been considered a company wide effort.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| isn't the TCO for those engineers also something like 400k
| each? not talking Principle Big-Dick Super-Staff Engineer,
| but like mid-level.
|
| Netflix was famous for that, too -- no RSUs, just straight
| cash, and we'll fire you if we think you can't deliver.
|
| 100s of devs would essentially be their entire, company-
| wide, operating budget; it's gotta be like 10-15 people
| tops on these things.
| dkh wrote:
| Netflix is still pretty cash-heavy on average, though
| with a lot more compensation going towards stock options
| in recent years. They let the employee choose the ratio.
| They pay extremely well, but this comes along with very
| high hiring standards and a very difficult culture.
|
| The culture was and still is as you have described, with
| massively high pressure, "radical candor" taken to
| arguably very unhealthy levels, and with no hesitation in
| firing you. This is a major reason why, despite the fact
| that I am a video engineer with a film background who
| lives walking distance to 2 of their campuses and has a
| great amount of respect for their technical achievements,
| I never apply there.
| dagmx wrote:
| I know quite a few people who worked on this and unfortunately
| this is effectively the product.
|
| It's a company that prioritizes micro services and enterprise
| style crud apps internally. I've seen so many of their
| presentations and it's like an IBM demo.
|
| It's data , data, data. That's their approach to everything.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| they're streaming fantastic quantities of movies in HD,
| constantly.
|
| why wouldn't data data data be their approach?
|
| that and churning out design-by-keyword visual media
| dagmx wrote:
| It's fine, but it doesn't make for nice to use tools or
| even interesting tools, which is what the person I
| responded to was talking about.
|
| CRUD apps are great for what they are. Exciting they are
| not.
| MarceliusK wrote:
| Yeah, I had the same feeling. The tech itself sounds genuinely
| impressive, but the article reads more like an internal case
| study than something aimed at engaging the wider community
| oDot wrote:
| Hi there, I'm a fellow filmmaker building my own tools and
| would love to hear your thoughts and needs. If you'd like (and
| anyone reading this), please email
|
| Studios at weedonandscott dot com
| dkh wrote:
| At last I've stumbled upon somebody using Gleam without
| expressly going and looking for it
| dkh wrote:
| For people in within the industry or the tech side of it,
| Netflix's engineering blog has always been fascinating and
| extremely useful because of the insane amount of stuff in this
| space they have solved or reworked. They have put more into
| tech side of modern-day TV/film than anybody else, and it's not
| even close. In a technical/workflow sense, working on a Netflix
| show is unlike working on any other. I have my issues with
| Netflix in other respects, but with respect to technology and
| workflow, they _are_ awesome.
|
| If you're unable to appreciate a behind-the-scenes look at
| their engineering because the technology isn't for you or
| available to you, that's totally valid! But it's a _you 're not
| interested_ thing, not a _Netflix is boasting about something
| that doesn 't matter_ thing. Only a few thousand teams in the
| world need most of what they do over there, but that doesn't
| mean they aren't _massive_ technical achievements. Most of them
| are. The scale, complexity, and cadence of modern production
| has given rise to some of the biggest technical challenges I've
| ever seen. And for anyone close to that world, this kind of
| content is of great interest -- if not genuinely valuable.
| fidotron wrote:
| Netflix get away with it because they own the result at the
| end of the process. If you were to suggest these workflows to
| other studios they'd balk at the idea of having the raw stuff
| being uploaded to the cloud etc. If they tried selling this
| as a solution do we think people outside Netflix would buy
| and use it?
|
| One of the people I worked with that is now at Netflix on
| this stuff was so violently opposed to not owning his own in
| office render farm and drive array it verged on ridiculous.
| okdood64 wrote:
| > they'd balk at the idea of having the raw stuff being
| uploaded to the cloud
|
| Why?
| dangoor wrote:
| Perhaps over fears of their shows getting leaked early.
| Apple apparently has people using Remote Desktop for
| severance: https://tedium.co/2025/03/29/severance-apple-
| remote-editing-...
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The major studios use cloud services all the time. For
| example, Paramount uses AWS. Disney has its own internal
| cloud system but also uses a combination of external clouds
| like AWS.
|
| The resistance to cloud services is based on preventing
| leaks, not opposition to technology.
|
| And in specific response to your comment: Netflix's
| "technology" is just a content management system. They're
| just reinventing a wheel that many of their competitors
| already use and bragging about something that Disney,
| Paramount, etc., did over a decade ago when they began
| embracing digital-first production.
| geodel wrote:
| Netflix is case of "nothing succeeds like success". We have
| at work a lot of Netflix libraries, frameworks etc which are
| in deprecated / half-assed state waiting to be replaced for
| years. It all works for Netflix because they can spend ton of
| money , resources and people and make even dubious shit work.
|
| I think it will remain fine for Netflix in any case keep or
| replace. But companies who keep using Netflix OSS, or
| architecture ideas only because _Netflix is so cool_ are
| going to have worse outcomes. Case in point is Micro services
| revolution which is almost invented and promoted by Netflix.
| cush wrote:
| > They have put more into tech side of modern-day TV/film
| than anybody else, and it's not even close
|
| I feel Disney is up there too they just don't blog about it
| youngNed wrote:
| I find it weird that people don't think of the BBC as a
| tech company, from their work on microphones way back in
| the day, to launching iPlayer (before youtube, and
| launching on christmas day iirc) to regular live streaming
| of huge events in 4k (something netflix has struggled
| with). But yet they are never recognised for their
| engineering.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| I don't think they're not recognized for it, they just
| don't brand themselves as it.
|
| For as long as broadcasting has been a thing, major
| broadcasters were involved in pushing the technology
| forward. For most of it's history the American network
| NBC was a subsidiary of the Radio Corporation of America.
| But NBC's brand is not tech, they want to consumer to
| associate the gliz of the picture.
| dkh wrote:
| They've done a lot of great stuff and I've always
| followed their engineering-related tools and content as
| well! In particular they made some major contributions to
| media archival and analysis tools, and, yes of course, to
| web players. Unfortunately they haven't put as much focus
| on a lot of it in recent years, at least not in the tools
| they've opened sourced and topics they used to write
| about a lot
| dkh wrote:
| All of the players in this echelon have contributed
| massively, and all of them have pretty wild workflows and
| impressive solutions to technical problems. If we were
| measuring technical achievement across the broader history
| of filmed entertainment, there's a strong case to be made
| for Disney as the most influential. But when it comes to
| how content is produced and distributed today, Netflix has
| definitely invested the most into tackling modern
| challenges and continues to do so, and these efforts feed
| directly into the meticulous, end-to-end workflow that's
| applied across every production.
|
| There are plenty of people who have worked on Netflix and
| non-Netflix shows and would would argue that Netflix's
| workflow and high standards are difficult if you're not
| used to it yet, or more stringent than they'd like, but
| very few would deny the end results or technical
| superiority
| eccentricsquare wrote:
| the disney studios (walt disney animation, walt disney
| pictures, pixar, Industrial Light and Magic, Blue Sky, 20th
| Century Fox) contributed a significant amount of research
| towards technologies used in film and television, much of
| it in academic conferences like SIGGRAPH
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _They have put more into tech side of modern-day TV /film
| than anybody else_
|
| This is objectively not true. Netflix has put almost no tech
| into the basic tooling of modern day TV/film (i.e., the
| cameras or audio equipment) or the software used to produce
| the content, or even the tech used to create the sets,
| makeup, CGI, or any of the other actual work that goes into
| producing the content.
|
| The only place where Netflix has put in more work is on the
| _non-linear_ distribution side.
|
| Netfix is way behind the big dogs in the live streaming
| space. Peacock...the smallest major streaming service...
| livestreamed dozens of Olympic sports simultaneously at HD
| and 4K resolutions to over a hundred million simultaneous
| viewers without issue. Netflix couldn't handle half of that
| traffic for a single boxing match without crashing or
| degrading the streams to CRT-era resolution. The biggest
| player in the live streaming space is Disney Streaming (fka
| BAMTech before its acquisition) which was created to create
| the technology to stream MLB games and now currently provides
| the technology for ESPN streaming, NHL, MLB, Blaze Media, and
| Hulu's live streams.
|
| The difference is that Netflix's competitors don't brag about
| their technology.
| dkh wrote:
| I should've been more specific--I was referring to the
| modern-day workflow for producing a scripted series, which
| is what the article was about. In that context, Netflix has
| the most technically sophisticated workflow and tooling to
| optimize production of that kind of content, from the
| perspective of creatives working on those sorts of shows.
| Certainly they have _major_ blind spots in a lot of user-
| facing stuff that they only recently started to care about,
| with live content being a huge one.
|
| I've been a big fan of peaock! The Olympics coverage was
| massively impressive. Like much of what Peacock does, their
| success wasn't just about comprehensively covering it
| (which they did do) but also with how cleverly they
| packaged it, and all sorts of cool features it had that
| nobody else does/did, like the "Gold Zone" Red Zone-esque
| whip-around coverage, the constantly-updating highlights
| and key moments, etc. My impression of Peacock from the
| beginning was very good because their design and interface
| pretty much blows everyone else's away, and then I
| continued to be impressed after discovering a lot of these
| "cleverness" features, like when I noticed while watching
| soccer matches that the key moments/highlights were tagged
| and timestamped for easy access in real-time as they were
| occurring. I just wish they had a better catalog of shows
| to go along with. It is worth noting that while they are
| the smallest streamer, they do have one of the largest
| budgets and are probably the least burdened by existential
| risk because they've got Comcast behind them
| barrkel wrote:
| The purpose of these articles is to promote the brand among
| engineers, help hire engineers, and help the careers of the
| authors both internally ("I'm helping the company hire") and
| externally (you can point at what you built because it's now
| public).
| pritambarhate wrote:
| Also creates an image that Netflix is a tech company!
| pests wrote:
| For your first point, you can see it in the videos they have
| embedded.
| thecybernerd wrote:
| I wonder if Netflix will offer MPS as a service in the future for
| shows that are not on Netflix.
| mrandish wrote:
| Probably not. One reason is that this is a competitive
| advantage for Netflix but I suspect the larger reason is that
| they created this to optimize their primary business, while
| operating it for other productions would be a secondary
| business and not mission critical. Another reason is that
| productions not on Netflix have other commercial options for
| camera to cloud production workflows (Frame.io for example).
|
| This workflow and tool set is tuned for Netflix and is probably
| opinionated in a variety of ways to conform with Netflix
| production standards and requirements. If your production is
| being funded by Netflix then you're incentivized to learn and
| use their provided tools.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| > I suspect the larger reason is that they created this to
| optimize their primary business
|
| Wasn't this how AWS started at Amazon as well?
| BhavdeepSethi wrote:
| 15 years ago, the first start up I worked for provided APIs for
| music streaming in India. One of the founders who managed all
| infra was in US, and so the servers (bare metal) were in LA. I
| still find it amusing, that it was cheaper (and faster) just to
| fly to India, buy bunch of portable hard drives, upload the
| media, fly back to US and upload the data to the file server,
| than uploading the media directly from India to the US server.
| Obviously only applies when data is in order of TBs. Later saw
| the same thing with AWS Snowball and Snowmobile.
| VectorLock wrote:
| "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of
| tapes hurtling down the highway." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum,
| Computer Networks, 3rd ed., p. 83. (paraphrasing Dr. Warren
| Jackson, Director, University of Toronto Computing Services
| (UTCS) circa 1985)
| MarceliusK wrote:
| How much global infrastructure has improved... but also how
| physical logistics can still beat the internet when you're
| dealing with massive datasets.
| dkh wrote:
| The technical requirements always seem to increase at the
| same rate as the technical advances. I've found this
| especially true in film/TV. Sure, by 2014ish we were shooting
| on solid state and had giant RAIDs on set and storage was
| cheaper than it ever had been, but we easily negated all of
| that by shooting on multiple RED cameras in raw at
| resolutions of 6.5k+. Terabytes of new data each day, even
| duplicating it before leaving took a lot of time! And then
| storing it at the office while letting more than 1 editor
| work with it at the time meant building a 36-disk ZFS server
| with 10GbE to each client. Just playing the footage back on a
| computer required a dedicated PCIe card
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| We had to transfer a few 10GBs, if not 100GBs between Europe
| and the US back 15yo.
|
| Bandwidth was of 100KB/sec at most, I suggested to do that fly
| over things if the systems team didn't want to raise the
| priority of that transfer, after prod tried 3 times over the
| weekend, sadly, they changed the priority of that flow, it took
| still like 40h? For the initial load.
| okdood64 wrote:
| Mailing hard drives of LARGE amounts of data was relatively
| common as recently as the mid 2010s.
| nimish wrote:
| What part of this makes good stories?
| poisonborz wrote:
| The time and stress saved for users.
| nimish wrote:
| Doesn't seem to be working that well tbh
| MarceliusK wrote:
| The part that struck me most was how much manual, error-prone
| work is still common in the industry. Still, I wonder how
| portable this is outside Netflix. It sounds like a very
| vertically integrated solution.
| dkh wrote:
| There is still a lot of manual, error-prone work, even at
| Netflix. Netflix just has workflows that ensure so many passes
| are of each task are done, with so many failsafes, fallbacks,
| tests, checks (both human and automated), and they start doing
| them all earlier in the production process than most other
| studios so they can handle things they still didn't account
| for.
|
| Yes, it's pretty vertical, but essentially every big streaming
| platform or production company is. There's a very specific
| Netflix way that governs how all Netflix shows are produced.
| There is a very different but still meticulously standardized
| way that governs how all Hulu shows are produced, one for all
| Warner Bros. shows, etc. This is an area where being vertically
| integrated is totally fine. It not only makes enormous sense
| for these studios, but nobody outside of those environments
| wants or needs _these_ workflows. Netflix 's workflows are
| there to aid Netflix even more than their shows, and while
| there's a lot of excellent stuff in their workflows that most
| productions should utilize for efficiency/safety/whatever,
| there's also a ton of stuff that would make no sense to use
| independently.
| perfmode wrote:
| What languages are used? The screenshot of the desktop app looks
| native.
| dagmx wrote:
| I know some of the folks who worked on this and a big chunk is
| Java with some Python afaik.
| alwinaugustin wrote:
| I can see this evolving into something like AWS -- a platform
| that offers high-end production tools to anyone willing to pay.
| That would democratize access to cutting-edge tech, effectively
| solving the tooling problem. But it still wouldn't address the
| real bottleneck: compelling storytelling.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > But it still wouldn't address the real bottleneck: compelling
| storytelling.
|
| The problem is, storytelling is risky. Either you stick to
| something bland (adaptations of popular books, cartoons or
| videogames) and it usually gives decent returns, or you go for
| something completely original - at the risk of it either going
| boom or going bust.
|
| As your average cinema movie is a triple-digit million dollar
| business these days just in pure production and actor cost and
| double that in promo cost, it's hard to find banks to finance
| the production, and so the banks prefer to go with something
| "proven and bland" over something risky.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Netflix doesn't make "stories" or "films" or "art" or anything
| that impressive.
|
| They make "content", and the distinction is super important.
| sluongng wrote:
| More on Netflix's Remote Workstation setup for artists
| https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix-workst...
| shubhamjain wrote:
| With the asset sizes they are talking about (hundreds of
| terabytes), how does it make it feasible to do this over the
| wire? Even with 1Gbps connection, it will take ~10 days to upload
| a single 100TB original camera file. And there could be several.
| chedabob wrote:
| Wouldn't surprise me if they had something like this in a few
| cities with big production teams. There must've been pipelines
| in place from when 35mm was the standard for movies, and crews
| needed to get hours of footage developed and over to various
| people for review each day.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-physical-aws-data-trans...
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| A single file isn't 100TB - an entire production of OCF is
| ~200TB. A single take is typically 10-200GB depending on a
| variety of factors.
| i5heu wrote:
| So.. it is just a NAS with transcoding?
| ryukoposting wrote:
| To be fair, it's a really, really big NAS with an interesting
| use case.
| Thaxll wrote:
| A NAS with ffmpeg :D
| gabriel666smith wrote:
| > "... automation became imperative. The intricacies of color and
| framing management, along with deliverables, must be seamlessly
| controlled and effortlessly managed by the user, without the need
| for manual intervention. Therefore, we cannot lean into humans
| configuring JSON files behind the scenes to map camera formats
| into deliverables."
|
| I'd often thought (critically) about the lack of visual diversity
| in Netflix output - and this is something I often see
| stereotypical film-enjoyers complain about.
|
| I'd never considered it as a consequence of Netflix's sheer
| scale. It's always really interesting when I discover that
| something I'd previously put down as an (unimaginably
| unimaginative) aesthetic choice might in fact be an operational
| choice. It makes me check myself!
|
| It sounds an incredibly complex and clever system; I can't help
| but feel that applying such a strong vertical to the more
| creative aspects of film and tv production - such as colour
| grading - will ultimately prove short-sighted.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| This. "the medium is the message" Marshall McLuhan.
|
| The actual content is invariably a result of the infrastructure
| behind it. And it's not just the image, it's also what kind of
| scripts are written, what kind of audience insights are passed
| on to creative producers, what kind of creative teams are
| selected.
|
| Is it proving short-sighted? If you're optimizing for cinematic
| art, then yeah. But they're optimizing for subscriptions and
| global reach. That vertical will likely move to live-streaming,
| sports and other forms that retain subscribers. And on multiple
| global markets at the same time (not just U.S.)
|
| It's a weird vertical, they're quite sophisticated in their
| approach, but it's surprising how they sometimes contract
| entire chunks out. I've read academic papers talking about how
| Netflix is a very strange disjointed _thing_.
| gabriel666smith wrote:
| That's interesting. I'd love to read those papers, if you
| remember what they were.
|
| I do wonder if an in-house aesthetic can become 'tacky' in
| the age of global media - can trends 'die' when there are
| still billions more people to reach? And will a creative org
| structure like this be able to move fast enough should that
| happen? I don't think we know the answer to that yet.
|
| I personally believe (maybe optimistically!) that this will
| be an important question even though Netflix's natural
| conclusion is to move towards the subscription-retaining,
| low-creative products like sports that you mentioned.
|
| The problem with those entertainment products is that they
| have intrinsic value: if the provider is adding little value
| besides distribution, some (or lots) of users will pirate
| that content. Super apparent in sports media.
|
| Maybe it's a naive hope, rather than a belief, but I hope /
| believe that because of this, companies like Netflix will be
| ultimately forced by users to have more idiosyncrasy in their
| production pipeline and output. It'll be really interesting
| to find out!
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