By Pankaj Maru.
In recent years, India’s VFX (visual effects) and animation segment have earned good credits and recognitions globally, through the success of Hollywood movies. The VFX and animation studios in India are becoming integral part of mega movie projects of Hollywood and TV projects.
For the visual computing giant Nvidia, this trend brings huge business opportunities to expand its foot hold in India’s M&E (media & entertainment) sector. Beside the Indian connection to many of those famous Hollywood flicks including Life of Pie, The Avengers and Stark Trek Into Darkness have used Nvidia’s GPU technology.
Growth prospects in India’s M&E industry
According to Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, South Asia – Nvidia, the Indian M&E market is estimated around $14 billion and is growing around 10-12% yearly, making this industry very profound.
“The growth is largely driven by digitization in the industry including TV channels and cinema or films sector that is getting more organized. The digitization of TV with so many channels have led to over a 20% growth in this segment, while the animation is seeing a 14-15% market growth. Interestingly, interlacing both these segments is the VFX-animation market and adjoining that is the gaming segment, is one of the fastest growing market at approximate rate of 25%,” Dhupar told Express Computer during a recently interaction.
India’s M&E industry is largely driven by digitization, which also means technology is playing key role in this sector. Though the industry seeing a rapid growth, it has its own set of challenges to deal with such large size workflows, reducing time to market and production cost along with dearth of skilled professionals.
“Most people I meet working in studios, production and post-production houses – all are dealing with 2 or 3 dominant challenges such as workflows — what kind of workflows they need to put in place that reduces the time to market, how can they be commercially more viable and how to do more things with minimum investments,” pointed out Dhupar.
Further,“Besides, they are struggling with the skill sets availability in the M&E industry. And to meet such demands, there are many initiatives people are talking about whether it be private sector or government that can push up the availability of skilled people in this new era of digitization and how can we generate more skill sets that can make difference to India,” he added.
Outsourcing in India’s M&E industry
Interestingly, the Indian M&E industry is showing traits similar to the IT and outsourcing industry with increasing number of projects and services being sourced from India. According to Dhupar, in the digitization era, whenever the word ‘digitization’ comes into play in which ever industry it is used, its often about exports.
“Exports is all about outsourcing, whether it was IT originally – where we (India) started about with low value solutions like body shopping and then going up the value chain. And I think the M&E industry is pretty close to that aspect,” Dhupar on how the M&E industry is moving closer to the IT outsourcing industry trend.
Technological challenges
Despite this positive trends, the challenges for M&E industry needs technological solutions to take it to the next level. According to Will Braithwaite, Senior Applied Engineer – Digital Film, Nvidia, today the most noticeable thing that has happened in the movies is the ‘size’ and ‘fidelity’ of everything – not just the bigger screen size but 3D, epic movies with lavish detailed environments and it is growing exponentially.
“So having to combat that and the issues that come with dealing such massive amount of data requires some shifts and changes in the workflow. Some thing we have noticed is a move towards the front of pipeline. CGI (Computer generated Image) and visual effects are being brought in front of camera and production sets, and that’s the future of movie making. There’s increasing use of simulation and motion capture, facial recognition and other techniques that are almost replacing humans,” explained Braithwaite.
He observed that more and more simulations and visual effects will be used for water, smoke, fire effects and pyro techniques and explosions will be done on computers rather than practically, which will reduce the production costs and doing these effects on computer is far easier today as tools are available.
Growing demand of simulation and rendering
There’s a growing trend of using simulation and rendering to create reality by capturing real world materials, environments and location data. “What we are doing at Nvidia is assisting those technologies – simulation, rendering, animation by providing interactive feedback to artists and help it move in front of pipeline,” informed Braithwaite.
As the shift has already started to happen, the fundamental challenge still remains here is the size of simulation and rendering of huge volume of data in real-time. For instance, the simulation effects to created a spray of sea form in the latest sci-fi movie Pacific Rim used approximately some 300 million particles and each particle requires roughly around 30 Gigabyte of memory, according to Braithwaite.
Though the goal of VFX is reality, given the human eye limitation, simulation of 300 million particles for every movement is not required and that way the data can be compressed. With the growing demand of high in-memory, today the GPUs are powered with 2500 cores.
This brings back the focus on demand of GPU technology and simulation in the movies, entertainment and TV segments. “Computer generated VFX, animations – are the predominate forces whether it’s in movies or TVs, because there’s lot of demand from TVs for quick turn around of content. Wherever there’s story telling content and demand is high, the requirement of this technology is high. In TV industry, for instance live broadcast of election, sporting events like cricket matches uses simulation,” informed Dhupar.
Role of cloud and virtualization in M&E industry
Given the nature of movie industry, which is more of project based, investment in technology is always challenging as it needs to scale-up and down depending on the project nature and its size. To address such demand of technology as well as investment, virtualization and cloud technology comes handy to studios and production houses.
According to Braithwaite, virtualization is very important to visual effects due to the nature of visual productions – where the companies would grow in size often and then shrink to the size of next production coming in and then grow again.
“This would be oscillation of size and it could be very expensive to maintain render farms or workstations but having every thing cloud based, the render farm, simulation farm and computer user or artist farm – all integrated into one saves massive amount of cost,” explained Braithwaite.
Further, “The idea of putting this technology on cloud is having third party service providers offering all the machines and computing power, gives the scaling ability and budgeting option,” he added.
The public farms concept offers same technology of rendering and simulation along with scalability through cloud to small studios and users as per their needs without making big investments as well as reduces the production cost. Company is looking to bring its cloud based solutions to Indian market focused on M&E segment with the help of cloud infrastructure providers.
Nvidia’s position and competition in the Indian market
“Nvidia’s market share is so dominant that we are de-facto standard and there’s hardly anyone around us. However, the market size we are talking about is still very limited and so are trying to work towards market expansion by working on different corridors to ensure that the market continues to imbibe the technology for the current trends and needs of the industry,” said Dhupar.
About Nvidia’s key initiatives, Dhupar informed that company is focusing on skill development by partnering through associations with government and setting up different centers where people can come and fine tune their creativity skills along with technology skills.
“Besides, we are working a lot towards awareness part, creating enough forums where people can understand and appreciate how technology can differentiate. And one of the initiative under that is basically describing people some of the advantages of changing their workflows or applying the technology. Because we believe Nvidia is chartered fundamentally to evangelize how technology can be used so that people can take its advantage and market better at lower cost,” added Dhupar.
While, Nvidia is faced with competition in the Indian market, according to Dhupar, one of the way to deal with it is by keeping people updated with future road maps, technology and its applications. “Our interest is to say that this is the future road map, this is how you can invest today and grow with us, and this is what will differentiate all your different processes and elements you looking forward in doing it,” he concluded.
