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re:Invent 2025: Amazon MGM Studios Modernizes Movie Production with Studio in the Cloud and Carbon Reduction
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📖 re:Invent 2025: AWS re:Invent 2025 - Revolutionize media production: Field-ready cloud solutions (AMZ307)
In this video, Greg Young, Worldwide Head of Production and Post-Production Technology at Amazon MGM Studios, explains the transition to Studio in the Cloud for film and TV production. Traditionally, for the multi-camera format show LOL, which uses 40-50 cameras, camera streams were sent directly to AWS, enabling remote editing from 5,000 miles away in Los Angeles with sub-second latency. They cloud-enabled nine workflows from production to post-production, utilizing direct uploads to Amazon S3, Avid Nexis shared storage, and remote editing desktops, accelerating daily processing by 50% and shortening production timelines by days to weeks. Furthermore, they developed a custom Rivian R1S equipped with a 205-kilowatt battery and solar power to enable cloud uploads from remote locations. With 51% of the average carbon footprint in the film and TV industry coming from travel and transportation, this cloud-native approach reduces on-site hardware footprint, with a goal to run over 100 productions in the cloud by 2026.
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Main Content
Amazon MGM Studios' Studio in the Cloud: Overview of Production Workflow and Cloud Migration Strategy
Hello everyone. Thanks for coming. I hope you're enjoying re:Invent. We've got a fun session for you today. This is part of what we call the Learn from Amazon track. What we try to do is find interesting stories within Amazon to bring to you as an added value of re:Invent, so you can see some of the interesting ways companies within Amazon are using AWS. My name is Jason O'Malley. I'm a Senior Partner Solutions Architect. I work on the global media and entertainment strategy team. I'm joined today by Greg Young. Greg is the Worldwide Head of Production and Post-Production Technology for Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios. We have a lot to talk about, so let's jump right into it.
One of the things I just mentioned is that this is learning from Amazon. One of the things that's happening this week, and I encourage you to check it out later today and throughout the week, is that these tracks are really trying to bring you insights and best practices from projects where Amazon and other companies like Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios are innovating and using AWS. These are things like chalk talks, lightning talks like this, and breakout sessions where you can learn more about it. This is some of the scale and numbers that Amazon is operating. This is from a recent Prime Day, and you see the word "trillion" in there. So getting an insight from how Amazon is using AWS internally should be interesting from that perspective.
What we're going to talk about today is we're going to start off by talking about Greg and his team's workflow at Amazon MGM Studios. What they've been doing is leveraging the cloud to optimize how they make film and television. So really optimizing the entire content production lifecycle, and really thinking in a cloud-native way. This is really helping reduce some of the inefficiencies, and one of the things we'll touch on is it can even reduce some of the carbon hot spots in film and television production. Greg will give you a first-hand look at what he and the team are doing, from live cloud production to remote scripted film and television production.
Then we'll go into an example of some of the innovations they've made, which is really leaning into film and television production and thinking in a cloud-native way. That's the mobile uplink camera to cloud workflow. And then finally, we'll close out with conclusions and next steps and hopefully tell you that you've learned a lot, and you can actually go see one of the things we talked about first-hand. Before we finish, really quickly, how many of you are from media and entertainment versus how many of you are generalists? Okay. One or two. Great. That's what I expected. It is a re:Invent conference, but this talk is about taking a legacy business process and thinking about applying it to a workflow. It will be applicable, and you will have takeaways that are applicable regardless. So now I'm going to turn it over to Greg to tell you a little bit more about what he does.
Thank you, Jason. As Jason said, today's talk is going to focus on Amazon MGM Studios' shift to studio in the cloud and how we're driving our sustainability goals, as well as cost and reducing the time it takes to produce content faster globally. What you see on screen here 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 checking it out. It's been running for over 70 seasons, filmed all over the world. We call this a multi-camera format show, and a multi-camera format show means there are 40 to 50 cameras on a show. That means there's a lot of broadcast trucks, local storage rentals, a lot of equipment rentals, generators brought in, and a lot of content being produced that you need to send to partners globally via courier or digital transfer.
So how did we approach efficiency on this show? Typically, these 40 camera streams would be sent to disk recorders and on-premise storage, but instead, we decided to send these camera streams directly to AWS. This allowed our teams in Los Angeles to remotely direct, playback, edit, and review from 5,000 miles away. The 40 camera streams are delivered with sub-second latency. We were the first to prove this capability on this type of unscripted show, essentially reducing transfer times from days to weeks, and also reducing our on-premise footprint. Our talent and creative teams were back in Los Angeles doing some of the post-work for this show, but there's no problem for these talent and creative teams to be anywhere in the world, or even in their living room at home.
I imagine there are people from media and entertainment in the room, and for those who are not, let's take a moment to talk about what Studio in the Cloud is, and generally what the production and post-production process is.
We actually start with nine workflows. We start on the left with production. This is really principal photography and ingestion. This is where we're on location with cameras, shooting footage for the day. And then we move into the dailies process. This is where we create a large amount of unedited raw footage, and we need to do sanity checks on that footage every day.
As we move further into the post-process, we get into editorial. This is really where we take that unedited raw footage and start to craft the narrative of the show. Moving into conform, typically these media files are quite large and difficult to deal with unless you're dealing with them in a low-resolution format, but at some point, you have to combine the low-resolution with the high-resolution. That's when we get into VFX, or visual effects. Many of you have heard of this, where we start to enhance the story and add many aesthetic elements.
Color grading is really about ensuring that the color and creative consistency are aligned across the entire show. In sound, you typically have many audio files that you need to integrate to create the final soundtrack. And finally, mastering and QC is where what you see on the screen is the final deliverable that goes out to theaters and streaming providers. So we've talked a little bit about what looks like a really nice workflow across nine workflows, but in reality, this is the reality. It spans hundreds of vendors around the world, trucks, generators, storage rentals, couriers, and delivery services, and it doesn't just proceed simply from workflow to workflow. Sometimes we'll jump from editorial to sound, back from sound to conform, and then to VFX, jumping all over the place.
And today, in our current world, much of our uploads to AWS were done as archives. So once a show finished, we'd upload it to AWS to make sure we were archiving that footage for future use. Instead, we decided to reverse this. Let's upload that content as soon as possible, as close to principal photography as possible. What this enabled was to open up a world where we could bring global creatives into the cloud. But that wasn't quite enough. So we worked with vendors like Avid, Colorfront, Adobe, and Black Magic to ensure that the applications and tools creatives know and love would perform just as well in the cloud as they do under their desks. So we migrated all these tools to the cloud. And the ultimate goal was to bring the creatives to the content, instead of shipping the content to creatives around the world.
From Legacy Production Processes to Cloud-Native: Achieving Efficiency and Carbon Footprint Reduction
Now, most of you may not be very familiar with film and television workflows, so let's talk a little bit about what that looks like, especially from a Studio in the Cloud perspective. From a legacy perspective, imagine you're shooting a film or a TV show and you're on location. You're not necessarily near the comforts of power and connectivity. So traditionally, what you would do is take your media and offload it to multiple hard drives, so you can deliver it in parallel to ensure it's not lost in transit. So you spend a lot of time copying media from one card to another. Then you're thinking, since you're not near home base, you're going to transfer it to the studio. That takes time and resources. You'll probably be using gasoline-powered vehicles, and overall, it's not very efficient.
And once it gets to its destination, you have to take that shuttle drive and copy it back to something like a SAN or a storage array so that creatives can begin working. So throughout this entire lifecycle, you can see there are a lot of opportunities for optimization, both from a business and efficiency perspective. So what does this look like from a cloud-native perspective, especially as we take a little preview into the example that Greg and the team will talk about later? When you look at a Studio in the Cloud workflow, obviously you're still going to be on location, but one of the innovations they've made is the opportunity to send it directly to Amazon S3, into an S3 bucket, rather than copying media from media. If you copy that media, it's automatically safe and durably stored.
And the way that's possible is you can use cellular and satellite internet connections when you're away from a core centralized location. And once it's in Amazon S3, as I said, it's durably stored, it's safe, and creatives can start working with remote editing desktops. This is really the next evolution, and what Greg and the team will be working towards. So let's look at what this looks like from an architectural perspective. Obviously, you see familiar elements from the previous slide.
You're on location, you have trucks, and you're offloading. Then, from an architectural perspective, one of the things MGM Studios does is have a shared services VPC. This handles things like brokering software licenses and hash verification to ensure content arrives safely and is not corrupted. Obviously, in film and television, this is extremely important. So overall security and other shared services are performed.
As we look at the production-specific account, that environment can be spun up to have its own virtual private cloud dedicated to production. One of the initial aspects is taking that footage and uploading it to Amazon S3. This can be done by uploading directly to S3 with a native client or using a partner solution like Aspera. And then what happens is you start to move it. Once it's stored in S3, you move it to a shared storage system. You copy it from S3, and in this case, one of the solutions the studio team is using is from a partner called Avid, and they have Avid Nexis shared storage.
What this does is it allows Windows computers to be networked in the cloud, and then they can collaborate. Some of the workflows Greg talked about earlier—video editors, colorists, and finally, the person in charge of conforming—can all collaborate in a fully cloud-based workflow. This also enables remote editors, contributors, and freelancers to log in and start working from anywhere, without being tied to a single location, because it's in the cloud.
It also allows for situations where, often, not everyone is on the central team. You might have specialists like visual effects houses working on it. So it provides an opportunity for them to access the footage, perform their specialized work, and put it back into the system. Now, in the end, it can start from S3 and then be archived to S3. This can be done with something like a lifecycle policy to Amazon S3 Glacier, designed for affordable long-term storage, or you can copy it to an archive-specific bucket.
What you really see end-to-end is that it's in the cloud from the beginning, and that's also where it's delivered to the Amazon Studios content delivery pipeline. Like the slide I showed you earlier with Greg, instead of copying back and forth and repeating these different on-premise workflows, you start to see how everyone can access that media in a more centralized, cloud-based, virtualized type of workflow, and the benefits that can bring.
One of the benefits we talked about was efficiency from a business perspective and from a cost perspective, but another is actually from a carbon goal and climate goal perspective. One of the ways this comes into play is, at least for Amazon, Amazon has a Climate Pledge, which is a commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across all our operations by 2040. This includes Greg and the team at Amazon MGM Studios. But in reality, what we're seeing is that this is also an industry-wide vision. That's what the Climate Pledge is talking about, a collective effort to share best practices and work together across the industry to transform workflows and move forward.
This becomes important when you look at classical film and television production. 51% of the average carbon footprint comes just from travel and transportation. This is data from an organization called Albert, which specializes in researching the environmental impact of the film and television industry. One of the things they're saying is that what productions and the industry should start doing in the future is reducing the use of diesel generators, changing their mindset, and constantly evaluating when and where they can start reducing the amount of travel and transportation. So now, let's have Greg talk about how MGM Studios is thinking about this.
Development of Custom Rivian R1S: Results of a Mobile Cloud Studio Supporting Remote Filming
Thank you, Jason. I previously spoke a bit about the challenges on the journey to studio in the cloud. So, let me introduce our custom-built Rivian R1S. It features a total of 205 kilowatts of battery power, 1,000 watts of solar power, mobile internet connectivity with multiple carriers and different technologies, and an in-car ingest computer. Essentially, it provides access to a full studio in the cloud—in essence, a video village—in a mobile and sustainable way.
But why did we build this? It arose from a real-world scenario. In the first season of Rings of Power, we were filming in remote rural areas. And again, it was a large-format show, generating a huge amount of media, with bandwidth difficulties and shortages.
This challenge led to long delays from principal photography to other downstream workflows, sometimes taking days or even weeks for delivery. We wanted to create a solution that could go anywhere, operate for weeks on location, provide multi-carrier bandwidth upload capabilities, and offer the ability to work directly in any place, at any location.
Let's talk about some of the benefits. The initial benefits we've seen are really the ability to process dailies approximately 50% faster. We talked about the nine workflows earlier. We've also seen changes like, "I like this editor in Mexico," and "Next week, I like this editor in Madrid." When you have to rent, ship, deliver equipment, and sign purchase orders, doing this is very difficult. With these automated cloud workflows, it's easy, and it really takes only minutes to spin up in the local region where you're filming, whether it's principal photography or post-processing.
We've achieved a reduction in the overall production timeline by days to weeks. Faster compute allows for faster editing, faster rendering, and faster execution across various different workloads. And again, we have a lighter hardware footprint on site, meaning less hardware, storage, and generators to rent and ship. In 2025 this year, we completed about 70 productions globally across multiple different workflows. This year we built four or five workflows. We plan to build about four more workflows next year, aiming to run over 100 productions in the cloud by 2026. We are truly excited about what's to come.
Greg, thank you so much for coming today. I hope you all were able to take something away, even if it's not from a film and television perspective. That is, perhaps your industry also has legacy business processes, and you can step back and think about whether you can leverage cloud technology to skip some of those inefficiencies in your business. Now, this is my favorite part of the week, where normally I'd say, "Hey, here's this QR code, check out this website," but we actually have this modified Rivian that Greg was talking about here, and it's actually over there. You can see it from there. So if you look for the AWS sustainability cube in the sky, you can go over there, check it out, and see it in person. It's truly impressive, and it's really interesting to see in real life.
And if you have some time later today, you can go to Caesar's Forum, and if you want to hear about other things Amazon, there's a great house-like setup where you can see other Amazon companies that are using AWS. So I wish you all a fantastic rest of re:Invent. Thank you for coming. Please leave feedback in the app. Let us know what was good. That helps us choose what to do next year. And again, thank you. Thank you.
※ This article was automatically generated using Amazon Bedrock, while aiming to maintain the information from the original video as much as possible.
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