How Hammerspace, HP Anyware and Autodesk Enable Remote M&E Artists to Work from Anywhere

Media & entertainment workplaces used to center around the production studio. But the advent of hybrid work has changed how M&E artists, producers, and editors work—the workplace is no longer in a studio or office, it can also be at home, on location, or even on the move. 

In a webinar entitled “Hybrid Cloud Strategies to Empower Remote Creative Teams”, experts from Hammerspace, HP Anyware, and Autodesk discussed the challenges of collaborating and creating when artists are working in hybrid environments and talent is geographically dispersed. 

Hosted by Molly Presley, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Hammerspace, the webinar featured Jeff Bell, Senior Director of Product Management at Autodesk, Mike Bott, Principal Systems Engineer with Hammerspace, and Chad Smith, Technical Alliance Architect at HP. The panel shared insights into real-time remote and hybrid collaboration, high-performance workloads in remote settings, and access to distributed content. 

HP Anyware offers hybrid studios additional security 

Chad Smith spoke about HP Anyware’s “strong emphasis” on the anywhere story. “We like to say any endpoint, to any place, to any host on any network,” said Smith. “From a standalone workstation to a multi-cloud deployment,” artists can use HP Anyware to connect to Windows®, Linux® and Mac® host systems.  

Anyware is based on highly secured PC-over-IP (PCoIP^®) technology and only transmits encrypted pixels between the host system and a user’s device. No files are ever transferred from the data center. “It's more secure and efficient to send change pixels between endpoints and host systems than to move and synchronize file changes across the WAN,” said Smith. Alongside security, PCoIP also delivers a highly responsive, color and text-accurate, and lossless performance at low latency. 

Hammerspace and Autodesk augment HP Anyware’s offering 

Smith highlighted the importance of HP Anyware’s partnerships with technology companies like Hammerspace. “The HP anywhere solution by itself couldn't address the underlying data movement problem that these new environments needed,” said Smith. So, Anyware partnered with Hammerspace to ensure that more workflows could be accessed remotely. “What we're proposing with the Hammerspace architecture is a hub and spoke model,” added Smith. “Where the hubs are where the Hammerspace file system resides, and the spokes are the HP Anyware PC-over-IP connections into the hubs themselves. With this architecture, we're actually preserving and enhancing the security and functionality of the overall solution together.” 

Mike Bott elucidated that Hammerspace was on the other side of the problem. “We can distribute data, but what workstations are going to be there? HP Anyware is the other piece of that solution... You can centralize an exposure of your data set, and then bring the artists in using HP Anyware.” With HP Anyware’s access to workstations and Hammerspace’s data organization, studios are able to reach talent who are located in regions far away from the studio. 

Jeff Bell added how Autodesk’s product Shotgrid adds an additional layer that connects the infrastructure side with data access and enhances the joint remote solution. Shotgrid “is a cloud-based task and resource management system” explained Bell. It “allows you to determine where the data needs to be at any particular time based on the production schedules.” With Shotgrid, artists can see which sequences are in the production queue and what the “business logic is regarding where and which data is needed when.” 

Presley spoke about using Shotgrid and seeing the immediate benefits to artists. “The artists really don't need to worry too much about the technical bits of what's happening in the background.” With Shotgrid, elements appear in the right location almost “magically”. Even for the IT team, Shotgrid makes it easy to choose infrastructure, cloud regions, storage systems, and performance modes. 

An M&E solution that promises performance and security 

Smith, Bott, and Bell shared more details about the joint solution, including peripheral support, burst-to-render, and security features. 

Learn more about the Hammerspace, HP Anyware and Autodesk solutions for M&E teams by watching the webinar on Hybrid Cloud Strategies to Empower Remote Creative Teams. You can find out more about HP Anyware here.