DigitalFilm Tree Wins Engineering Award for OpenStack-based Cloud Initiative

DigitalFilm Tree, an LA-based firm that does post production work for television and film, has been ahead of the media and entertainment technology curve for a long time. They joined the OpenStack Foundation in 2013 to solve a common problem in the TV and film production industry: data silos. Plenty of production shops have been using clouds for storage and rendering, but they had no efficient way of sharing raw video data across client and collaborator’s infrastructures.

DigitalFilm Tree looked to OpenStack to design a flexible and affordable hybrid cloud that could help them automate their workflows and share large, raw video files very efficiently. Guillaume Aubuchon, the CTO of DigitalFilm Tree has called it, “your own enterprise Google Docs.”

This week, DigitalFilm Tree was recognized for its innovation in media and entertainment technology with the 2014 Engineering Excellence Award from The Hollywood Post Alliance. The award, developed “to recognize the technical excellence and creative innovation that continually drive the post production industry in the advancement and support of content creation,” was given to DigitalFilm Tree for their use of ProStack, the company’s hybrid cloud workflow based on OpenStack.

“We have been focused on developing a system that is truly cloud based and easily useable for our clients, an OpenStack environment with secure and instantaneous access,” said Guillaume Aubuchon, DigitalFilm Tree CTO.

Since adopting OpenStack, DigitalFilm Tree has presented a case study on how the company has leveraged OpenStack in the entertainment industry at the Hong Kong Summit last year, and parodied the “Between Two Ferns” skit on stage in Atlanta in May. Watch the skit and hear Guillaume Aubuchon on how DigitalFilm Tree uses OpenStack here: