Google Cloud makes splash at NAB: CDN Beta, Renderman, CloudVision API, Lytro, Autodesk Maya and more

Google has some big announcements at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) this week. Chief among them in my book is the announcement of the Google Cloud CDN going into Beta. This is big for Publishers (like us) who want to speed up delivery of images, audio and video and will take on big players like Amazon’s CloudFront, Akamai and Telco solutions.

Cloud CDN enters Beta

We’re launching Cloud CDN Beta, allowing your media content to be pushed out to Google’s network edge and cached close to users. As always, data travels via Google’s network and reaches users who expect instantaneous access to images and live-stream video experiences. Cloud CDN is also fully integrated with Google’s global load balancing and enterprise-grade security to distribute media workloads anywhere they originate, so jobs never get bogged down.

Google is also teaming up with Autodesk to increase rendering speed in Maya by up to 10x…

We’re collaborating with Autodesk to launch a new cloud-optimized rendering service called Autodesk Maya for Google Cloud Platform ZYNC Render. Autodesk software has been behind the past 21 Academy Award winners for Best Visual Effects and we’re bringing this capability to Google Cloud Platform.

The combined offering captures the aim of both companies to enable individual artists and developers to focus on content, abstracting away the nuances of managing infrastructure. Small teams of artists can tap world-class infrastructure to realize the creative vision of what was once limited to much larger studios.

Here’s how it works:

• Product teams at Google and Autodesk have developed a cloud-optimized version of Autodesk® Maya®, the popular tool for animation, modeling, and rendering. Via a Maya plugin, 3D scenes are transferred to Google Compute Engine in the background, while the artist is working. Because Maya is capable of running on the artist’s workstation and also in the cloud on Google Cloud Platform, this allows artists to run massively parallel rendering far more efficiently than before — taking advantage of the scalability, performance, and price benefits of GCP

• Compared with the non-optimized version, Maya® customers see up to 10x improvement in file upload efficiency. This allows many rendering jobs to start instantaneously, cutting wait time and accelerating time to finished shot

Maya isn’t the only rendering technology Google is working with. Google is also working Pixar’s historic RenderMan platform ZYNC Render:

Improvements to ZYNC Render

ZYNC Render fully supports Pixar’s historic RenderMan, with licensing built-in to the product. ZYNC users are also now able to spin up 500 machines per account, scaling to 32,000 rendering cores, with new support for 64-core machines — making short work of ambitious rendering jobs.

There is also a graduation of sorts for Google’s Cloud Vision API giving mortals access to Google’s insane image searching with ability to “classify images and analyze emotional facial attributes,” as well as logo detection and improved OCR.

Cloud Vision API graduates to General Availability

The goal of Cloud Vision API is to provide vision capability to your applications in the same way that Google Photos does. It is a powerful tool for media and entertainment companies enabling you to classify images and analyze emotional facial attributes. To further improve our customer experience, Cloud Vision API is going into general availability today with new features:

• Logo Detection expanded to cover millions of logos

• Updated OCR for understanding more granular text like receipts

Finally, Google is working with Lytro:

Lytro chooses Google Cloud Platform and The Foundry

Lytro’s technology seems to defy the traditional physics of photography, capturing massive volumes of visual data with such fidelity that infinite creative choices abound: unprecedented control over focus, perspective, aperture and shutter angle, all in post-production. Lytro selected Google Cloud Platform and The Foundry to help power their amazing invention. Learn more by watching their video.

I wasn’t even aware that Google had a presence at NAB, traditionally a destination for Apple and video production and storage companies, but this technology sounds really cool.