 Live from the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, California. It's The Cube at Google Cloud Platform Live. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Live in San Francisco for Google's Cloud Platform Developer Conference, Geek Fest, this is The Cube, I'm John Furrier. My co-host Jeff Frick, we're here to extract a simple noise, this is Google's first premier developer conference around the cloud, normally part of their premier conference, I.O. Obviously, cloud's breaking out on its own. This is the next future I.O. Next guest is Kevin Bailey, co-founder of Atomic Fiction. This is the next I.O. for the cloud. I mean, it's going to be huge, but it's a small community, so welcome to The Cube. Thank you very much, excited to be here. Yeah, we talked to you guys in the past at Amazon, but now cloud, obviously the big whales are going at it. Google, a lot to print to the table. You're on stage with part of the announcements. Google certainly make a big run of putting up all their red meat and all their big iron for developers of tooling and also large scales. Talk about your take of what's going on here and what you guys did on stage. Well, we're really just excited about what's going on with the cloud in general. I mean, I think that there's so many exciting advancements that are made every year, every month, really, as far as, you know, different cloud providers offering different things. And, you know, Google is absolutely no exception. I think they're making some pretty crazy headway in offering both developers and sort of end users and we happen to be both of those things, a really compelling, compelling offer. A big void in the enterprise here and we were commenting on Twitter in between segments here, not necessarily their focus. I mean, they can always get to that middle ground they're going for winning the developers and end users, but also that teasing out a large, a large scale. I mean, talking about peering, that's not an enterprise, that's a large global scale. So, in a way, it's kind of the bookend strategy, kind of win the developers and then win the high-end infrastructure and then meet in the middle. Do you see it the same way? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Google has also been great in supporting us and we're just announced today that we're releasing our software as a service cloud platform as a service called Conductor that actually sits on Google, their cloud platform. So, you know, for us, it's like having the access as developers, but then also them supporting us sort of as an enterprise platform is going to be great and it's going to allow us to offer a service to other people, to a lot of other companies like ours and in other industries as well that helps to make the cloud just more accessible and easier to use. So, it's interesting, Kevin, you guys are taking your home product and now releasing it, so now you're not only a studio and making great visual effects, but you're also a product company, which is pretty cool. Talk about kind of this cascading economics that the cloud providers like Google are doing, just driving pricing down, down, down. And I think in your demo in the keynote, you said you spun up 12,000 cores to render one frame of video, which is pretty interesting, a little spaceship. How are you guys using those changing economics, these constant reductions in price? Are you just being able to do things less expensively? Are you taking those savings and driving it into more use? Are you finding new ways to use your same budget in ways that you didn't use it before? How does that constant downward spiral of pricing impact the way you guys do business? Well, it's obviously a great thing for us to have the pricing of cloud resources go down and down and down. I think everything else being equal, it would just help us do our work more economically for our clients and actually allow our artists to spend more time doing the work and less time waiting for the results of their work. So it helped to make them more efficient and that actually enhances creativity. Unfortunately, in the world in which we work in creative movies, every movie needs to be bigger and every movie needs to be more spectacular, right? Which means more compute resources are needed. So in that world, we kind of just stay at water level, but what we're able to produce is so much more grand. So it's actually allows us to give filmmakers more for the same cost. Now the other interesting thing, right, is you've got more compute at your disposal. You can make artificial look closer to real. So are you doing more kind of simulations of reality using the technology versus creating space and kind of science fiction effects where you can get closer and closer and closer to live production using computer generated assets? Absolutely. I mean, on stage today, we showed how we use Conductor to give us a result in minutes that would have otherwise taken hours. Clearly that is a big win in the world of being able to sort of like create a realistic world. For the last 100 plus years, movie making has been all about kind of creating an approximation of reality, a simulation of reality, if you will. So the more advancements that happen in compute and visual effects, the closer we are to being able to like do all of that in a computer. So it's really exciting and the cloud, I think it's going to fundamentally change how we do things and help us take that next step into fully virtual productions. Kevin, talk about the compute needs. Obviously on stage, they're touting a lot of stuff. They were going rapid fire on the announcements. You got the VM engines, you got the App Engine, you got the Compute Engine. Are you guys leveraging App Engine and the Compute Engine? And what are some of the things that they've done with Kubernetes and containers? Are you using any of those? What are the key details under the hood that Google's either adding or tweaking? Well, I can only talk a little bit about what we're doing under the hood as we, you know, we're going to be- Come on, share all the secret sauce. Tell everybody. Yeah, well, we'll be going public beta is sort of early to mid next year. So we're excited about that. You know, we are using App Engine and to help us scale, we are using Compute Engine for all of the resources that are actually jumping onto the tasks that we throw at it. So, you know, the VMs, the instances that are available on Compute Engine are amazing for what it is that we do. They have ones that have over 100 gigabytes of RAM. You know, generally we're using ones that have 16 cores and about 60 gigabytes of RAM. So they're really ideally suited for the workflows that we have. They're really beefy, beefy stuff. One of the things that we heard in the keynote was making it easier for folks around tooling. You heard Kubernetes for scheduling and coordinating resources. I mean, that's been a complaint. People in general kind of, you know, raw pass kind of component, there's some tooling we got to learn, get to speed a little learning curve. What do you guys see here that's getting you excited around some of the automation and or making it easy to stand up large fleets of apps, as they say? Yeah, well, you know, our industry and the visual effects side of things is actually an interesting one because it's only been around in a real way for 20 some odd years. And so even though it's fairly young, it's actually got a lot of legacy in it. So the thing that we're excited about is seeing all of the developments and announcements here is that there are all these clear ways of actually jumping in and helping to improve things at a fundamental level. So, you know, easier access to those kinds of things, I think we'll take an industry right now that is sort of mired in how it used to be done and actually helped to propel it into how it needs to be done. So you see workflow and creativity coming more of a common point because of the ability to spin up compute. So literally if you got mainframe on demand, if you will, spinning up lots of cycles of compute, you see more creativity on the visual side. Absolutely, because like I said in my presentation on stage, it's like we love movies. We don't love data centers. I mean, data centers are cool. We don't love provisioning workloads across multiple clouds. I mean, come on, it's so much fun. I know, I know, because it's like all the bleaky lights and it's really loud in those places. But you know, in all seriousness, it's like the reason why we do movies is because we love movies. We love to entertain people. And I think when we get to the place where we're not thinking about limitations of compute anymore, that's when we'll be living the dream. I was, I want to ask you a question because one of the things that we always talk about in theCUBE is what innovations will come out of the new leverage of the technology. And I want to ask you, do you see a mashup coming on? Certainly in music, you see people mixing up from raw materials. We were watching the World Series here and the Giants one. And it was an overlay graphics image that they put on the screen where as the guy's rounding second, you can actually look at speed velocity. And that was done in the cloud. So what the developers did was is they had all the data. They actually whipped up an app that overlaid onto the screen. And they showed essentially the runner's speed and velocity. So the point was that would have taken months to spec out. So talk about that kind of impact. You're like, how people just give up? I mean, do people tend to say, ah, screw it too much work? And what does that mean to the creative process? You know, I think it's always true whether it's in the creative process or development that the path of least resistance is likely to be followed. So if you make it easier for somebody to innovate and easier for them to do the things the right way, they do it. And that's why we created Conductor and actually are deciding to release it to the public is it's actually a very kind of like open architecture that makes it easy to access cloud resources. It makes doing things in Google's cloud platform easier. So we actually look forward to seeing what people are going to do with the framework that we're providing them and using that as a path of least resistance to do things in the cloud that we would have never imagined on our own. So tell us what you guys are up to next because you got all this creativity. You guys are kicking ass, taking names. You got this now resource at Google and your disposal. What's next for you guys? Stepping up more creativity, any projects you're working on you'd like to share, any ideas, just kind of give a taste of how this changes your work environment. Well, we just actually opened up an office in Montreal and absolutely amazing city. The team there is doing such a fantastic job about six months into their sort of initial existence. And it's just, it's incredible to see how the studio here in the San Francisco Bay Area and our Montreal studio are able to work together using the cloud as kind of a link between the two of them. Now we're working on the next Robert Zemeckis movie who is one of my favorite directors growing up, if not my favorite director growing up. It's called The Walk and that'll be coming out in October 2015. But then of course, you know, we're really moving forward full speed ahead with Conductor as sort of a separate entity all on its own and looking for a public release in 2015. If you could share with folks out there, observation folks that might not be in the front cutting edge or bleeding edge like you are this new generation that consuming feeds, Instagram, a lot of stuff going on online, new consumption patterns. What do you see? I mean, cause you've got Star Wars, right? To me, that's my generation where you're that, you know, that really changed the game, pushing the envelope and now we look at that now. So what's that new innovation that really hits this new consumption? You got mobile, you got cloud and the users aren't necessarily locked in on a screen is kind of a mobile aspect to it. What's that next? Share with the folks out there who aren't maybe up to speed. What is that new environment like and how do you guys serve that? I think if I knew the answer to that, I would probably be a billionaire, so, but... You have to do it too bad. But it's making movies for a living. You're inventing the future. I'm having fun, that's for sure. You know, I mean, it's really interesting. I mean, there's all the technology, like the virtual reality headsets out there are all the rage now, you know, the Oculus Rift. There are, you know, cloud computing, I think is going to enable a lot of very, very cool things for us. So, you know, it's hard to tell where things are going to go. I think that the movie industry is really struggling with where to go because of how all these new, you know, consumption devices are out there and how people are going to use them. I was joking with Robert Zemeckis a few weeks ago and we're talking, it's like movies are going to be, start to be made like vertically now because that's how people are washing their iPhones. You know, who knows where it's going to go, but, you know, we're happy to, you know, be here. Building VD, vertically. I know, I know, it's crazy. Define. Well, too, they keep delivering the capacity. I mean, when are you going to get to continuous rendering? I mean, that's got to be the holy grail of your industry, right, as fast as they're mapping it out. Or is it even relevant based on the process and the layering and all the stuff that goes into it? I mean, like I said, I think that the time where we don't have to think about compute is the time where we're living the dream. And I think that, you know, especially when you look at an animated movie, like something like a, you know, a DreamWorks or a Pixar would work on, to be able to see the entire movie laid out and then some form of rendering and then as tweaks are made, the whole thing gets better and better and better until it's done. That would just be like such an incredible creative tool. It's so incredibly freeing. You know, we're not there yet, but I think that, you know, in the coming years we will get there and we're going to see some pretty amazing creativity unlocked by having that. Because that's really it. It unlocks the creativity because you're no longer waiting around for the render, right? Yep, that's the idea. Yeah, that's great stuff. I would appreciate you coming on theCUBE. We are here live in San Francisco for Google Cloud Platform Live. This is the Google Developer Conference. Again, they're an inaugural event, really exploding onto the scene with that same vibe. Probably a little bit lower budget than IO. I've been to all the IO's and they're really a fantastic event. Really geeking out here. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick, live in San Francisco, the Google Cloud Conference here. We'll be right back after this short break.