I wasn't sure what to expect when I attended the 2024 Global Entertainment Awards (GEA), but the experience proved to be a remarkable one, for two reasons.
First, I had a front-row seat to some of the most amazing creative work in the entertainment industry. The GEA awards honor the teams who create promotional and marketing material for movies, TV shows, and video games, including everything from social media shorts to movie and TV show trailers. Second, I got to peek behind the scenes at the technology running the entire show.
The GEA emphasizes the unique value and creativity of the various types of short-form media that shape our collective understanding of content before we see it, or as they refer to it, the art of selling the story. Focusing on these elements of the creative process sets the GEA apart. The show honors the unsung heroes of the entertainment industry, focusing on the marketing that drives audiences into the seats of movie theaters or towards a streaming binge.
I particularly enjoyed the AMD emerging talent awards within the main program, which is a special entry route for new talent to break into the industry. This special section of the awards is for brand new entrants (less than 3 years in the industry) with limited resources, providing them with an opportunity to be seen on a global stage. AMD even equipped each emerging talent category winner with an AMD Ryzen™ CPU to further advance their careers.
The other incredible part of the show was, admittedly, a little less visible, but no less amazing if you knew what to look for.
Bringing together an awards show like this means assembling an array of technology behind the scenes to make everything run smoothly. AMD is a proud partner of the GEA and contributed multiple workstations powered by an AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper ™ PRO 7995WX CPU and Radeon™ PRO W7900 GPU, as well as a storage and render server featuring an AMD EPYC™ 9354 CPU and Radeon™ PRO W6800 GPU. This AMD ecosystem was assembled in a matter of days in a special editing suite in Portugal. Every component of the system, including the CPU, GPU, storage capacity, storage bandwidth, and total available memory plays a part in supporting the collaborative environment that transformed what the GEA staff thought they could expect from a high-performance workstation and remote rendering server. The entire show was filmed, edited, and then delivered in just 24 hours to then be published on Deadline Hollywood.
The GEA staff runs on a tight timeline, with only about 18 hours to turn raw 8k footage into fully processed, color-graded final product. In the past, data had to be manually transferred between machines because there was no centralized storage solution. This year, the production team was able to centralize information on a server powered by an AMD EPYC™ 9354 CPU, while simultaneously using the same system to serve as a remote DaVinci Resolve render station. Offloading tasks from the other workstations to the server freed up those systems for other creative tasks, improving the team's flexibility.
If you're curious about the GEA or the hardware AMD provided, check out the case study the two organizations recently published or the video embedded above. One clear takeaway is that the benefits from AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO processors weren't just a stepwise improvement.
"Thanks to AMD innovation, we gained six or seven hours in production time1, probably more, because we achieved so much more in a smaller amount of time," said Alex Martin-Verdinos, GEA's Production Director. “These time savings allowed the team to focus more on the creative aspects of their work and less on technical limitations. He added, "We had more social media content going out. And this year, we had a longer show."
I really enjoyed the show, both as a chance to see some amazing content and as an opportunity to watch what creative professionals can accomplish when hardware platforms are designed to get out of their way. I'm already looking forward to 2025 and what GEA and AMD can accomplish together.
1All performance and/or cost savings claims are provided by the Global Entertainment Awards and have not been independently verified by AMD. Performance and cost benefits are impacted by a variety of variables. Results herein are specific to the Global Entertainment Awards and may not be typical. GD-181.