Red Bull Media House Banks on AMD for Storytelling Excellence

Red Bull Media House Banks on AMD for Storytelling Excellence

Explore how Red Bull Media House, the award-winning boutique film operation affiliated with the Austrian energy drink manufacturer is using AMD Threadripper™ PRO processors to put extraordinary events to film.

Showcasing world-leading athletes and their superhuman feats – this is what Red Bull is known for. Superlatives are par for the course for the Austrian energy drink manufacturer and for Red Bull Media House, the affiliated award-winning boutique operation that commits these extraordinary events to film. Stefan Knerrich Rubin– Director of Post Production, Engineering & Technology at Red Bull Media House North America – talks to us about the process of creating content for such once-in-a-lifetime events. “The challenge is always the same,” he says. “You have athletes in one of the most remote locations on the planet. You have a Formula One car on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. You have a skydiver jumping from the stratosphere. You better shoot that from as many angles as you can. Because you only do it once.”

Breaking records and barriers

Knerrich Rubin was there along with eight million other online viewers to witness Felix Baumgartner freefall 24 miles (39.96 km) from space. Baumgartner successfully became the first person to break the sound barrier without an aircraft, taking a mere 34 seconds to reach Mach 1.25 at 844 miles per hour (1,358 km/h). Red Bull Stratos not only broke the sound barrier, it broke other records too – for the highest altitude jump, the highest manned balloon flight, and for the most ever watched YouTube livestream. “Google was afraid that we would crash YouTube,” Knerrich Rubin recalls, “that’s how high the numbers were.” Capturing the leap that was literally out-of-this-world was a gigantic undertaking. “We had more than 30 cameras, and many running continuously for four and a half hours. You can imagine the amount of material we accumulated,” Knerrich Rubin recalls.

Meticulous planning, a powerful technical infrastructure, and fast processing speeds were crucial to their success. “Technology has progressed dramatically since then, of course, and it would have been nice to have machines back then like we have today.”

Speed is of the essence

Today, the projects are no less sensational, and the pace of production more accelerated. The post production team in North America, located in Santa Monica, is typically juggling 10-15 projects at any given time. “Faster is better, and yesterday is better than tomorrow,” is the motto they live by. Quick turnaround times are routine – projects they work on are often posted within hours after the event itself. To complicate matters, editors are spread out all across the US and beyond, with some creative teams working from Great Britain, France or Brazil. “Especially because of Covid, I was looking for solutions early on that would allow us to work remotely with high performance but with centralized hardware and shared storage. We decided to use a solution that originated in the world of remote gaming,” Knerrich Rubin explains. He also relies on AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO processors to get the job done right. They are ideal for remote systems and can process vast volumes of video footage quickly.

Powerful performance, versatile application

Filming and editing a live performance in Los Angeles of hip hop superstar producer Metro Boomin along with a symphony orchestra for the Red Bull Symphonic series was a textbook example for the high performance of the systems in Santa Monica. Ingesting and preparing Ultra HD source footage from 15 high-end digital cinema cameras overnight for the start of the edit the next day was done quickly and efficiently, as was the fast-turnaround edit that followed. “The AMD Threadripper™ CPUs have the speed, the performance, the flexibility, and it’s easy to install. The price-to-performance ratio is also spot on,” Knerrich Rubin comments. The Threadripper™ PRO 5000 WX-Series processor is designed for versatile workstations and all key professional applications – from Adobe to VIZRT. More than 40 editorial and production systems run on the most powerful CPUs of AMD in Santa Monica. The Red Bull Media House editors in North America are equipped with PRO 16-cores, the graphics team with the 32-core solutions. “For editing, we use all industry-standard non-linear editing applications and VFX plugins for ingest and edit prep, color grading and playout,” explains Knerrich Rubin. They all count on the streamlined post production workflows that AMD Threadripper™ PRO processors’ eight memory channels enable. “It was important for me that the performance fits, the model fits, and that you can upgrade them.”

A powerhouse of content creation

Content-creation is Red Bull Media House’s mandate all over the world. Every year, it produces around 150,000 minutes of video content for more than 20,000 media assets. Over 850 personalities in 200+ disciplines and 1,500 events in 175 countries around the world have been celebrated. And AMD technology is vital to this storytelling apparatus. Award-winning content, from two-minute shorts that highlight spectacular stunts to feature-length documentary films that paint poignant portraits — they all require the right tools to support the Red Bull Media House teams in their quest to showcase athletes and artists as they pursue their visions and ideas.