Smarter Tools from Lenovo with AMD Power Creatives in Media and Entertainment

Consumers continue to expect fresh and innovative experiences across film, TV, games and interactive experiences, in greater quantity with higher fidelity, which means artists and studios require more compute power to handle ever-growing datasets while still delivering on time and on budget.

Primitive people had charcoal to create cave paintings, Michelangelo used a hammer and chisel to carve David, da Vinci had horsehair paint brushes for the Sistine Chapel, and Fellini used humble black and white film to create cinematic masterpieces. Artists in the 21^st century are using computers.

The media and entertainment (M&E) industry has long been at the center of society’s innovation — from the printing press and radio to the first moving pictures, television, animation, and video games. As creative industries evolve, consumer demand for the next big thing has only increased. Today, we’re at an inflection point where consumers are expecting fresh and innovative entertainment experiences across film, television, and gaming, and legions of talented creatives empowered by smarter technology must rise to the challenge.

However, consumer expectations pose many challenges: artists and studios must create a larger volume of higher-fidelity entertainment content than ever before, which in turn requires more compute power to handle the ever-growing complexity of datasets. So, while production software is important, having the right workstation to run it and keep the creatives making their magic is essential. To help creatives in the M&E industry meet this challenge, Lenovo is working with partners such as AMD to deliver AI-optimized devices.

The right solution to tackle today’s industry challenges

There is a fundamental gap between what artists and studios are being asked to deliver and what they’re able to deliver given imposed time constraints, budgets, and available tools. That’s where Lenovo’s Workstation portfolio, powered by AMD, can help bridge the gap between clients’ expectations and the resources needed to deliver the highest-fidelity visual content. Not only is the technology advancing rapidly… but so are the skills of the artists harnessing it.

The Lenovo ThinkStation P8 Workstation helps artists create revolutionary content better, smarter, and faster than ever before. It combines a breakthrough compute architecture with an advanced thermal design in a rack-optimized, Aston Martin-inspired chassis. Featuring the latest AMD Ryzen^™ Threadripper^™ PRO 7000 WX-Series processor, up to three NVIDIA RTX^™ 6000 Ada Generation graphics, robust PCIe Gen 5 connectivity, and high-speed DDR5 memory, the ThinkStation P8 delivers staggering performance output from a single-socket platform. M&E creatives benefit from the lightning-fast renders, simulations, image processing and simulations, and build/compiling processes for game development.

Lenovo makes the needs of creatives a top priority by partnering with organizations like AMD that are dedicated to smarter innovation. Lenovo developed the ThinkStation P8 workstation directly from customer feedback, including artist and studio input, as part of the development process in an effort to deliver solutions that will drive greater creativity and production efficiency. In fact, many of the current Workstation features are the result of direct conversation with artists and studios about what they expect and need from the technology. For example, the ThinkStation P8 is purpose built for flexible deployments, featuring handles on the chassis and rack optimization for the creatives who move their workspaces around studio lots during different phases of production.

What’s on the horizon in 2025 and beyond

AI is becoming more and more prevalent within production pipelines with the promise that it will make the creation of art easier and faster. With that comes concerns that it could replace certain artist jobs and production functions or interfere with artistic decisions. But it’s simply not the case. AI is evolving to become more of an assistant to the artist, allowing them to focus more on the art they are creating than the repetitive and technical aspects of art creation.

While AI has been at the forefront of discussions within the industry, there are other issues that warrant equal attention.

How real-time technologies are changing the way films are made

Leveraging real-time technology in a virtual production volume has changed how actors are seamlessly inserted into environments (versus traditional methods), while reducing costs and time to delivery. Additionally, directors are afforded greater flexibility and control to bring their creative vision to life. Real-time is also allowing artists to work in context and iterate more frequently, increasing their ability to deliver higher fidelity end results. The combination of high-performance compute capabilities like AMD’s Threadripper PRO CPUs, paired with NVIDIA’s Proviz GPUs and Epic’s Unreal Engine have changed, and will continue to change content creation and filmmaking, and further blurring the lines between the analog world we live in with the digital worlds created by artists.

Formats are growing exponentially and require the infrastructure to support them. Nearly all new televisions today are 4K, and content providers such as Netflix, YouTube or Hulu are making 4K content more widely available online in a fight to win viewers. While 4K is becoming more common, the move to 8K and beyond is already in full swing, and things will remain this way for the foreseeable future. From a creator standpoint, the evolution to 8K requires them to account for increased storage, networking and compute requirements associated with larger formats.

As the move from 4K to 8K happens, file sizes are quadrupled and the underlying technologies used to create, move, house and playback have to follow suit. When you go beyond traditional viewing experiences, like televisions and movie theatres, and move into interactive experiences, such as the Las Vegas Sphere, the requirements are even greater and need to be scaled to the workload.

So, what’s next?

The one constant of production is change, where artists and studios creating content for film, television, streaming, or gaming, continually need to raise the creative bar, while staying on time and on budget. Lenovo works closely with the industry to help bridge the gap between consumer expectation and the ability to deliver on them so content being created continues to captivate audiences around the world.

Lenovo workstations can help maximize creative output and bring more projects to audiences faster with the processing speed and certified software media and entertainment professionals count on.

ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series workstations support and help sustain: