Who are Aerial Empire?
Aerial Empire specialise in producing video footage of outdoor spaces. As part of their business, they create and deliver 360-degree timelapse footage of construction sites, giving companies an accessible overview of progress on the ground. They also produce artistic drone films for clients such as tourism companies and property agents.
Why Lambert Labs?
Aerial Empire needed help in expanding their timelapse video management system, the “Time-Lapse Portal”, across all aspects. This Portal runs as a Python/Flask app hosted on Digital Ocean. As highly-skilled Flask developers, we were well suited to the task. In addition, video production is managed by a Celery worker, which in turn is one of many containers orchestrated by Kubernetes in the cloud. Both of these technologies are ones with which members of our team have had extensive experience.
What we did
- Scaled up resources on the compute instance responsible for video production. This meant we could render longer and higher-resolution timelapses without worrying about out-of-memory crashes.
- Implemented a custom Python script to scale up/down cloud resources as needed to help reduce business costs.
- Increased the video editor capabilities in the Portal, so that Aerial Empire could customize more attributes like video resolution directly from the frontend.
- Improved the self-render functionality of the Portal, which periodically re-renders timelapse videos to include the latest images captured by on-site cameras.
- Helped implement a UI upgrade of the Portal.
- Streamlined the video rendering algorithm by optimizing our usage of FFmpeg encoding features.
Read more
To read more about how we use Python and Flask in our services, follow the links below: