Grace Ashiru
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), has unveiled AWS Deadline Cloud, a comprehensive managed service designed to streamline the setup, deployment, and scalability of rendering projects within minutes. This service empowers customers to enhance the efficiency of their rendering pipelines and take on additional work.
With Deadline Cloud, customers in the fields of computer graphics, visual effects (VFX), and those integrating AI-generated visuals into their pipelines can establish a cloud-based render farm—aggregated computer- that can seamlessly scale from zero to thousands of compute instances to meet peak demand, eliminating the need to manage their own infrastructure.
Customers have the ability to utilize the built-in customization tools and integrations with digital content creation (DCC) software, such as Autodesk Arnold, Autodesk Maya, Foundry Nuke, and SideFX Houdini, to tailor their render pipelines for specific projects.
This enables them to directly render from their preferred tools for use in design, modeling, animation, visual effects, and more. With Deadline Cloud, creative teams can expedite production timelines by running multiple projects simultaneously without concerns about capacity limits.
Deadline Cloud also provides built-in budget-management capabilities, allowing customers to comprehensively understand costs on a project-by-project basis, with no upfront costs. Customers only pay when they are rendering. To begin using Deadline Cloud, please visit aws.amazon.com/deadline-cloud.
The process of rendering, which involves generating the final frames for VFX and other digital media, encompasses the computation of output from 2D and 3D digital content data, resulting in images or videos. The escalating demand for rendering high-resolution content from creative studios and generative AI tools has prompted numerous organizations to establish their own on-premises infrastructure, known as render farms. These render farms harness the collective power of hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of computing nodes to efficiently process rendering jobs.
Render farms, consisting of queues for submitted render jobs and fleets of nodes for processing, require extensive time and resources for building and deployment, often taking weeks or even months. This process involves significant planning and upfront commitments for procuring hardware and configuring complex infrastructure. Organizations are faced with the challenge of deciding between provisioning for peak demand, which can result in costly idle infrastructure, or facing fixed capacity constraints that limit concurrent projects, causing delays and missed delivery commitments.
Render farms also necessitate companies to integrate software from various specialized DCC tools, such as those used for animation or game cinematics. In cases where the software in the asset pipeline is incompatible or outdated in relation to the render management tool, studios may be compelled to stick to older software versions, compromise their preferred workflow, or implement additional processes to ensure software integration. Moreover, organizations must effectively monitor and manage costs to adhere to budget constraints, with in-house tools often lacking the capacity to easily track project expenses.
While some organizations leverage render management software such as AWS Thinkbox Deadline, numerous studios lack the internal expertise and IT resources required to configure or oversee their own cloud-based computing infrastructure. Consequently, they must seek external assistance for compute and IT support. This often results in organizations facing challenges in scaling their capacity to accommodate business growth.
With Deadline Cloud, clients in industries such as media, entertainment, architecture, and engineering can revolutionize their content-rendering pipelines for a wide range of projects, from films and television shows to commercials, games, and industrial design. This can all be achieved without the need for upfront investments or ongoing costs between projects. Clients can easily access Deadline Cloud through the AWS Management Console and utilize a guided process to construct their render farm. This includes providing project size and duration to determine instance type and configuring permissions.
Deadline Cloud streamlines the process of provisioning Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances and effectively manages network and compute infrastructure, making it easier for customers to adjust their compute resources based on demand.
It seamlessly integrates with existing on-premises compute resources, allowing customers to leverage their current infrastructure for rendering jobs. By offering pre-built integrations with popular DCC tools, Deadline Cloud eliminates the need for manual setup and licensing for rendering projects, saving time and effort in tailoring rendering pipelines for each job. For instance, an animation studio can efficiently render compute-intensive scenes for an upcoming film by combining DCC and generative AI techniques with Deadline Cloud, without disrupting other projects or requiring additional infrastructure provisioning.
Deadline Cloud’s dashboard offers customers a comprehensive view for analyzing logs, previewing in-progress render jobs, and efficiently managing costs. With Deadline Cloud, customers can integrate their own third-party software licenses with the service or opt for usage-based licensing for rendering with existing DCC tools and render engines. The scalability and flexibility of Deadline Cloud, with its pay-as-you-go model, eliminate the need for expensive hardware or the time-consuming setup of an on-premises render farm.
“We are currently at a pivotal moment in the industry, where the demand for high-quality VFX and the creation of content using generative AI is surpassing the capacity of customers’ on-premises render farms,” explained Antony Passemard, general manager of Creative Tools at AWS.
“AWS Deadline Cloud addresses this challenge by offering a scalable render farm that eliminates the need to manage the underlying infrastructure. This empowers creative teams to adapt to the fast pace of content pipelines, take on more projects, meet tight deadlines, and deliver top-notch content.”
Deadline Cloud is now available for general use in various regions, including US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Ireland).
Animaj is a cutting-edge media company dedicated to delivering top-tier, captivating brands to children and families across the globe. According to Antoine Lhermitte, VP of Engineering at Animaj, “Our company’s foundation lies in streamlining and enhancing the creation of 3D animated scenes that ignite the imaginations of children worldwide. Managing our unique pipeline, which involves various intricate steps of character animation, can be laborious and time-consuming when executed on customized infrastructure.
This can lead to content bottlenecks, diverting our focus from innovating in storytelling.” Lhermitte further explained, “With AWS Deadline Cloud, we can dynamically scale render capacity and adjust it within minutes, instead of hours. By delegating repetitive tasks, we have accelerated our deployment by sevenfold, enabling our artists to concentrate on creativity and crafting inspiring narratives for global audiences.”
Company 3 is a top-tier postproduction facility catering to a wide range of clients, including features, episodic content, commercials, and music videos. According to Phil Wortas, Director of New Technology at Company 3, the company has made substantial investments in on-premises resources to handle large rendering jobs. The flexibility of AWS Deadline Cloud for managing render computing, both on-premises and in the cloud, along with the ability to use Open Job Description, has enabled the seamless sharing of job execution processes across multiple departments within the company.
For over thirty-five years, SideFX has been dedicated to equipping artists with cutting-edge procedural 3D animation and visual effects tools, tailored to produce top-tier cinematic results.
According to Rob Stauffer, Technical Consulting Manager at SideFX, “As the creators of Houdini, a leading visual effects software in the industry, it is crucial to us that the artist’s experience with our tools is intuitive, customizable, and future-proof.” The integration of Houdini with AWS Deadline Cloud now allows artists to leverage advanced and familiar tools for motion graphics, virtual reality, and more, seamlessly rendering in the cloud directly from Houdini. This empowers creators to focus on innovating new ways to deliver stunning content rather than managing rendering workstreams. SideFX is excited about the potential to enrich Houdini’s comprehensive toolset with the performance and capabilities of Deadline Cloud.
