In an announcement timed to the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas, which begins later this month, Amazon today announced Deadline Cloud, a new service that allows customers to configure, deploy and scale graphics and visual effects rendering pipelines on the AWS Cloud. Infrastructure.
With Deadline Cloud, customers in the media and entertainment and architecture and engineering industries can leverage AWS compute to render content for TV shows, movies, commercials, video games and digital plans, said Antony Passemard, general manager of AWS authoring tools.
“We are at a critical point in the industry where the demand for rendering-quality visual effects and the amount of content created using generative AI exceeds the (computing) capacity of customers,” added Passemard in a blog article. “AWS Deadline Cloud meets the rendering requirements of all customers by providing a scalable render farm without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.
A getting started wizard in Deadline Cloud guides customers through the process of setting up a render farm, including providing the size and duration of their projects to determine instance type and configure permissions. Deadline Cloud then provisions Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances and manages the network and compute infrastructure. And – for customers with on-premises compute – Deadline Cloud integrates with that compute and uses it to run rendering jobs.
The Deadline Cloud dashboard provides a view to analyze logs, preview current rendering jobs, and review and monitor costs. With Deadline Cloud, customers can attach their own third-party software licenses to the service or leverage usage-based licensing for rendering with existing rendering tools and engines (e.g. Autodesk Maya, Foundry Nuke and SideFX Houdini, etc. ).
“(With Deadline Cloud,) creative teams can take advantage of the speed of content pipelines and respond quickly to opportunities to take on more projects, while meeting tight deadlines and delivering high-quality content,” continued Passemard .
Deadline Cloud is generally available today in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo). ) and Europe (Frankfurt). and AWS Europe (Ireland) server regions.
Cloud-based rendering is nothing new. In 2015, Google made a splash in the space with the acquisition of Zync, whose technology has since been used to launch Google Cloud-based visual effects tools in partnership with Sony’s animation studio, Sony Pictures Imageworks. Elsewhere, platforms like Arch have been providing on-demand, cloud-based VFX infrastructure for years.
But the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the migration of VFX workloads to the cloud, as the cost of maintaining hardware – and space to store it – increased as work simultaneously declined, a result of mandates working from home and production stoppages for health reasons. .
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