Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the availability of AWS Deadline Cloud, a fully managed service that helps customers set up, deploy and scale rendering projects, to improve the efficiency of their rendering pipelines and improve productivity.
The final frames for VFX and other digital media are generated through a process called rendering that takes 2D and 3D digital content data and computes an output, such as an image or video.
The demand for rendering high-resolution content developed by creative studios and generative AI tools has recently led many organizations to set up their own on-premise infrastructure – render farms – that combine the power of hundreds of computing nodes to process rendering jobs.
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Deadline Cloud is said to help customers creating computer graphics and visual effects (VFX), or incorporating AI-generated visuals to build a cloud-based render farm that scales from zero to thousands of compute instances for peak demand, without needing to manage their own infrastructure.
In this way, Deadline Cloud promises creative teams the ability to accelerate production timelines by running more projects in parallel, beyond standard capacity limits.
Deadline Cloud also offers built-in budget management capabilities to help users understand costs with high granularity on a project-by-project basis, with customers only paying for rendering.
With Deadline Cloud, users in industries like media and entertainment, architecture and engineering can transform their content-rendering pipelines for projects including films, television shows, commercials and games without upfront investments or ongoing costs between projects.
“We are at a tipping point in the industry where demand for rendering quality VFX and the amount of content created using generative AI are outpacing customers’ on-premises render farm capacity,” said Antony Passemard, general manager of creative tools at AWS.
“AWS Deadline Cloud meets any customer’s rendering requirements by providing a scalable render farm without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.”
Animaj, a next-generation media company bringing brands to kids and families, is among the customers and partners using AWS Deadline Cloud in their rendering workflows.
Antoine Lhermitte, VP of engineering at Animaj, said: “Running our unique pipeline – which combines several steps of complex character animation manipulations – is tedious and time-consuming when done on custom infrastructure, creating content bottlenecks and detracting from time that we could spend innovating on storytelling.
“By offloading undifferentiated work, we have been able to deploy seven times faster, giving us the ability to expedite our artists’ inventions so they can focus on creativity and bringing inspiring stories to global audiences.”
Deadline Cloud is generally available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt) and Europe (Ireland).
