Sharing the Passion
Passion Pictures scales intelligently into the cloud to manage data and compute power on a job-by-job basis.
Animation production companies and studios have found a rare spot of sunshine as the rest of the entertainment industry slowly emerges from the dreary-looking environment of the last two years. It is a sector where visual effects artists, animators and video editors can work entirely from home and all their efforts come together online for the final result. With production workflows that are smoother to run and less risky than live-action film production, streaming providers like Disney Plus, HBO Max and Netflix
are doubling down by commissioning new animated series which will provide thousands of hours of new content for subscribers. For creative production group
Passion Pictures, keeping up with the pace of this growth meant more teams collaborating using cloud- based services as opposed to their on-premise facilities. Passion Pictures needed to scale into the cloud efficiently yet intelligently, controlling all of the resources they were using; from workstations, to render compute and
even data movement. Passion Pictures connects and
“pixitmedia has helped us take that next step again with ngenea
to allow us to have a more linear scalability to the business.”
Jason Nicholas Head of CG
at Passion Pictures
inspires through the moving image, specialising in animated commercials and features, illustration, technology enabled storytelling and feature documentaries. With 30 years of innovation in motion under their belts, Passion’s most recent accomplishments in CG animated film includes McDonald’s ‘Inner Child’ Christmas
advert, ‘Project Cobra’ character trailer for battle royale mobile game, Free Fire; and ‘The Composer’ a heart-warming Christmas film for financial services provider Erste Group.
‘The Composer’ for Erste Group, Directed by Kyra & Constantin at Passion Animation Studios
Cost-efficiently scaling for business continuity During 2020, Passion Pictures needed to rapidly scale up the amount of compute resource to handle heavy workloads using cloud, specifically Amazon Web Services (AWS), where many of Passion’s rendered images were being produced. Their existing system had limited capacity, and these new
‘Inner Child’ for McDonalds, Directed by Against All Odds at Passion Animation Studios
projects needed to scale far beyond the limits of the infrastructure that Passion had previously implemented. Because of the scale that files were being generated in the cloud, data-egress costs also had to be carefully managed so that they were only paying for data that was actually needed outside of their cloud environment (rather than temporary data). The foundation of this is a pixstor
based on a single Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instance that can comfortably service up to 300 render nodes. They can also easily add more servers down the line with no disruption to any of their workflows or pipelines. By harnessing the power, flexibility and scalability of pixstor’s high-performance software-defined storage, Passion Pictures now has the confidence to explore opportunities to have servers in other locations should production capability need to grow.
Intelligently using Cloud Compute for Rendering pixstor and ngenea have been developed to support the entire media lifecycle from ingest and creation through to distribution and archive, providing significant benefits for the full spectrum of media-centric organisations. Passion Pictures has an on-premise storage where they
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140
