VFX
WORKING IN THE CLOUD
(Jellyfish’s UK data centre). The artists have an improved user experience, whilst still having the same access and security as if they were in the studio.” Smith says this puts the needs of
the production first, hiring the best creatives for each task no matter where they live. “And when the project is over, we shut it off,” he says. “We aren’t stuck with on-premises hardware investments that consume air conditioning, square footage, and so on.”
Cloud renders Jellyfish has been using the cloud to increase rendering capacity by 70%. “In our on-premises datacenter, we use EPYC processor cores. So it was an easy decision to choose the same processors in the cloud, where we rely mainly on Microsoft Azure HBv2-series virtual ma-chines (VMs) with 120 AMD EPYC 7742 processor cores,” says Smith. “We built large-scale services using Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets to create and manage a group of heterogeneous load-balanced VMs. Azure services runs many renders in parallel on a wide range of hardware, including GPUs. So when our studio’s creatives exceed the capacity of the on-premises datacenter, we burst render with Virtual Machine Scale Sets to increase or decrease the number of VMs automatically in response to demand or based on its self-defined schedule.” The Mill’s renderfarm bursts into
the cloud when out of local capacity, which is often, according to Akram. “We almost always run out of local rendering capacity, and improvements in our workflow and pipeline means we hit the rendering stage much faster than we did, say, five years ago. With more jobs rendering at the same time, cloud burst is an essential feature,” he explains. “Most of our recent projects will have used some sort of cloud based rendering - two recent examples include Einstein Knows Best (Smart Energy) when rendering a Digi Human and Anything for you Mama (Winimax) which had an FX heavy workload. Rarely will a project come through the building without leveraging an element
90
televisual.com Summer 2021
Jellyfish
W A T C HME N FO R H B O
of the cloud.” Axis first used cloud rendering
in anger last year on A Discovery of Witches (Bad Wolf/Sky Studios) “We pretty much rebuilt pre-Tudor London on the Thames, and the size of the asset needed cloud rendering,” says Davies. “We were using our own bespoke infrastructure set up on Amazon Web Services in combination with some of the Thinkbox Technology, which meant that we had systems locally and in the cloud,” says Hooker. “So when an artist requests a render, our custom- built render submitter technology will check and compare what’s changed locally from the studio based machines with data already in the cloud. It will update anything that’s changed or anything that’s new, upload it all to the cloud and spawn up a fleet [a cloud term for a group of instances] to do the rendering. [Once that renders] it creates a transfer process back to our local studio systems.” “We couldn’t have done it on our
smaller farms, it was great to have the option to put those big assets on AWS,” says Davies. “We were quite controlled and measured in how we did it, we did lots of low quality renders to start with,
lots of testing before the high quality renders went through that system.” Milk too has taken the cloud route.
On Sky Original drama Intergalactic for which Milk created 850 shots across eight episodes, it rendered a lot of the 4K final shots on the cloud. “We have a mixture between budgeted use of the cloud, planned use and bursting to ease rendering traffic when delivering multiple larger scale projects and large amounts of 4K data,” says Cohen. “Last year we upped our hardware baseline capabilities for on-prem render, in order to have greater visibility and control on cost and have reverted to a more cloudburst methodology.”
Future virtual “I think if you were to set up a studio tomorrow you would look to start with a totally cloud based setup,” says Chapman. “This would allow you to scale organically and also avoid some of the big up-front hardware costs. For the Mill with our current scale and the scale of the wider Technicolor Creative Studios group, we can make some economies by having large infrastructure in house, while also using the cloud to scale up and down in areas like rendering.”
“With the right set up, [a
completely virtualised workflow] can be created, compliant with the Trusted Partner Network,” says Smith. “It’s all dependent on cost. If the cost of the cloud became more competitive, then we would definitely look at migrating our infrastructure to be wholly cloud- based.” The news of the forthcoming
release of WetaM, a subscription cloud service (SaaS) that provides tools designed and developed by Weta Digital fully embedded in Autodesk Maya, has focussed the VFX world even more on cloud-based pipelines. According to Weta Digital, the
service “is cloud-based, highly virtualised in its philosophy and the design is optimised to keep the data in the cloud”. The cloud-based service will
include various rendering options and requirements will likely be akin to many of the remote working workflows that have seen much greater adoption over the last 18 months.
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
