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Cloud Computing Democratizes Digital Animation
kenekaplan writes "John McNeil is the chief creative officer and founder of a digital arts and communication company based in Berkeley, CA. After turning to Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing service for the first time to finish animation under tight deadline, he was impressed by how it would let him compete with bigger studios. He said, 'Cloud computing is the first truly democratic, accessible technology that potentially gives everyone a supercomputer...it's a game changer. I could never compete or be able to deliver something at the level of a Pixar or a Disney, given what I have at my disposal inside the walls of the studio,' McNeil said. 'But if I factor in the cloud, all of a sudden I can go there. And then the limitations of whether or not I can deliver something great will be on my own talent and the talent of the people that are part of the studio.'"
Queue the "but it's cheaper than owning a render farm" comments!
But, hey! It actually is cheaper when you can't utilize a render farm as efficiently as big studios can.
I think this is a prime example of rent-a-hpc done right.
-- no sig today
Small studios produce a title every few years. With the cost of keeping their hardware current this option makes a lot of sense for them.
Studio Pyxis (www.studiopyxis.com) is a Burbank based production company that is taking full advantage of cloud computing, both for our own productions and for sharing with clients. The company is a new model of production company leveraging years of development in real time technology such as the Virtual Production process used on Avatar which involve real time graphics and visualization so that directors can shoot visual effects interactively as if they are really happening in front of you, and cloud computing that can complete the photorealistic renders on the back end in record time.
One feature of cloud computing that is often over looked though in these production discussions is the breadth vs depth computing model. It's obvious that it's a value to have a massive cold room that you don't have to buy up front, but the real advantage comes when it costs exactly the same thing to run 1000 cpus for 1 hour as it does to run 10 cpus for 100 hours.
Visual effects and animation production is all about revisions. It's a huge win to have your full renders back sooner. Being able to run every frame of a shot at once regardless of how many frames you have means that you have the entire shot in the time it takes the longest frame to render. This has never been possible before. Production has always wanted a dynamically scalable solution but as always had to contend with some fixed capacity. Granted EC2 has a fixed capacity as well, but it is so much more massive then a typical production facility as to be a non issue.
As for what some commenters are saying about bandwidth issues it is true it's a factor, and this is why it's not a turn key solution for the average small company. We've spend a fair amount of time creating an infrastructure that mirrors assets in the cloud, renders and composite locally to the cloud, then generates compressed images and movie files for download at review. Only when we approach the completion of a shot do we download actual exr, or dpx data. But we do make our infrastructure available to other companies to help them be more turn key.
Another aspect that more then democratizing cg production actually gives an advantage to the smaller facility are the limitations that larger facilities working on mainstream studio pictures have such as MPAA rules about keeping film assets off the internet and/or on physically disconnected machines. Whereas small facilities like ours can be satisfied with a VPN connection to Amazon, larger facilities are often legally obliged not to.
The one area that still needs to be solved to truly make this work for everyone is for the software companies to start offering the same type of pay as you go licensing so that we can more easily use the professional tools. It would be relatively easy for a company like Pixar to offer a RenderMan license server that one could connect to over the internet or even EC2 based that would monitor your hourly usage. Are you listening Pixar?