Amazon today announced the launch of AWS Deadline Cloud, a fully managed service that helps customers set up, deploy, and scale rendering projects in minutes, so they can improve the efficiency of their rendering pipelines and take on more work.
With Deadline Cloud, customers creating computer graphics, visual effects (VFX), or innovating their pipelines to incorporate artificial intelligence-generated (AI-generated) visuals can build a cloud-based render farm—aggregated compute—that scales from zero to thousands of compute instances for peak demand, without needing to manage their own infrastructure.
Customers can use built-in customisation tools and integrations with digital content creation (DCC) software, such as Autodesk Arnold, Autodesk Maya, Foundry Nuke, and SideFX Houdini, to tailor their render pipelines for specific projects and directly render from preferred tools for use in design, modeling, animation, visual effects, and more.
With Deadline Cloud, creative teams can accelerate production timelines by running more projects in parallel, without worrying about capacity limits.
Deadline Cloud offers built-in budget-management capabilities that help customers understand costs with high granularity on a project-by-project basis, and with no upfront costs. Customers only pay when they are rendering.
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 led many organisations to set up their own on-premises infrastructure—render farms—that combine the power of hundreds, even thousands, of computing nodes to process rendering jobs.
Comprised of queues (submitted render jobs) and fleets (groups of nodes that process queues), render farms can take weeks or even months to build and deploy and require significant planning and upfront commitments to procure hardware and configure complex infrastructure.
Additionally, organisations need to track and manage costs to stay on budget, and often in-house tools lack capabilities to easily track project costs. While some organisations use render management software like AWS Thinkbox Deadline, many studios don’t have the in-house staff or IT resources to configure or manage their own cloud-based compute infrastructure and must look externally for alternative compute and IT support. As a consequence, organizations may lack scaling capacity to easily grow their business.
With Deadline Cloud, customers in industries like media and entertainment, architecture, and engineering can transform their content-rendering pipelines for projects spanning films, television shows, commercials, games, industrial design, and more—without upfront investments or ongoing costs between projects.
Customers can access Deadline Cloud through the AWS Management Console and use a guided process to build their render farm, including providing the size and duration of their projects to determine instance type and configuring permissions.
With Deadline Cloud, customers can link their own third-party software licenses with the service, or they can easily engage usage-based licensing for rendering with existing DCC tools and render engines. The scale and elasticity of Deadline Cloud—through its pay-as-you-go model—means customers do not need expensive hardware or have to spend time setting up an on-premises render farm.
“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. Creative teams can embrace the velocity of content pipelines and respond quickly to opportunities to accept more projects, while meeting tight deadlines and delivering high-quality content.”
