On Tuesday, Amazon launched a new service called Deadline Cloud that allows customers to configure, deploy, and scale up graphics and visual effects rendering pipelines on AWS cloud infrastructure. The new service is aimed at the media and entertainment industry and was introduced in time for the National Association of Broadcasters conference, which begins in Las Vegas later this month.
Deadline Cloud enables architecture and engineering as well as media and entertainment customers to use AWS computing to render content such as television shows, movies, advertisements, video games, and digital blueprints. , said Antony Passemard, GM of AWS Creative Tools.
In other words, AWS is betting on growing demand for tools that help media, entertainment, and other executives navigate the ins and outs of cloud-based rendering.
“We are at an inflection point in the industry, where the demand for high-quality VFX rendering and the amount of content created using generative AI is outpacing customer demand. [compute] capacity,” Pasmar added in a blog post. “AWS Deadline Cloud meets any customer's rendering requirements by providing a scalable render farm without managing the underlying infrastructure.”
Deadline Cloud's startup wizard guides customers through the process of setting up a render farm, including specifying the project size and duration, determining the instance type, and configuring permissions. Deadline Cloud provisions Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances and manages network and compute infrastructure. Additionally, for customers with on-premises compute, Deadline Cloud integrates with this compute and uses it to run rendering jobs.
Deadline Cloud's dashboard provides a view to analyze logs, preview in-progress rendering jobs, and see and control costs. Deadline Cloud allows customers to link their own third-party software licenses to the service or leverage usage-based licensing for rendering with existing rendering tools (Autodesk Maya, Foundry Nuke, SideFX Houdini, etc.) and engines. You can do that.
“[With Deadline Cloud,] Creative teams can leverage the speed of their content pipeline to quickly respond to opportunities to take on more projects, while meeting tight deadlines and delivering high-quality content,” Pasmar continued.
Deadline Cloud is currently available in the following AWS server regions: US East (Ohio, North Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland).
Cloud-based rendering is nothing new. In 2015, Google acquired his Zync and created a buzz in this field. The technology has since been used in partnership with Sony's animation studio, Sony Pictures Imageworks, to launch visual effects tools powered by Google Cloud. Elsewhere, platforms like Arch and Chaos Cloud have been providing on-demand, cloud-based VFX infrastructure for years.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the cost of maintaining hardware and the space to store it, while requiring work from home and shutting down production for health reasons. The simultaneous decline accelerated the migration of VFX workloads to the cloud. . As Passemard alluded to, the rise of generative AI has also increased demand for his rendering hardware, leading to the creation of his entirely new cloud-based GPU acceleration provider.