cloud-test: Enabling artists to focus on creativity, not infrastructure

Google Cloud Platform Blog

Enabling artists to focus on creativity, not infrastructure

Monday, July 13, 2015

Many of us on the Google Cloud Platform team have been inspired by the artistic and creative work our customers are beginning to power in the cloud. Google aims to put artists and creative professionals first with a set of solutions tailored to the unique needs of the media industry.

One of the key workloads in media that has natural synergy with cloud computing is graphics rendering, a process relied upon by the entertainment, engineering, design, and scientific communities. The rendering requirements of the visual effects and animation industry in particular are at an extraordinary scale, requiring vast amounts of compute and storage. One customer, Atomic Fiction, reported that their rendering jobs run anywhere from 2 minutes up to 40 hours for every single frame of a motion picture -- there are 24 frames in a single second of film!

With rendering historically being completed exclusively on-premises in large render farms, companies like Thinkbox Software are providing an important bridge to the cloud, giving studios effectively infinite compute and storage when they need it most. With the launch of Deadline Cloud Wizard, Thinkbox greatly simplifies the creation of cloud-based render farms. With support for over 60 different rendering packages out of the box, Thinkbox’s flagship product Deadline empowers artists, architects, and engineers to harness compute cores for rendering on Google Compute Engine. Deadline customers can scale their internal render farms seamlessly to the cloud in 30 minutes with minimal configuration. Customers can take advantage of Compute Engine’s key benefits that matter most for graphics rendering: per-minute billing, automatic sustained use discounts, fast provisioning of VMs, and the performance, reliability, and security of Google’s global networking infrastructure.

Media is one of Google Cloud Platform’s fastest growing workloads, and we’re seeing great momentum across our creative partners and our customers. Check out how Framestore enables its artists to build toward a greater result through creative refinement, how Atomic Fiction takes audiences to another place by focusing on creativity rather than infrastructure, or how RodeoFX is looking to tap Google’s cloud-based tools for its ambitious creative pipeline. Get in touch with us, we would love to learn how you’re powering your media and entertainment processes today, and how we can enable your artists and creative professionals.

- Posted by Todd Prives, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform