Customers in industries like architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) and media and entertainment (M&E) use a process called rendering to generate final frames for film, TV, games, industrial design visualizations, and other digital media. Rendering involves taking 2D/3D digital content data and computing an output, such as an image or video file. It requires significant compute power, especially for generating high-resolution 3D graphics and visual effects (VFX) with resolutions up to 16K for films and TV. This limits the number of rendering projects customers can work on simultaneously.
To meet the demand for rendering high-resolution content, customers often build “render farms” by combining the power of hundreds or thousands of computing nodes to process their rendering jobs. However, traditional render farms can take weeks or months to build and deploy, requiring significant planning and hardware procurement commitments. As a result, many customers are transitioning to scalable, cloud-based render farms for more efficient production, rather than maintaining a dedicated render farm on-premises with high fixed costs.
AWS Deadline Cloud is a new fully managed service that addresses this need. It allows creative teams to quickly set up a render farm, scale to run more projects concurrently, and pay only for the resources they use. With a web-based portal, customers can easily create and manage render farms, preview in-progress renders, view and analyze render logs, and track costs. Deadline Cloud provides integrations with digital content creation (DCC) tools and customization tools to streamline the rendering pipeline for each project. Customers can use their existing licenses or those provided by the service for third-party DCC software like Maya, Nuke, and Houdini.
AWS Deadline Cloud allows users to create and manage rendering projects and jobs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances directly from DCC pipelines and workstations. Customers can create rendering farms, queues, and fleets, with queues scheduling submitted jobs and fleets supporting multiple queues. The service integrates with AWS IAM Identity Center for workforce authentication and authorization management, allowing IT administrators to grant access permissions to users and groups at different levels.
Key components of AWS Deadline Cloud include the Deadline Cloud monitor, which provides real-time access to job progress, logs, and troubleshooting metrics; the Deadline Cloud submitter for submitting rendering jobs directly using AWS SDK or CLI, or from DCC software via integrated plugins; the Deadline Cloud budget manager for managing project costs; and the Deadline Cloud usage explorer for tracking compute and licensing costs.
To get started with AWS Deadline Cloud, users can define and create a farm with a monitor, download the submitter, and install plugins for their preferred DCC applications. They can then define rendering jobs in their DCC application and submit them to the created farm within the plugin’s interface. The service streamlines the rendering process, from uploading job assets to Amazon S3, rendering the job on Deadline Cloud, to providing completed frames for customer access.
Overall, AWS Deadline Cloud offers a fully managed, scalable solution for rendering high-resolution content, enabling creative teams to set up render farms quickly, run multiple projects concurrently, and efficiently manage costs.
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