Amazon Web Services > Case Studies > FuseFX Renders 1,000 Frames in One Hour Using AWS Thinkbox Deadline

FuseFX Renders 1,000 Frames in One Hour Using AWS Thinkbox Deadline

Company Size

200-1,000

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

AWS Thinkbox Deadline
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
Amazon Machine Images (AMI)

Tech Stack

AWS Cloud
Thinkbox Deadline
Amazon EC2
Amazon Machine Image

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Middleware & Microservices

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
Process Control & Optimization
Visual Quality Detection

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration

About The Customer

FuseFX is a company that uses its proprietary content-creation pipeline to build visual effects for episodic television, feature films, commercials, and virtual-reality productions. Founded in 2006, the company operates studios in Los Angeles, New York City, and Vancouver, BC. The company is known for its technical artistry that goes into work like creating eye-popping action sequences in The Tick, for example, FuseFX used Autodesk 3ds Max 3D modeling and rendering software with the Chaos Group V-Ray plugin. The company is growing quickly in terms of company size and the scope of its creative ambitions.

The Challenge

FuseFX, a visual effects company, was facing a challenge of lack of compute power, specifically, finding enough nodes for the compute-hungry process of rendering computer-generated imagery (CGI). The company was growing quickly in terms of size and the scope of its creative ambitions. One of the responsibilities was ensuring that the capacity of the FuseFX content-creation pipeline grows right along with the rest of the company. The company needed a solution that could provide unlimited computing power, the ability to expand rendering nodes quickly, affordably, and essentially infinitely.

The Solution

FuseFX turned to Thinkbox Software, creators of Thinkbox Deadline, an administration and compute management toolkit for render farms, for help adding cloud capabilities. Working with Thinkbox, FuseFX took advantage of the AWS Portal in Thinkbox Deadline to augment its on-premises render nodes with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances. The new architecture allowed Thinkbox Deadline to have connectivity into FuseFX's AWS account, so it could spin up instances on demand and then terminate them when they weren't needed. FuseFX relied on AWS Thinkbox Deadline to manage and administer on-premises render resources for lighter workloads. When processing needs, or delivery expectations exceeded the capacity of the company’s on-premises render farm, the solution seamlessly added Amazon EC2 instances as needed.

Operational Impact

FuseFX can now access all this additional computing power at a fraction of what on-premises resources would cost.
The company can now scale up its number of cloud render nodes almost infinitely.
The solution provides significant time savings. If FuseFX has 10 hours for a job, it can use 100 nodes to render 1,000 frames. But if it only has 1 hour, it can call up an extra 900 Amazon EC2 Spot Instances with a few mouse clicks and still deliver that 1,000-frame render job on time.
The solution provides a safety net when dealing with the crazy schedules that FuseFX has when working in television.

Quantitative Benefit

For the same price as renting 80 local render nodes, FuseFX can spin up 300 Amazon EC2 nodes almost instantly.
Completes 1,000-frame render jobs in as little as 1 hour.