Cloud Hosting

Advertisement

Peter Rabbit 2

Image: supplied

Animal Logic technology director Darin Grant has detailed the speed with which animation creatives can expect to produce in the future, noting that leveraging the cloud does not mean that a movie can end faster or a date is presented launch, but that is the advantage. Give it to the team.

Advertisement

The key advantage of the cloud for animators, Grant said, is flexibility in scale.

"A few years ago, when the company analyzed the resources in the cloud, we felt that the economy made no sense locally in the region but now when we have a single-digit latency in the data center, the region is now just an obvious one, "he said.

"This idea of flow engineering flow or artistic flow in the past, before there were cloud services, we had to buy fixed assets for our render farm and as an animator, you would animate a shot with Peter Rabbit on and press a button and you would wait and look at your watch, you would go for coffee, and then you would get it back and you could interact after that, that could be five, 10, 30 minutes.

"Imagine if you could reduce that waiting time so people could stay in the flow."

He said that is what the cloud has allowed Animal Logic to do.

"We can climb horizontally very quickly. In a microscale, it allows people to remain in the creative zone," he said.

"In a large-scale movie (for) animated films, you can delay creative decisions as much as possible. Some may feel that it is inefficient that is true if you are absolutely certain that this is the movie you want to make. In our industry, there are big bets on these hugely successful films on a large scale; studios want to make sure they can evaluate and see them and get results, swing and change.

"Since we are animated movies and everything is computer generated, we have the flexibility to bring some of those creative options to the end."

Animal Logic is an animation and visual effects firm based in Sydney with a feature film curriculum, ranging from Babe to The Great Gatsby, animated penguins dancing in Happy Feet and The Lego Movie franchise.

The company has existed for 28 years, initially focusing on visual effects.

Speaking to ZDNet during Amazon Web Services (AWS) re: Invent in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Grant said the cloud has democratized the animation industry a bit.

"From the perspective of the product, it allows us flexibility: just as a movie like Matrix for Hollywood was needed to present itself to the talent group that was in Australia, there are talent groups available in all parts of the world and to allow those talents in Any place to be able to work on the same great movies we are working on in New South Wales right now is a key reason why the cloud exists, "Grant said.

"You see some opportunities that have happened, Amazon in particular bought a company called Nimble Collective and has the idea of building a pipe, an animation studio in the cloud and when you see that, and you see that it allows people without the giant workforce that we have and years and years of infrastructure and development that we have had to achieve a certain level of automation, that is quite exciting. "

Recently, the company decided to adopt AWS as its cloud provider for visual effects and animation rendering. He has been working with the company for about 12 months, Grant said.

Specifically, the studio is using AWS to support the delivery of the hybrid live action and animation feature, Peter Rabbit 2, which will be released on April 3, 2020.

Through the use of specific instances of AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Grant said Animal Logic can quickly scale capacity both up and down as its demand changes.

Animal Logic built a fully automatic and elastic rendering farm, a high-performance processing system that offers computer-generated images and videos on AWS.

It works together with the internal Render Pipeline Manager of the studio to dynamically respond to changes in production requirements, resulting in 50% faster rendering performance than your current local kit.

Animal Logic also uses a combination of AWS EC2 Spot Instances and AWS Direct Connect, which is a service that provides the studio with a dedicated network connection from its Sydney studio to AWS.

"The often unpredictable nature of movie production means that we cannot always plan what IT resources we will need," Grant said.

Asha Barbaschow traveled to re: Invent as an AWS guest.

How Animal Logic rebuilt its storage for the production of & # 39; The Lego Movie & # 39;

The animation and visual effects firm turned to Dell EMC to manage the large amount of data created during the making of The Lego Movie, a film that reached a maximum of 345 terabytes.

Animal Logic begins content backup with Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud will now support Animal Logic backup requirements, especially during peak periods where 150 TB of data is generated in a 24-hour period.

Advertisement

Here is the original post:
Animal Logic promotes cloud computing as democratizing the future of animation - Mash Viral