Cinesite: Accelerating the Production of Motion Pictures with Cloud Rendering
Cinesite is a leading digital entertainment studio, having produced animated feature films such as The Addams Family, Extinct and Riverdance as well as VFX products for The James Bond movie franchise, Avengers: Endgame, Rocketman, and The Witcher. The studio has over 1,000 employees in offices in London, Montreal, Berlin, Munich, and Vancouver.
Qumulo and AWS enabled Cinesite to leverage high-performance storage at scale with controlled costs that avoided overprovisioning and enabled effective cloud-bursting. As a result, Cinesite is serving its current customer needs, but also developing scalable 16K video workload capabilities for future customer requirements. Cinesite also uses Qumulo’s Cloud Data Fabric to rapidly exchange data all over the world and make the best use of their far-flung workforce.
Qumulo is working with Cinesite to use AI for predictive block as well as file access between locations, for intelligent caching, known as NeuralCache, and to enable even more responsive scaling everywhere. Cinesite said they render in 2K with a push to 4K and they do marketing stills at 2K, 4K or 8K.
The image below shows an example of a real M&E workload, showing occasional spikes in performance demand, which Cloud Native Qumulo (CNQ) is able to support. The customer gets the storage performance they need when they need it, and only pays for higher performance when they use it. In addition to cloud rendering, Qumulo also makes it easier to use excess capacity in-house in different locations to improve workflows.
Cinesite uses CNQ on AWS, leveraging Amazon EC2 and EBS to provide the cloud-bursting scale that Cinesite requires. In particular, Qumulo cloud storage helped Cinesite move its workload to AWS US East (Virginia) from a smaller AWS region to achieve the rendering performance scale it needed. Cinesite experiences consistent performance of at least 20GB/s bursting to 20-2,000 high-quality render nodes on CNQ on AWS. These nodes can be spun up in minutes and torn down just as quickly. This enables significant changes in scheduling and forecasting project pipelines, resulting in more predictable schedules.
Qumulo’s global namespaces with security and access control provides the safe and easy international content exchanges that Cinesite needs for its workflows. In addition, Qumulo provides support for disaster recovery (DR) storage using fast replication from its production storage, and paid for with the same Qumulo license. Cinesite has 30+ PB of storage across production, archive and cloud storage globally.Â
Qumulo has also been very responsive to Cinesite’s support needs, and Qumulo provides direct support, without a middleman. At one point, the Cinesite technical team had to solve a pressing problem in the early morning and reached out to Qumulo’s customer success team. Within sixty minutes, the Qumulo team responded with suggestions for configuration changes that improved network performance. Cinesite implemented these changes and got the performance it needed for its media projects.
Industry:
Media & Entertainment
Use Case:
Accelerating the production of motion pictures with cloud rendering.
Deployment:
On-prem + CNQ on AWS for cloud rendering
Location:
London, UK
Company Overview:
Cinesite is an independent, multinational business that provides services to the media and entertainment industries.