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The major problem for cloud-based services for studio pipelines is: 1) There are are large amount of assets that need to be sent over to the cloud. In my exper

by akg 15y ago

The major problem for cloud-based services for studio pipelines is: 1) There are are large amount of assets that need to be sent over to the cloud. In my experience this can go up to several gigabytes per frame if you count CFX, FX, Rigs, etc. 2) Most studios are reluctant to have their data stored on the cloud due to piracy concerns. I wonder how Greenbutton is handling these two issues?

berkut 15y ago
1. Most VFX places are on a fat bandwidth pipe because it's becoming more and more common to shares assets with other studios. It's definitely an issue, but with geometry formats like Alembic which offer very efficient compression and de-duplication, it's not as bad as it seems.
- akg 15y ago
  True. Although, when I was at Dreamworks, they had a dedicated pipe between their two office locations and one to a offsite rendering center in New Mexico. I know they were having trouble still (even with a private dedicated pipe) transferring all their assets and render data. This got even more problematic as they switched to 3D-Stereo renders. Then again, that was a couple of years ago.
  - pestaa 15y ago
    How does the switch to 3D-Stereo make the issue worse? The process of 3D rendering consists of rendering the same content from two angles and blending the two, is that right? To an amateur like me, it doesn't sound like additional data to transfer.
    - berkut 15y ago
      For 3D rendering, yeah, the geometry and textures are the same, so you re-use them. But you get double the output. And it's not just RGBA data, generally you output AOVs of Z depth, UV coords, Normals, XYZ world position pass, motion vectors (forwards and backwards), specular contribution, reflection, ambient occlusion, object ID, material ID, etc, etc. And that's stored normally as EXR files (16 or 32-bit float), which can be compressed, but for 4K res is generally around 40MB per frame (RGBA). For a full set of AOVs, you can be talking 640 MB per frame, x 2 for stereo which adds up to a lot. Assuming a 2 hour movie, at 24 fps, that's around 172k frames. If it's not a full CG film, if you're lucky (i.e. no manual 3D conversion) you've got double the video footage as well. These all need to be composited together, producing twice as much on the output of that.
plasma 15y ago
You can rent a 10Gbps port to Amazon AWS directly using Direct Connect - http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/ http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/ May be an alternative.

by akg 15y ago

berkut 15y ago

1. Most VFX places are on a fat bandwidth pipe because it's becoming more and more common to shares assets with other studios. It's definitely an issue, but with geometry formats like Alembic which offer very efficient compression and de-duplication, it's not as bad as it seems.

akg 15y ago
True. Although, when I was at Dreamworks, they had a dedicated pipe between their two office locations and one to a offsite rendering center in New Mexico. I know they were having trouble still (even with a private dedicated pipe) transferring all their assets and render data. This got even more problematic as they switched to 3D-Stereo renders. Then again, that was a couple of years ago.
- pestaa 15y ago
  How does the switch to 3D-Stereo make the issue worse? The process of 3D rendering consists of rendering the same content from two angles and blending the two, is that right? To an amateur like me, it doesn't sound like additional data to transfer.
  - berkut 15y ago
    For 3D rendering, yeah, the geometry and textures are the same, so you re-use them. But you get double the output. And it's not just RGBA data, generally you output AOVs of Z depth, UV coords, Normals, XYZ world position pass, motion vectors (forwards and backwards), specular contribution, reflection, ambient occlusion, object ID, material ID, etc, etc. And that's stored normally as EXR files (16 or 32-bit float), which can be compressed, but for 4K res is generally around 40MB per frame (RGBA). For a full set of AOVs, you can be talking 640 MB per frame, x 2 for stereo which adds up to a lot. Assuming a 2 hour movie, at 24 fps, that's around 172k frames. If it's not a full CG film, if you're lucky (i.e. no manual 3D conversion) you've got double the video footage as well. These all need to be composited together, producing twice as much on the output of that.

plasma 15y ago

You can rent a 10Gbps port to Amazon AWS directly using Direct Connect - http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/ http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/ May be an alternative.