
Lights, camera, cloud: How film is spreading its wings - Sami_Lehtinen
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-37636099
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KaiserPro
Atomic fiction Are a nice bunch of guys.

I worked with them a number of times in my previous life.

They are very proud of not having a permanent render farm, as for them the
upfront cost would be too much.

I heard somewhere that at one point them (or a similar company) were using
100k machines, which required google to switch out some youtube transcoders.
Obviously 100k machines is way out of range for even pixar, only weta have
something close.

However I still remain sceptical on actual total cost of ownership. Yes Atomic
Fiction now have no capex budget, But its been replaced by OpEx.

I suspect the cost per hour of CPU is quite a bit higher than a traditional
render farm (including power and running expenses.)

~~~
berkut
100k _machines_ doesn't sound right - cores _possibly_ but not machines.

Even the big effects houses like MPC (with farms in London, Montreal,
Vancouver and works on on average 18-20 films at once - some entire
exclusives) don't need that many cores.

Atomic Fiction don't have that big a film/sequence/shot count - if they are
using that much core time it doesn't sound like they're being that efficient.

Surely they must be using artists workstations at night to render some stuff -
they can't be sending _all_ their stuff to the cloud.

~~~
KaiserPro
yes, sorry cores.

However you have to remember that they are paying only for the time that the
machines are used.

so 100 hours on one node is the same cost as 1 hour on a 100 nodes.

One of the nice things about zync is that each shot has a cost, which is
really nice.

The other thing to note is that workstation make terrible render nodes. They
always are in a weird state, and usually have something changed from the stock
image. Plus Atomic fiction are only ~30-100 people, so not really worth the
effort to bring workstations online.

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nemesisj
This reminds me of when my consulting company was looking for cheap servers
back in 2004 to host client projects. We found an eBay listing for about 80
machines (if memory serves) that were being sold off at a pretty good price
and had really good specs. They had been used to do the rendering for the SFX
on The Chronicles of Riddick. We spent a few days trying to figure out how we
could manage to buy the cluster and perhaps sell them to friends, etc and it
just didn't work out. But that combined with talking about servers with a
friend who had been a sysadmin on the VegieTales crew (then Pixar then
Dreamworks) and the challenges they faced scaling up for projects meant it
sparked the thought at the time that there's probably a nice market for
running a rendering utility. And that's where the thought ended! Interesting
to see if up and running now and benefiting smaller studios!

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walter_bishop
Is cloud computing another name for a render farm that's available for rent.

