AWS Deadline Cloud is a new, dedicated service for cloud-based VFX rendering

Amazon Web Services Inc. said today it’s launching a new service aimed at the media and entertainment industries, designed to help those customers set up, deploy and scale massive graphics and visual effects rendering pipelines on its public cloud infrastructure.

The new service is called AWS Deadline Cloud, and it was announced ahead of the National Association of Broadcasters conference that’s set to take place in Las Vegas later this month, where customers will be able to get a much closer look at it.

The company explained that creating sophisticated computer graphics and visual effects requires extensive and expensive computing resources. To address this need, it’s making that infrastructure available to filmmakers and other content creators at a much lower price point, it insisted.

According to the company, AWS Deadline Cloud’s model is structured in such a way that customers only pay for the computing resources they need, when they need them. It enables customers in the media and entertainment industries, as well as others such as architecture and engineering, to access AWS’s most powerful servers and render content for TV shows, movies, advertisements, video games, digital blueprints and more.

In a blog post, AWS’s general manager of creative tools Antony Passemard said the media and entertainment industries have reached a tipping point, where the demand for rendering quality visual effects and the amount of content created using generative artificial intelligence are outpacing the compute capacity of many customers. “AWS Deadline Cloud meets any customer’s rendering requirements by providing a scalable render farm without having to manage the underlying infrastructure,” he added.

Customers using Deadline Cloud for the first time can access a startup wizard that walks them through the steps involved in setting up new render forms. It will ask users to specify both the size and duration of each project, in order to determine which instance type is most suitable. Then, the service will automatically provision the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances needed, and manage all of the compute and networking infrastructure involved. For customers with their own on-premises computing resources, AWS Deadline Cloud can integrate with this and use it to execute rendering jobs. It also integrates with customers’ third-party software licenses for existing rendering tools, such as Autodesk Maya and Foundry Nuke.

There’s a dashboard that provides users with an overview of their rendering infrastructure and the ability to preview in-progress rendering jobs and review and control their costs.

“[With Deadline Cloud,] creative teams can embrace the velocity of content pipelines and respond quickly to opportunities to accept more projects, while meeting tight deadlines and delivering high-quality content,” Passemard said.

In an interview with Variety, Passemard said that other rendering options available to VFX studios, such as on-premises server farms and alternative cloud services, are more expensive than Deadline Cloud. That’s because customers still have to pay underlying infrastructure costs when they’re not rendering any content. “With Deadline Cloud you only pay for when you render,” he explained. “When you have downtime in your production, it costs you zero.”

AWS Deadline Cloud therefore gives customers the option to scale to thousands of servers when they’re required, before shutting them down when they’re not necessary. As such, customers will have much better control over their computing costs. “We built many tools in that regard to make sure that the productions have very clear and granular visibility on their spend,” Passemard added.

AWS isn’t alone in offering cloud-based rendering services to media and entertainment customers. Google Cloud has offered a similar service, known as Zync Render, for the best part of a decade already. Moreover, there are dedicated cloud rendering service providers, such as Enscape GmbH’s Chaos Cloud platform, which also provides on-demand access to cloud-hosted VFX infrastructure.

However, AWS clearly thinks there’s enough demand for its new service to co-exist alongside those more established platforms. The COVID-19 pandemic is thought to have accelerated the transition of VFX workloads to the cloud, and the emergence of image- and video-based generative AI models has only added to the demand for rendering hardware.

The company said AWS Deadline Cloud is available now in its U.S. East (Ohio, North Virginia), U.S. West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland) AWS server regions, with wider availability to follow.

Image: AWS