By Rita Nolan, Media Relations Manager, iMiller Public Relations
Audiences are in love with high-budget Hollywood movies delivering 3D and other cool visual effects. The list of major motion pictures shot digitally has been rapidly growing in the last few years. Behind the scenes, movie studios have been struggling to keep up with the immense growth in demand for servers required to produce these movies.
In the last couple of years, HD movie resolution standard has changed from 2K to 4K. As a result, computing and data requirements have doubled and previously stockpiled servers became obsolete. Studios, often working on a few movies simultaneously, use tens of thousands of computing hours to render graphics. Until fairly recently, the only available options were to keep piling on an increasing number of servers within the studios, or to invest in off-premise data-center infrastructure.
The VFX Rendering Service by Unitas Global offers a new way to get out of this bind. It connects visual-effect studios via a network of dark fiber to its farm of bare-metal Intel servers and provides scalable computing capacity on a monthly basis. There may be hundreds of servers working on a movie at the same time. The benefits of this solution outweigh those of data-center colocation by eliminating the expenses of under-utilized data-center space in-between productions that studios might be committed to for years.
Grant Kirkwood, Founder and CEO of Unitas Global, calls the service “rendering on flex-availability hardware”, delivered like a private-cloud model: it is customized, private, secure and flexible.
Traditional cloud-computing services (in addition to often being perceived as insecure and unreliable) can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars each month. On the other hand, the Unitas VFX rendering solution can be implemented at a small fraction of that cost, making it a very attractive alternative.
Unitas Global’s visual rendering solution has already been implemented by a few premier Hollywood studios. It is currently available in North America and will soon be available at Unitas Global private cloud facilities around the world.
For more information about Unitas Global, email unitas@imillerpr.com.
