Render Farm Management Software Helps Company Meet Topical Timelines for Internationally Famous News Clips
Los Angeles, CA (May 28, 2014) – When a man gets attacked by a bear or the mayor of Toronto starts giving in to drugs, who you going to call? Next Media Animation (NMA) if you want your breaking news to be animated, informative and hilarious. Already world famous for their TomoNews web clips, NMA’s success has led to a surge in the need for content and talent. More people and tight deadlines meant the team needed a powerful tool to manage the influx in rendering jobs. The solution came from a major Hollywood studio that recently built a VFX facility in China, who tipped the team to PipelineFX’s Qube!.
With two production lines going around the clock, NMA is so confident that they are meeting the internet’s desire for quick content head-on that they’ve dubbed themselves,“The fastest animation studio in the world.” A modern claim for a newscape where stories can lose their topicality overnight. As speed became NMA’s bread and butter, it also became apparent that their existing render farm manager wasn’t scaling to meet the workload. Qube! could.
“We needed Qube! to adapt with us,” said Kenneth Chan, MIS Lead System Engineer at Next Media Animation. “As projects expand and goals get more ambitious, we wanted something that could give us the flexibility to change and the stability we could always count on. We get all those things and more with Qube!”
With 170 render-ready computers onsite, NMA artists found efficiency by using Qube!’s cluster feature, a job and rights controller. When enabled, clusters assign a guaranteed amount of workers to a specific artist, assuring that they’ll always have a pool of computing power to draw upon. Users are also able to share resources with co-workers so they can maximize their render queue as it becomes more demanding.
“As our workload grows, Qube! remains responsive,” added Chan. “And if we ever have an issue, PipelineFX’s support team is in close contact, either over Skype or via remote log-in, ready to solve our problems. That’s one way we got our database settings optimized so fast.”
When the firm isn’t bringing you the most talked about WTF stories on the internet (their words), they are producing 3D manga cartoons like “Kurokan” and “Double Hard.” Striking a balance between two concurrent content factories has made render efficiency even more important. And because Qube! render farms are running at utilization rates of over 95%, the need to buy more servers, a common event for inefficient firms, becomes moot.
“Efficiency is always necessary, whatever you are doing in production work. But when it comes to rendering, the default is usually some state of gridlock,” continued Chan. “The power of Qube! is that you can use prioritization settings to manage which jobs get finished first. Order brings speed, and in the news game, you need to react quickly if you want them to tune in.”
About Qube!™ and Smart Farming™
Qube! is an intelligent, mature and highly scalable render management solution that can be quickly integrated into any production workflow, and is backed by world-class technical support. Smart Farming delivers intelligence to production pipelines by providing business-critical insight into render pipelines, maximizing investment in rendering infrastructure and automating manual processes. Qube! works out of the box with all leading content creation applications and is truly cross-platform with all software components available on Windows®, Linux®, and Mac OS®X operating systems.
About PipelineFX
As the leading provider of intelligent render farm management solutions for digital content creation, PipelineFX provides software, support, consulting and training services worldwide. Qube! runs on more than 30,000 render nodes at over 600 customers in 51 countries and is used to render film and visual effects, post production, broadcast, design, games and education media. Clients include Apple, Arc Productions, Base FX, BBC, Cinesite, Deluxe, Digital District, Digital Domain, Dyson, Efilm, Electronic Arts, Google, HBO, Hasbro, L.M.U., Laika Studios, Lockheed Martin, Method Studios, MPC, NBC Sports, Nvidia, NHK, NYU, Original Force, Pratt Institute, Procter & Gamble, ReelFX, South Park Studios, SVA, Target, Technicolor and many others. PipelineFX is headquartered in Honolulu, HI, and has offices in Los Angeles, London, Portland, Las Vegas, and Vancouver.
About Next Media Animation
Next Media Animation is one of the largest 3D computer animation studios in Asia, with more than 500 creators and animators based in Taipei, Taiwan. NMA additionally have offices in Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States. NMA is also the fastest 3D animation studio in the world. Known around the world for its daily CG animated news stories with their millions of followers, NMA is one of the few fully digital content studios in Asia. The studio handles every step of the 3D animation content workflow: from storyboard to real-time 3D production to CG animation. Our vision is to provide more interactive entertainment content through key distribution channels in the fastest time. Next Media Animation opens a new world of rich entertainment experiences to a rapidly mobile worldwide community.
