AWS Partners accelerate content creation in the cloud with Amazon Nimble Studio

Creative studios face a number of challenges, from hiring local artists to scaling up (and down) to meet fluctuations in project demand. Artistic talent is critical for a creative studio, and finding local talent is increasingly difficult due to the explosion in demand for digital content creation. Studios now depend on hiring artists working remotely. Onboarding geographically dispersed talent can take days or even weeks. Furthermore, ensuring secure, seamless collaboration between dispersed creative teams creates additional challenges, and keeping costs down while planning for spikes in production that require high-powered compute and storage infrastructure is difficult. This is where Amazon Nimble Studio, a new service on AWS, comes in.

Amazon Nimble Studio is a service that creative studios can use to produce visual effects, animation, and interactive content entirely in the cloud with AWS, from storyboard sketch to final deliverable. Nimble Studio provides customers with on-demand access to virtual workstations, elastic file storage, and render farm capacity. It also provides built-in automation tools for IP security, permissions, and collaboration. Now, studios can launch and scale elastic, performant virtual workstations, high-speed storage, and scalable rendering in hours, without dedicated IT support. Artists can also use their favorite creative software tools.

Nimble Studio is built on top of AWS infrastructure, ensuring performant computing power and security of your data. With Nimble Studio, artists can securely collaborate on a project from anywhere in the world. Nimble Studio uses EC2 for compute, Amazon FSx for storage, AWS Single Sign-On for user management, and AWS Thinkbox Deadline for render farm management.

Amazon Nimble Studio Console

In addition to these AWS services, several AWS Partners provide added capabilities.

DaVinci Resolve is a leading software solution that combines editing, color correction, visual effects, motion graphics, and audio post production all in one software tool. Fusion, built into DaVinci Resolve and featuring a node-based workflow with hundreds of 2D and 3D tools allows artists to create cinematic visual effects and motion graphics, and is ideal for everything from quick fixes such as retouching and repairing shots to creating true Hollywood-caliber effects. DaVinci Resolve customers are always innovating and looking for new ways to work and collaborate. The use of DaVinci Resolve and Fusion with Amazon Nimble Studio allows artists to access a production ready system easily and collaborate with other artists using a remote post-production workflow entirely on the AWS Cloud.

3D artists and designers can now use V-Ray, one of the world’s most popular renderers, with Amazon Nimble Studio, bringing the height of visualization to any project. Thanks to adaptive ray tracing, artists can depict whatever they imagine, with the same tools driving Digital Domain, Scanline VFX, and a52 ’s most important projects. Artists can use V-Ray for 3ds Max, V-Ray for Maya, V-Ray for Houdini and more with Nimble Studio, giving users more ways to channel their creativity. Each is fully featured, and ready for animations, stills, and other cloud-based workflows.

Film studios and post-production houses can use Foundry’s Nuke family of compositing, editorial, and review tools; Katana’s look development and lighting workflows; and Modo’s powerful and flexible 3D modeling, animation, texturing and rendering toolset with Nimble Studio. Customers can harness the flexibility, cost-efficiency, and security of virtualized workstations, storage, and rendering capacity. As long-time evangelists of cloud workflows, Foundry recognizes the customer benefits of cloud infrastructure for scalable, high-performance compute capacity, connecting artists across geographical boundaries, and enhancing creative workflows.

Studios and digital content creators everywhere can now use HERE Premier 3D Cities with Amazon Nimble Studio to scout locations, pre-visualize media, and bring stories to life. With HERE Premier 3D Cities, creatives can save time, money, and deliver high quality, 3D representations of city centers, customizable for unique requirements, in over 70 cities globally. Digital content creators can get compact, accurate, and fully customizable 3D representations, from wireframe to near realistic, to support the creation of immersive 3D map visualizations. Try a free sample of our Premier 3D Cities offering, available in AWS Marketplace.

With globally dispersed teams and remote work on the rise, studios can use NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstations with Amazon Nimble Studio to access high-performance virtual workstations, from wherever they work. Powered by NVIDIA data center GPUs, RTX virtual workstations provide users with performance that’s virtually indistinguishable from a physical workstation. NVIDIA RTX technology provides advanced features like real-time ray tracing, artificial intelligence, rasterization, and simulation. With RTX, creators can achieve real-time cinematic-quality renderings of photorealistic environments with realistically accurate shadows, reflections, and refractions. RTX also brings the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to visual computing: accelerate creative workflows by freeing up time and resources through intelligent manipulation of images, automation of repetitive tasks, and optimization of compute-intensive processes. Nimble Studio with RTX technology also enables accurate simulation of real-world objects and physics in everything from games to feature film-quality visual effects. NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation is included in the Amazon EC2 G4dn instances.

Qumulo’s support for Amazon Nimble Studio builds upon years of collaboration that includes a variety of content production customers, including Cinesite Studios, Industrial Brothers, Raynault VFX, and FuseFX. Qumulo VFX and animation studio customers know that cloud-based rendering of animated films can be more effective and efficient for complex character rendering and modeling processes, as it reduces the time and cost compared to traditional rendering. Beyond rendering, Qumulo’s high-performance file data management supports a variety of post-production workflows on AWS, including color grading, compositing, computer graphics, and motion design. Qumulo with Amazon Nimble Studios provides customers several unique benefits. First, Qumulo’s multi-protocol support allows artists to use virtual workstations for remote content creation workflows at petabyte scale. Moreover, Qumulo meets the storage performance requirements of Amazon G4 EC2 instances for animation and VFX workloads on AWS global infrastructure, and provides real-time visibility, predictive caching, and a comprehensive API.

3D artists can use SideFX Houdini’s node-based procedural workflows with Amazon Nimble Studio for visual effects (VFX), character FX, crowds, rigging, animation, lighting, layout, lookdev, modelling, and rendering. Using Houdini with Nimble Studio gives artists access to Houdini’s powerful procedural workflows entirely in the cloud, from early-stage virtual production to final deliverables. Houdini is used by studios and individuals across the world to create the highest-quality cinematic results for film, TV, advertising, video games and more.

With Nimble Studio, artists using Wacom devices in post-production workflows can leverage the power of the cloud to work with graphic and CPU intensive programs like Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, SideFX Houdini, and Foundry’s Nuke. Nimble Studio supports the creator’s computational needs, and Wacom provides the tool for creators to design with precision, speed, and reliability. Artists can use the powerful features of Wacom Cintiq Pro and Wacom Intuos Pro with Nimble Studio to edit, composite, and create visual effects using the power of the AWS Cloud to render their work. Studio administrators have the ability to scale resources based on the pipeline, rapidly enabling artists to create anywhere, anytime!

Nimble Studio users can use Weka’s File System (WekaFS™) to quickly and efficiently deploy storage on AWS and accelerate demanding rendering projects without the hassle of managing storage infrastructure. WekaFS is a multi-protocol file system with full file shareability and file locking across different operating systems. Windows, macOS, and Linux users can access and share a single project set allowing easy collaboration among creative teams. WekaFS features include snapshots, encryption, quotas, and more. Its non-volatile memory express (NVMe) flash tier tightly integrates with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for high performance and cost optimization in a single namespace. Weka’s unique snap-to-object feature allows users to reduce cost by “parking” user projects, the file system, and metadata in Amazon S3 when not in use. When needed again, users can re-hydrate this snapshot in minutes and artists can resume work. Creatives can automate deployment of WekaFS with Amazon Nimble Studio using AWS CloudFormation Templates to simplify provisioning and management on AWS.

Together with the AWS Partners, Amazon Nimble Studio empowers creative studios to produce visual effects, animation, and interactive content entirely in the cloud, from storyboard sketch to final deliverable.

Ready to get started? Learn how to start building with Amazon Nimble Studio in the AWS Management Console.