AWS Thinkbox releases deadline 10.1

I’m happy to announce that AWS Thinkbox has rolled out Deadline 10.1, the latest version of our production-proven render management software offering new performance enhancements and improved scalability. Deadline 10.1 is a major step forward and reflects our ongoing investment in performance and scale. Among the things I am most excited about for this release of Deadline are the improvements in scaling up the number of workers running in parallel, providing you with the ability to go bigger and faster than ever to complete your projects.

We’ve also made it easier to use Deadline on AWS. Deadline has always been free to use when you pay for AWS resources (such as EC2 instances and EFS storage) for rendering, though it required a few extra steps to get credit. With Deadline 10.1, an improved billing process provides AWS Thinkbox Deadline customers with a more streamlined experience by removing the upfront payment requirement. Additionally, Deadline can now automatically detect if it is running on AWS and will no longer require any licensing setup of any kind.

I think users will be excited to learn about support we added for widely used content production tools. SideFX Houdini can now be used in AWS Portal in Deadline, which is a set of Deadline features that enables you to more easily extend your on-premises rendering to AWS, and usage-based licensing for SideFX Houdini Engine is now available on the AWS Thinkbox Marketplace (with Mantra support to follow in an upcoming release). Additionally, we have added incremental Deadline support for Autodesk Maya, Foundry’s Nuke and Modo, ftrack, Maxon Cinema 4D, OTOY Octane, and many others.

Another big part of this release includes massive changes under the hood, with the removal of Mono as a dependency to leverage a .NET core framework across MacOS, Windows, and Linux. This standardization enables more frequent Deadline updates while supporting a consistent, highly scalable cross-platform user experience.

We’ve launched Deadline 10.1 alongside our annual Deadline Day promo. Through 11:59pm PT on October 10, 2019, AWS Thinkbox is offering:

• $10 discount on each annual subscription license of Deadline purchased ($38 USD per node)
• 10% discount on all AWS Thinkbox Marketplace products
• 10% discount on each annual Thinkbox 3D tool license

Interested in learning more about Deadline 10.1? For details, check out the release notes or visit the downloads page.