Juno FX redefines the future of VFX production in the cloud
In just two years, visual effects (VFX) studio Juno FX has reimagined content creation in the cloud while breaking fresh ground in entertainment production. Its modest team of artists and developers can now compete with much larger studios thanks to Orion, the startup’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform developed by sister company Juno Innovations. Built entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and using Kubernetes open-source container orchestration software, Orion enables Juno FX to scale compute resources quickly and efficiently so that the studio and its clients can take on jobs that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
“We are 100% all in on AWS, and it’s the best cloud by miles for us. We can spin up services in the US, Mumbai, the EU, or wherever else we need to in 15 minutes or less,” said Alex Hatfield, CEO of Juno FX and Juno Innovations. “Getting remote artists up and running on virtual workstations has never been faster or easier.”
Cloud-native pipeline
Instead of conforming to existing legacy models, Hatfield reimagined the entire VFX pipeline through a cloud-native lens. By designing for distributed, containerized cloud architectures first, Orion enables studios to deploy its platform anywhere—in the cloud or on premises.
“We wanted to make something that’s truly cloud-native,” explained Hatfield. “The typical approach of just lifting and shifting on-prem pipelines to the cloud is actually the most painful and expensive way to do it.”
Along with tackling larger, traditional projects, Juno FX’s flexible infrastructure allows the studio to pick up last minute, fast-turnaround projects. “Recently, we got an early morning call from a potential client for a ‘9-1-1’ job,” Hatfield shared. “After we accepted the project, we were able to seamlessly provision the environment, complete the work, and shut it down, all within a five-hour window. Most studios would turn away a job like that, due to the time and budget required to spin up resources, but with AWS, we made it happen.”
Juno FX’s transformative pipeline natively supports industry-standard VFX tools like Foundry’s Nuke and the Blender open-source digital content creation (DCC) software, and the team is working on an integration with Autodesk Maya and SideFX Houdini. “Our artists are able to log in and start working on their preferred tools almost immediately,” Hatfield said. “Once a project is complete, we can tear the whole thing down in 15 minutes. The power, scalability, and versatility of our platform is extraordinary.”
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Image 1: Juno VFX services brought a space-themed environment to life. All production work was accomplished using containers and rendered with AWS Thinkbox Deadline.
Squeezing maximum efficiency from the cloud
A driving philosophy behind Juno Innovation’s approach was creating a VFX pipeline optimized for extreme scalability, resiliency, and cost efficiency. Recognizing the scalability and resiliency of the finance sector’s cloud approach, Hatfield looked to the same technology that handles horizontal scaling for bank transactions as a template for Orion. It’s why Juno FX’s render farm is so efficient. The team can slice GPU resources to leverage one machine for multiple jobs at the same time, minimizing overhead and squeezing the most performance out of each instance.
“Our infrastructure looks more like a financial institution than a VFX studio,” Hatfield shared. “We use the underlying Kubernetes scaler to handle all changes, not proprietary code. Also, our workstations all run on Spot Instances and they get scaled so aggressively that our actual overhead is incredibly low, which helps us preserve our margins. The scalability in operating with AWS is invaluable.”
Hatfield and team have also leveraged best practices from other industries, which they’ve tailored for VFX. The result of these collective efforts is a VFX studio in the cloud that can also work on premises, an idea heavily influenced by Hatfield’s experience as a former compositor and systems architect working at prominent facilities like Digital Domain and Cinesite.
“You can’t take on-prem solutions and just push them up to the cloud, but you can definitely bring the cloud down to you if you build cloud native,” he noted. “Some people have the misconception that the cloud is expensive, but that’s not reality. If you design your workflow right, then the cloud is insanely effective.”
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Image 2: Juno VFX services created the iconic “light-on” effect in a Star Wars-themed commercial. All production work was accomplished using containers and rendered with AWS Thinkbox Deadline.
Scalable rendering
Rendering is a critical piece of any VFX pipeline, and a key area where Juno FX has innovated with its approach. At the core of the Orion workflow is the company’s custom “render operator” that treats rendering as a containerized, Kubernetes-driven workload.
“Our render farm is 100% containerized and it’s completely driven by Kubernetes,” explained Hatfield. “The scalability and aggressiveness of actually being able to do all the automated deployments, do the workstation slicing, do all of the different kinds of ways that we can deploy on every single cloud or region, all of that comes for free from Kubernetes.”
Powered by AWS Thinkbox Deadline, Juno FX’s render operator automatically provisions rendering capacity across Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances when jobs are submitted. By leveraging Kubernetes scheduling and orchestration, it can optimize utilization far beyond a traditional render farm.
“We found that even on-prem, Orion can squeeze more render efficiency out of existing hardware. Benchmarks showed we could fit 22 render nodes on a single EC2 instance, compared to the eight nodes typically used—increasing density by 175%,” Hatfield detailed.
The render operator currently integrates with AWS Thinkbox Deadline out-of-the-box, but Juno Innovations plans to add support for other render management tools. This will allow more studios to leverage Orion’s cloud-native rendering capabilities while continuing to use their existing pipeline tools.
The ability to dynamically scale rendering up or down based on demand is ideal for VFX workloads. Juno FX can quickly spin up a full render farm across multiple regions in minutes. For a recent project in Mumbai, they had a team of artists productively working within an hour after provisioning cloud resources. Hatfield remarked, “The AWS infrastructure is so cost-effective for us that we can concentrate on talent.”
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Image 3: Juno VFX services were utilized to achieve the desired look and effect for the high-performance tire. All production work was accomplished using containers and rendered with AWS Thinkbox Deadline.
A containerized backbone
While Orion is built on AWS, it can be deployed to any environment, including to local hardware. Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) containerizes every component, allowing rapid replication to any region in the world. It also uses Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) for storage, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), and Amazon EC2 for processing. AWS Thinkbox Deadline manages the render load using the Kubernetes operator, which monitors the cluster for state changes and automatically reacts.
The platform is designed so that artists can simply log into the system and get down to work. Hatfield elaborated, “The pipeline we’ve built is extraordinarily fast to learn. I didn’t want an artist to feel like they’re in a fighter jet. There’s literally three clicks and you have a workstation. You can be comping and submitting to the render farm within minutes.”
Because its workstations are ephemeral, Juno FX can easily manage them. If an application locks up or crashes, users can simply discard their workstation and spin up a new one. Orion saves all data to network storage, then destroys and recreates the container, minimizing downtime and nearly eliminating reliance on IT to fix issues.
“There’s almost zero maintenance required to keep the system healthy. We’ve never had an outage,” Hatfield said. “Being containerized, our workstations can launch on demand, on any device, anywhere, and at any time at a fraction of the cost of traditional workstations.”
Prepping for release
After rigorously stress testing Orion in production, Hatfield anticipates making the software generally available in 2025. “We want to make sure what we release is rock solid and provides a great user experience, so we’ve been cautious about our timeline. And AWS has been there to support us almost the entire time. The VFX industry is notoriously volatile and our vision for Orion is that it will enable studios to increase operational efficiency so that they can keep artists steadily employed instead of investing in a ton of infrastructure,” he concluded.
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