Film & Renderro Cloud Workplaces: Post-Production in the Post-Pandemic World

Guest post by Piotr Chomczyk, CEO, Renderro

The new reality of a global pandemic touched thousands of movie professionals around the globe. Technicians, post-production artists, even whole studios had to change their old ways in the stretch of a few months. Rebuilding a studio so that a whole team could work remotely turned out to be an expensive, and time-consuming endeavor, especially because post-production requires a lot of computing power and usually comes with expensive physical workstations shared across the studio.

The remote work experience was limiting for teams who desperately needed the same capabilities to move on with their production tasks. The first approach was using virtual desktops to allow the teams to connect to their day-to-day workstations. This relied heavily on the connection quality, which wasn’t meant for precise post-production editing. Another part of the problem was file sharing. Creating a widely available network, where the team can store and work on the same files is easy when everyone is concentrated in a single, physical location, but it requires heavy effort to seamlessly move this experience to a remote reality. The cloud storage solutions are mostly meant for archiving, and that isn’t good enough to allow smooth team collaboration.

Post-production cloud computing services we’re designed mainly for rendering tasks, while editing and modeling require much broader access to workstation resources. The software filmmakers, designers, and animators normally use on a day-to-day basis couldn’t be installed on a cloud computer. Facing those obstacles required a new idea of a cloud, remote-focused workplace.

As an experienced post-production director, I wanted to end this struggle by creating Renderro, a cloud workplace that introduces AWS cloud services in a way that is easy to comprehend for non-tech savvy users. With the flexibility of pricing and resource management, AWS was the first and the best pick for Renderro. Using an intuitive administration panel, Renderro users can connect to AWS resources like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) cloud drives and virtual workstations that offer computing power well beyond what their physical equivalents offer. S3 drive flexibility means sharing resources between all studio team members. They can operate on the same files in real-time, and with the coming-soon S3 Glacier archive, they can store all their work in a cost-efficient way, with an option to easily switch between the standard S3 drives and Glacier.

The scalable virtual workstations connect to AWS high-performance Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with NVIDIA T4 graphic cards with 16GB of GPU. This cuts the time needed to render and deliver demanding animations, models, and scenes. Those two main functionalities are enough to give the artists a feeling of working hand in hand with their team members and delivering results at an almost in-person level.

The way Renderro was able to seamlessly introduce all those conveniences was thanks to the scalable and flexible management of the AWS cloud resources. Thanks to billing based on resource usage, Renderro can offer a pay-as-you-go model for all its customers, without any up-front investment. Based on the best-in-class infrastructure, Renderro cloud workplaces are now serving global customers and changing the way studios and creative agencies work on a day-to-day basis.