Amazon Nimble Studio Features

With Amazon Nimble Studio, you can accelerate your migration of your studio to the cloud so you can hire the best talent and scale to meet your clients’ demands for creative content.

In just a few hours, create a new studio environment in which creative talent can immediately access virtual workstations powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) G4dn instances, with NVIDIA Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), and high-speed storage from Amazon FSx. With support for both Windows and Linux operating systems, artists can work with their preferred third-party creative applications and custom software applications using Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Additionally, studios can use custom software applications and bring them into Nimble Studio via Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), ensuring a seamless on-premises to cloud migration. When ready to render images, Nimble Studio seamlessly scales your compute resources with AWS Thinkbox Deadline.

Bring your pipelines, workflows, applications, tools, and processes to Nimble Studio, ensuring a seamless transition for your artists.

Nimble Studio’s File Transfer feature enables rapid movement of media files to and from the cloud with no licensed limit on transfer speed, so studios and content creators can collaborate faster on productions — without paying extra for a separate transfer solution or additional physical infrastructure. Transfer speeds are only limited by hardware and network configurations, and by using Amazon S3 for object storage, only Amazon S3 storage costs are accrued.

Nimble Studio's StudioBuilder helps you create a virtual studio from scratch. Walk through and set up your studio by creating networking, render farm, and storage resources. The StudioBuilder process creates and deploys new resources into your region of choice, helping you build a studio in just a few hours. You can also re-run StudioBuilder to add additional resources.

Launch Profiles let you share necessary studio resources with artists to accomplish production tasks. Administrators can define and share the virtual workstations, necessary software, file system access, and the render farm. Launch Profiles uses a simple sharing mechanism to simplify resource assignment to your artists.

The Nimble Studio portal user interface (UI) simplifies artist onboarding, so they can focus more on creative output. Artists simply login into the Nimble Studio portal UI and launch the virtual workstation needed to complete tasks. Studio administrators can easily share Launch Profiles with artists based on the characteristics of the projects they are currently working on.

Take advantage of a full set of APIs to integrate proprietary tools into your workflow. Use the Nimble Studio API to extend your studio's functionality and leverage additional AWS services.

Nimble Studio uses AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS SSO) to provide secure artist access to web identities in the Nimble Studio portal. Nimble Studio portal includes workstation and file system access control via AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD), enabling directory-aware workloads for your production security needs. Nimble Studio gives account administrators and project owners the ability to share projects, add or remove artists, and control download access rights to sensitive data for added security on the (streaming) virtual workstations.

The simplest way for digital content creators to build and operate a studio in the cloud with virtual workstations, cloud rendering, and shared storage to produce visual effects, animation, and interactive content.

Nimble Studio includes on-demand virtual workstations via the NICE DCV remote display protocol. This allows a browser or local client, such as a laptop to meet high-fidelity content creation's workflow demands. You can accommodate the way your artists work, such as using hotkeys or pen tablets, and scale workstation instance types based on the complexity of artistic tasks. Artists can leverage instances such as G4dn.xlarge (4 vCPUs, 16GBmemory and a NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU with RTX) for lighter tasks and scale to instances with 64 vCPUs and 256GB of memory which can handle large data sets and simulation workflows.

Nimble Studio customers can access high-speed storage, including Amazon FSx, which provides cost-effective, high-performance, and scalable storage for content creation. You can stream both Linux and Windows while connected to the same storage for mixed OS production environments. Additionally, you can bring your own cloud-based storage solution, such as Qumulo or WekaIO.

Scale your rendering workloads to tens of thousands of cores in minutes. Utilizing the Render Farm Deployment Kit (RFDK) and AWS Thinkbox Deadline for render orchestration, Nimble Studio provides an integrated render farm that leveraging EC2 Spot pricing. You can also scale down just as quickly, providing incredible compute elasticity and cost control.