With the recent preview of OpenAI’s A.I. video generator, Sora, the craft of modern moviemakers is set to evolve yet again. Data and AI will be even more center stage for studios and effects companies, both as copilots for video and photo editors and as a creative engine itself.
Just look at the Coca-Cola ad made with ChatGPT-4 and its image generation platform, DALL-E and how many Super Bowl spots turned the spotlight on AI.
And while studios have no shortage of creativity and ideas for these projects and technologies, it turns out, many do have a shortage in storage capacity.
What Does It Take to Execute Creative Projects of This Scope?
The answer: immense GPU processing power, modern data storage, backup, and security capabilities. Creating large-scale digital film projects can take an army of artists and specialists, each working at a high-powered workstation, simultaneously generating massive amounts of data.
This requires petabytes of storage, ultra-fast processing for thousands of simulations, and massive backup requirements to protect hundreds of hours of work and the threat of missed production timelines. Underlying infrastructure simply cannot be a bottleneck.
It’s a challenge Cumulus Visual Effects (VFX) knows well. Based in New South Wales, Cumulus is one of Australia’s premier boutique VFX providers. The company is a trusted collaboration partner for larger VFX studios, nationally and internationally. According to Nicky Ladas, Chief Technologist at Cumulus VFX, most of the organization’s IT challenges came down to storage capacity.
“There was no overhead left on our old storage subsystem,” explains Ladas. “We had hit the wall from a capacity and performance point of view.”
VFX studio PhantomFX has worked on projects ranging from Hollywood films such as The Avengers to television and streaming shows including Sense8 and The Flash. PhantomFX faced tight timelines for its visual effects, but artists spent a lot of time moving content back and forth from local storage, creating delays and wasting production time and money. Storage requirements were growing rapidly.
“When we started out, we had a very basic storage setup, all the content was saved on a local storage system,” says Boopathy Thangamuthu, IT Manager of PhantomFX. “Artists spent a lot of time moving content to and from the system. These inefficiencies caused delays, wasting both production time and money.”
As the business grew and the team size increased, so did the storage requirements. Boopathy says, “We co-produced a Tamil movie called ‘Ayalaan’, and the VFX work for it involved around 350 TB of data.”
“The timelines for movies are very tight, and we need to be fast and accurate in what we do. If artists lose time in copying data to and from the storage system, it leads to a waste of production time and money.” – Boopathy Thangamuthu, IT Manager, PhantomFX
What’s in a Modern Digital Film Studio’s Tech Stack?
To support all this innovation, creativity, and data, serious computing power is needed. “The visual effects industry has highly demanding computing requirements with tremendous volumes of unstructured data,” explains Amy Rushall, Area Vice President, Australia & New Zealand, Pure Storage. To produce on time and at scale, studios rely on:
- Transparent, easy-to-provision, fast object storage—storing complex, object-based files for rendering systems. Provisioning those data storage resources in real time has to be simple and transparent for users.
- Fast, robust backup architectures—able to back up and archive massive snapshots in a batch time window before the next day’s work begins.
- Data-hungry, high-performance creative applications—PhantomFX has several departments, each working on a different aspect of VFX such as modeling, rigging, lighting, and compositing. They use high-performance creative applications such as Maya, Houdini, Blender, Nuke, and Photoshop.
- Powerful computing cores—multiple racks with chassis containing numerous machines, adding up to thousands of processors and hundreds of terabytes of RAM. Graphics processing units (GPUs) like NVIDIA, in particular, are in high demand.
- Fast-fiber network attached storage (NAS) and multi-gigabit networking—with local flash storage to support visual effects workloads’ high-bandwidth requirements. (Around 100 terabytes can be in play in a production environment.)
- Resilience against cyber threats. The VFX industry is a major target for cyberattacks, particularly from ransomware, and any lost data can dramatically delay production.
Customer Journeys to AI Success
A Data Platform Movie Dreams Are Made Of
To meet the enterprise-level SLAs of global clients, studios like Cumulus VFX and PhantomFX have upgraded to the Pure Storage data platform and seen incredible results.
“We’re already talking about doubling simulations,” says Ladas. “Pure is solid. They’ve got the redundancy and performance that we need to free up storage bottlenecks and better support global clients.” This allowed the team to grow from 20 to 60 rendering artists, enabling more processing of complex VFX simulations and six-nines of availability during massive simulations.
Recalls PhantomFX’s Thangamuthu, “There was a project before FlashBlade//S where we faced issues every day with storage and network latency. In contrast, now even with a project even as big and complex as ‘Ayalaan’, there hasn’t been a single complaint pertaining to the IT infrastructure.
Powering the Film Studios of Tomorrow
With one consolidated data platform, VFX studios and their artists can save more time and complete projects faster. The Pure Storage FlashBlade//S™ can help studios reduce the number of storage latency issues to almost zero, even for the most data-intensive projects.
“Data is the lifeblood for the companies in the visual effects industry like PhantomVFX. Any misstep could result in damaging financial losses,” says Ramanujam Komanduri, Country Manager, India, Pure Storage.
As more studios outsource data production demands to bigger data centers, processing farms, and the cloud, modern data storage providers that stay in lockstep with their demands will be key. The more (and bigger) projects a studio wants to accept, the more critical this is.
Studios can also benefit from as-a-service, pay-as-you-go models, removing the need for large up-front investments in render farms, workstations, and the storage they require. As many leverage the cloud for processing and rendering power, data mobility and accessibility will be paramount.
Learn more about the benefits for VFX studios here and contact us to learn more about how Pure can help your digital effects, animation, or film studio meet all your biggest data demands.
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