Deluxe Australia is a leading provider of services and technologies to the worldwide entertainment industry including top Hollywood studios. For nearly a century, Deluxe has provided content owners and creators with the tools and talent they need to bring the most compelling and exciting stories to life. Deluxe specializes in production,
post-production, distribution, and asset management.
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SUMMARY
CUSTOMER
Deluxe Australia
INDUSTRY
Media and Entertainment
Challenge
• Speed up VFX workflows
• Optimize Digital Artists’ Time and
Creativity
• Optimize Distributed Render Farm
Performance
• Gain Linear Scalability
• Finding an Easy-to-Manage solution
Solution
• Panasas®
ActiveStor®
14
• PanFS®
Parallel File System
Result
• VFX Delivered Faster
• Distributed Render Farm Optimized
• No More “Out of Hours” Rendering
• Happy, Productive Digital Artists
SUCCESSSTORY:DeluxeAustraliaINDUSTRY:Mediaandentertainment
As Deluxe Australia geared up for major
feature film productions like The Great
Gatsby and Fury Road, it turned to Panasas
and ActiveStor 14 to form the storage
foundation for its Visual Effects (VFX)
workflow. Creating VFX is digital artistry,
technically complex and aesthetically
demanding. It relies on an infrastructure
which includes powerful workstations, high
performance network attached storage
(NAS) and a large render farm to produce
visually compelling, multilayered effects.
The VFX Challenge
The Deluxe IT team supports 50 VFX artists
using CentOS-based workstations running
dual Xeon E5645 hex core CPUs or dual
Xeon E5-2665 CPUs with 24 to 32GB of
memory. Those artists use powerful anima-
tion software like Houdini from Side Effect
and Autodesk’s Maya to design 2D and 3D
VFX which are then rendered with Pixar’s
Renderman.
Creating 2D and 3D VFX generates large
numbers of files. For 2D VFX, Deluxe cre-
ates approximately 30 versions of each VFX
shot. For a 3D effect, the norm is about 50
versions per shot. The company anticipates
it will generate between 50 and 70 million
files on its current project.
VFX image files can also be sizeable. Cache
files for 3D with the particle information
can range up to 3GB, and there can be mil-
lions of these files in flight during creation
and render. These large numbers of large
concurrently active files can expose costly
performance bottlenecks very quickly.
“We needed fast, scalable, easily managed
storage to feed those workstations in a
tapeless, shared storage, file-based work-
flow and to keep the render farm operating
at maximum processor utilization,” Michael
Roperti, head of production at Deluxe
Australia, explained.
The Distributed Rendering
Challenge
Renderman is a software package for
network distributed rendering of complex
three dimensional views. Deluxe runs
Renderman on CentOS distributed across
an 80 node render farm built on dual Xeon
E5-2620 hex cores or X5650 hex cores with
32 to 48GB of system memory.
Rendering complex VFX can take hours,
days, weeks, months, or years on a single
computer, depending on the complexity,
detail and size of the individual images. For
animation, the frame rate and total dura-
tion of the animated sequence can also
greatly extend the total render time.
The rendering process can be accelerated
by subdividing tasks, individual frames or
sections of images into “pixel patches” and
distributing the calculation of each patch
across the render farm. There are two
reasons for using distributed rendering—
it’s faster and the number of concurrent
DELUXE AUSTRALIA
Panasas®
ActiveStor®
14 Helps Make Movies Better
Deluxe Australia is a leading provider of services and technologies to the worldwide
entertainment industry including top Hollywood studios. For nearly a century, Deluxe
has provided content owners and creators with the tools and talent they need to
bring the most compelling and exciting stories to life. Deluxe specializes in production,
post-production, distribution, and asset management.