SEATTLE: Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com Inc. company, announced the general availability of Amazon Nimble Studio, a new service that enables customers to set up a content production studio in hours instead of weeks, with elasticity that gives them near limitless scale and access to rendering on demand.
With Amazon Nimble Studio, customers can rapidly onboard and collaborate with artists from anywhere in the world, and produce content faster and more cost effectively. Artists will have access to accelerated virtual workstations, high-speed storage, and scalable rendering across AWS’s global infrastructure so they can create content faster.
To bring high-quality visual effects, animation, and creative content to life, studios historically have relied on local high-performance workstations connected to shared file storage systems over low-latency, on-premises networks.
Increased consumer appetite for premium content and experiences has driven greater demand for compute-intensive rendering of visual effects and animations.
This ever-growing demand causes content production studios to over-provision their compute, networking, and storage infrastructure for peak capacity, which proves expensive, difficult to manage, and hard to scale.
For example, a typical animated feature film now generates 730 terabytes of data and up to half a billion files, requiring more than 150 million core compute hours and coordination from hundreds of artists and engineers. Consumer demand for more content has also required studios to onboard talent from around the world, who then require high-powered workstations, specialized software, and high-speed storage and networking.
All of these constraints can result in production delays, increased expenses, and lost opportunity for content production studios.
“Amazon Nimble Studio is going to change the way customers produce content using a cloud-based production pipeline,” said Kyle Roche, Head of Content Production Tech, AWS.
“To date, studios struggle to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for creative content, which has driven an exponential increase in the computing power required to produce content—hastening obsolescence of workstations and straining on-premises storage and rendering capacity. We are excited to announce Amazon Nimble Studio, a transformational new service for the creative community built for the cloud to make it much faster, easier, and less expensive to produce the content that consumers want to watch.”