AWS launches Deadline Cloud for content rendering

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released a new managed version of its Thinkbox Deadline 10 offering, Deadline Cloud.

Deadline Cloud, which has been made generally available, is designed for render management tasks for teams creating computer-generated 2D or 3D graphics, visual effects for films, TV shows, commercials, games, and industrial design.

The cloud service provider released the Thinkbox Deadline 10 offering in 2017 after the acquisition of Thinkbox Software.

In contrast to the Deadline Cloud, which is managed and targets simplification of the entire setup process, Thinkbox Deadline is a free, downloadable software that companies configure locally to manage on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-based rendering jobs.  

According to AWS, Thinkbox Deadline 10 customers can easily move to Deadline Cloud.

“Thinkbox Deadline 10 customers who move to Deadline Cloud can take advantage of Deadline Cloud cost tracking to help understand how rendering on the cloud affects their project budget and to reduce the time and effort required to configure, maintain, and onboard artists to rendering pipelines,” the company said on its FAQs page.

AWS Deadline Cloud, according to the company, provides a web-based portal with the ability to create and manage render farms, preview in-progress renders, view and analyze render logs, and easily track these costs.

Components of Deadline Cloud

Just like its predecessor, Deadline Cloud creates rendering jobs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances directly from digital content creation (DCC) pipelines and workstations, which is essentially computer-aided design (CAD) and content-addressable memory (CAM) data.

“You can create a rendering farm, a collection of queues, and fleets. A queue is where your submitted jobs are located and scheduled to be rendered. A fleet is a group of worker nodes that can support multiple queues. A queue can be processed by multiple fleets,” the company explained in a blog post.

AWS’ Deadline Cloud consists of four key components — cloud monitor, cloud submitter, cloud budget monitor, and cloud usage explorer.

With the cloud monitor enterprise teams can access statuses, logs, and other troubleshooting metrics for jobs, steps, and tasks, the company said, adding that it provides real-time access and updates to job progress along with the ability to browse

multiple farm, fleet, and queue listings to view system utilization.

The cloud submitter, on the other hand, can be used to submit a rendering job directly using AWS SDK or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).   

The submitter can also be used by enterprise teams to submit jobs from the DCC software directly, the company said.

The cloud budget manager, as the name suggests, allows teams to create and edit budgets to help manage project costs by viewing how many AWS resources are being used and the estimated costs for those resources.

The cloud usage explorer, separately, allows teams to track the approximate compute and licensing costs based on public pricing rates in Amazon EC2 and Usage-Based Licensing (UBL).

Setting up Deadline Cloud

To get started with the managed service, enterprises need to access the Deadline Cloud console and follow the setup process.

During the setup, enterprise teams need to define and create a farm with the cloud monitor and then download the cloud submitter, adding that once the submitter is downloaded, teams need to install plugins for their DCC applications.

“Teams can define their rendering jobs in their preferred or in-use DCC application and submit them to the created farm within the plugin’s user interfaces,” AWS explained in a blog post.

The DCC plugins detect the necessary input scene data and build a job bundle that uploads to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket in your account, transfers to Deadline Cloud for rendering the job, and provides completed frames to the S3 bucket for your customers to access, it added.

However, the company warned that before teams can work on a project, IT administrators must give access to the required resources and the associated farm must be integrated with AWS’ IAM Identity Center to help manage workforce authentication and authorization.

The managed cloud offering is currently available across US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Ireland) regions.