Rendering is the most compute-intensive part of a movie production. By some estimates rendering can account for 90 percent of the total compute hours over the entire life of an animated feature or visual effects-laden feature film. Rendering is a highly-complex, distributed process with dependencies between render jobs and digital assets.
To address this complexity companies like PipelineFX offer render management solutions that simplify the management and control of render pipelines. Their solution integrates on-premises environments with cloud service providers such as Microsoft Azure. This gives their customers access to scale and elasticity for accelerating the time-to-production.
PipelineFx recently announced their latest software release, Qube 7. It has a great set of new features that you can read more about on their website. But there’s one thing in particular that caught my eye, the Supervisor is now free to use. Not only that, but the rendering component is free for the first 30 days. This is true regardless of scale.
As you probably know already, Azure scales out to big numbers. With the 30 day trial of Qube and our low-priority Virtual Machines, you can get a lot of rendering done without spending a lot of money. Here’s what you need to do:
- Sign up for a free trial of Qube 7.
- If you don’t already have an Azure account, register for a free trial that includes $200 in credits.
- Install the Supervisor on your render farm.
- Create your Azure virtual machines with Qube 7 installed.
- Submit your workloads.
With the free trials, you can quickly get a taste for how Azure gives you the ability to quickly scale your render farm to meet your needs, while only paying for what you use. To learn more about rendering in Azure visit our Batch Rendering page. You can read more about how Qvisten used Azure to meet deadlines for Anchors Up on the PipelineFX site.