At-a-Glance

Cinesite Studios turned to Qumulo to leap over technical barriers in its creative workflows, and deliver exceptional imagery for blockbuster motion pictures faster than the studio ever thought possible.

With Qumulo and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cinesite’s animation and VFX pipelines leveraged Qumulo’s hybrid file data services in order to deliver compelling images Cinesite was able to render 16K video at scale on Qumulo’s file system running on AWS with industry-leading levels of speed and agility.

Overview

Cinesite is a leading digital entertainment studio with credits on animated feature films such as The Addam’s Family, Extinct and Riverdance and VFX projects such as Avengers: Endgame, Rocketman, The Witcher, and the James Bond movie franchise. The company employs nearly 1,000 digital artists and staff, who work from offices across London, Montreal, Berlin, Munich, and Vancouver.

Cinesite’s award-winning visual effects and animation teams bring filmmakers’ visions to life. To support complex and demanding workflows
for visual effects, and conceiving and realizing CG-animated films, Qumulo and AWS enabled Cinesite to leverage high-performance storage at scale, helping Cinesite achieve more than the studio ever thought possible, including developing scalable 16K video workflows for future applications.

Cinesite’s existing infrastructure included a newly-installed but older generation storage technology from another provider that supported approximately 500 render nodes in the Montreal data center, and a workflow that leveraged AWS for occasional overflow rendering.