BAFTA-winning studio Milk VFX is at BVE to reveal how exhibitor Escape Technology helped set up a cloud-centric scalable pipeline that enables its artists to share files easily and securely between its London and Cardiff facilities.
Escape Technology, in partnership with Milk VFX, Pixit Media, Dell and Intel, is showcasing the latest solutions for pipelines at the show, demonstrating 4K playback from Pixit Media’s shared storage system and high render speeds with Google’s Cloud Platform and NVIDIA’s VCA.
Known for its work on Doctor Who, Sherlock and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Milk configured a pioneering workflow that enables its artists, though 150 miles apart, to collaborate on projects as easily as if they were in the same building.
Dave Goodbourn, head of systems at Milk, explained: “When we opened the Cardiff facility, rather than have a separate island of storage we were able to connect the suites to our London storage with barely any delay, We don’t treat Cardiff as a separate entity; from an infrastructure point of view, it’s like we’ve added another floor in London, but for a fraction of the cost.”
By using Pixit Media’s PixCache, which provides local caching of remote assets, and with support for cloud rendering, this workflow also lets Milk harness Google Cloud Platform technology for render-on-demand capacity. The solution accelerates rendering by transferring a single copy of the data requested to multiple private cloud render instances from existing on-site storage, considerably reducing the time, complexity and costs of launching render resources.
The project is being highlighted at the Post Production and Workflow Theatre on Wednesday 24 Feb at 14:00.
K11 (with Pixit Media)
J26 (with PNY)
