Atomic Cartoons brings to life animated tales with creatives scattered across multiple locations, including Vancouver, Ottawa, and Los Angeles. Since 1999, when the studio was founded, rendering was done using its own co-located infrastructure, scaling up with rented nodes from local vendors during production peaks. However, with demand for content booming, the studio’s increased needs often extend beyond the resources of its traditional rendering technology. But in the wake of old technology comes new. Unimaginable advances in cloud-based rendering are turning the tables on the entire production pipeline. To optimize and embrace the “cloud,” the studio has tapped IMT for custom cloud integration solutions to help scale its pipeline on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“If my local vendor doesn’t have nodes when I need them, I’m stuck, and not being able to scale puts our productions at risk,” shared Atomic Cartoons Director of IT Hanoz Elavia. “AWS provides us the flexibility to spin up in the cloud, use instances, and turn them back down. Regardless of what we need, chances are that AWS will have the instances available because of its high capacity.”
After evaluating cloud providers, Elavia opted to move forward with AWS. Looking to get the studio’s cloud implementation up and running as soon as possible, he enlisted solutions integrator IMT to create a custom interface between AWS and Pixar Tractor, which the studio uses for renderfarm management. The setup allowed the studio to leverage Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) without a major overhaul.
