Lights, camera, cloud: How film is spreading its wings
bbc.com
bbc.com
I worked with them a number of times in my previous life.
They are very proud of not having a permanent render farm, as for them the upfront cost would be too much.
I heard somewhere that at one point them (or a similar company) were using 100k machines, which required google to switch out some youtube transcoders. Obviously 100k machines is way out of range for even pixar, only weta have something close.
However I still remain sceptical on actual total cost of ownership. Yes Atomic Fiction now have no capex budget, But its been replaced by OpEx.
I suspect the cost per hour of CPU is quite a bit higher than a traditional render farm (including power and running expenses.)
Even the big effects houses like MPC (with farms in London, Montreal, Vancouver and works on on average 18-20 films at once - some entire exclusives) don't need that many cores.
Atomic Fiction don't have that big a film/sequence/shot count - if they are using that much core time it doesn't sound like they're being that efficient.
Surely they must be using artists workstations at night to render some stuff - they can't be sending all their stuff to the cloud.
However you have to remember that they are paying only for the time that the machines are used.
so 100 hours on one node is the same cost as 1 hour on a 100 nodes.
One of the nice things about zync is that each shot has a cost, which is really nice.
The other thing to note is that workstation make terrible render nodes. They always are in a weird state, and usually have something changed from the stock image. Plus Atomic fiction are only ~30-100 people, so not really worth the effort to bring workstations online.