SEATTLE–Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is offering the general availability of Amazon Nimble Studio, a new service that enables customers to set up a content production studio in hours instead of weeks, with elasticity that gives them near limitless scale and access to rendering on demand.
With Amazon Nimble Studio, customers can rapidly onboard and collaborate with artists from anywhere in the world, and produce content faster and more cost effectively. Artists will have access to accelerated virtual workstations, high-speed storage, and scalable rendering across AWS’s global infrastructure so they can create content faster. There are no upfront fees or commitments to use Amazon Nimble Studio, and customers pay only for the underlying AWS services used.
To bring high-quality visual effects, animation, and creative content to life, studios historically have relied on local high-performance workstations connected to shared file storage systems over low-latency, on-premises networks. Increased consumer appetite for premium content and experiences has driven greater demand for compute-intensive rendering of visual effects and animations. This ever-growing demand causes content production studios to over-provision their compute, networking, and storage infrastructure for peak capacity, which proves expensive, difficult to manage, and hard to scale.
For example, a typical animated feature film now generates 730 terabytes of data and up to half a billion files, requiring more than 150 million core compute hours and coordination from hundreds of artists and engineers. Consumer demand for more content has also required studios to onboard talent from around the world, who then require high-powered workstations, specialized software, and high-speed storage and networking. All of these constraints can result in production delays, increased expenses, and lost opportunity for content production studios.
Using Amazon Nimble Studio, customers can create a new content production studio in just a few hours. The creative talent then has immediate access to high performance workstations powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) G4dn instances with NVIDIA Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), shared file storage from Amazon FSx, and ultra low-latency streaming via the AWS global network. Amazon Nimble Studio gives content production studios the ability to start with as few resources as needed, scale up those resources when rendering demands peak, and spin them back down once projects are completed. Content production studios can onboard remote teams from around the world and provide them access to just the right amount of high performance infrastructure for only as long as needed—all without having to procure, set up, and manage local workstations, file systems, and low-latency networking.
Amazon Nimble Studio supports both the Windows and Linux operating systems so that artists can work with their preferred third-party creative applications. Additionally, studios can use custom software applications and bring them into Amazon Nimble Studio via Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), ensuring a seamless migration from on-premises to cloud infrastructure. Amazon Nimble Studio is the latest AWS solution for media and entertainment customers, joining the AWS Thinkbox Deadline render management application as a core capability supporting content production.
“Amazon Nimble Studio is going to change the way customers produce content using a cloud-based production pipeline,” said Kyle Roche, Head of Content Production Tech, AWS. “To date, studios struggle to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for creative content, which has driven an exponential increase in the computing power required to produce content—hastening obsolescence of workstations and straining on-premises storage and rendering capacity. We are excited to announce Amazon Nimble Studio, a transformational new service for the creative community built for the cloud to make it much faster, easier, and less expensive to produce the content that consumers want to watch.”
Amazon Nimble Studio is available today in six AWS Regions and AWS Local Zones: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon) Region, Canada (Central) Region, Europe (London) Region, Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, and US Local Zone (Los Angeles), with additional region support coming soon.
AWS has also announced AWS for Media & Entertainment, an initiative that makes it easier for industry customers to discover, implement, and deploy purpose-built AWS capabilities and partner solutions for their highest priority workloads—enabling them to create compelling content faster, invent new customer experiences, expand direct-to-consumer offerings, and improve media supply chain efficiency. AWS for Media & Entertainment aligns the broadest and deepest set of industry-specific cloud capabilities, including purpose-built media and creative services, hardware, solutions, tools, and partners.