Creativity knows no bounds, neither should your data.
For visual storytellers, building beyond the status quo means unleashing creative minds to dream without limits and share that vision with the world.
With the VAST Data Platform, the creative process is no longer bound by the restrictions of limited data access, long render times, and costly downtime.
Streamline the creative process with all-flash performance across all content to power distributed teams and deliver remarkably faster render times.
The VAST Data Platform is the new standard in storytelling, built for the AI-era and real-time workflows.
The weight of legacy infrastructure is throttling the creative process
As digital animation and VFX studios push the boundaries of their art, the demands on technology are surging. Individual films now require petabytes of storage capacity and studios juggle multiple projects concurrently to meet demanding production schedules.
Moreover, globally dispersed teams of artists require seamless access to data to maintain productivity. To expedite the processing of large rendering tasks, studios are turning to cloud providers for elastic compute resources.
Operating at this scale, studios are adopting AI to automate significant parts of the creative process. However, training these advanced models requires high-speed access to content, presenting a challenge for an industry where the largest datasets have historically been stored on the slowest storage systems.
With The VAST Data Platform, studios can finally afford flash for all working and render data. By consolidating all data sets to one high-performance tier visual pipelines are simplified.
Managing assets becomes simple with an always-in-sync metadata index provided by the VAST Catalog that lets teams search, find, and curate data sets via UI or SQL interface for automation and advanced queries.
Accelerate creativity to AI speeds with the VAST Data Platform
VAST Data breaks the decades-old tradeoff between performance and capacity with a new architecture that enables unlimited processing on affordable flash, at up to exabyte scale.
Studios can take advantage of the VAST Data Platform’s ability to manage data over multiple sites and the cloud to support the work of creative teams around the world.
The VAST DataSpace creates a global namespace for data access by distributed teams as well as cloud burst workflows. All-flash performance with intelligent data management means digital artists have greater access to assets, rendering pipelines run faster, AI learns more effectively, and the entire studio works more efficiently.
Coming in 2024: The VAST DataEngine provides an intelligent execution layer to automate AI-powered visual pipelines across edge, core, and cloud.
“We generate massive data sets for every project we work on. For our 3D and simulation teams, a single frame can require several gigabytes — and we need thousands of frames just for one sequence. Having the infrastructure to control that sprawl and serve more than 300 remote workers who all need low-latency access to that data is critical to our operations. With VAST, smart storage architecture allows us to unleash the power of allflash without breaking our project budget.”
- Grant Miller, Partner & VFX Supervisor, Ingenuity Studios
PDF - Animation & VFX Solution Brief
Animation and VFX studios use rendering tools to shape today’s most compelling content. In addition, rendering workflows are now being exposed to new machine learning and deep learning frameworks to automate much of the creative process by programmatically learning from artistic behaviors.
To train these new models, organizations are finding that they need to provide high speed access to their content archives for high-throughput computation... a challenge for organizations who have kept their largest data sets on the slowest storage.
With VAST Data, animations studios and FX shops can finally afford flash for all of their render data. Once flash can be affordable for the pipeline, render farms can deliver at up to 10 times faster performance than HDD-based scaleout storage.
Success Story – Lola Visual Effects
PDF – Fostering the Speed of Collaboration for Award-Winning VFX
To accelerate collaboration, Lola VFX needed to consolidate all of their data on a high-speed shared data platform accessible to artists globally. After evaluating options, they selected the VAST DataStore for its performance, scale, and multiprotocol capabilities.
Lola utilizes Autodesk Flame in its film editing process and Lola has 60 Flames globally with 40 Flames at its Los Angeles office. With VAST, 60 Flame artists are able to collaborate together on one platform with an aggregate throughput of 64 gigabytes a second. Williams elaborated,
“All our artists in Los Angeles can play back 4K in real-time on the VAST Data Platform. In the past, we had to RAM cache each shot, taking 3–4 seconds each. That adds up with 60–100 shots per day in review.”
– Edson Williams, Founder, Lola VFX
On Demand Webinar - Supercharge Animation & VFX in Hollywood
Watch this webinar to learn what it takes to create visual effects for binge-worthy content, and how infrastructure can shape the outcome. Get insights into how Ingenuity Studios leverages a radically affordable all-flash platform to create award-worthy visuals for films, television and music videos, while empowering their animators and artists to meet aggressive timelines for their most discerning clients.
Speakers
Grant Miller
VFX Supervisor & Partner, Ingenuity Studios
Jeff Denworth
CMO, Co-Founder VAST Data
Video - Pixar + VAST | Revolutionizing Data-Intensive Animated Feature Productions
Learn how Pixar leverages the VAST Data Platform to create captivating visual stories for global audiences, revolutionizing data-intensive animated feature productions.