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, by Rory Fellowes | Productfocus

A Cloud with a silver lining

Probably the single greatest burden accompanying the development of digital technology is the amount of data that has to be processed. Multicore 2 or 3 GHz CPUs and 64 Gb RAM have become the industry standard for professional workstations, and the software for any process dedicated to producing images has grown to make use of that speed and space. The result being, the data in a single CGI generated film frame is huge.

To process that data takes a whole lot of computing power, and when time is of the essence (and when isn’t it?) it takes a big budget to set up enough CPUs to deal with it all. One side effect of this is that the industry is being taken over by the big movie production companies, all good at their work, of course, but the upshot is that the film making industry is in danger of losing the input of individuals and small companies who cannot compete.

But then along came cloud computing. Effectively, this puts a potentially huge number of CPUs at the disposal of those smaller companies, limited only by the service provider’s set up. This is where render farms come in. They are an essential player in any attempt to take the industry back to its roots, lone operators and independent companies, having innovative ideas and a wild desire to put them into production. Big companies simply cannot afford to be adventurous, and you only have to look at Hollywood’s major studios’ output in recent years to see how they dog each other, produce film after film within a genre they seem to have agreed to over donuts and coffee, all of them all but indistinguishable, with some notable and admirable exceptions (I’m thinking “Gravity”, Shutter Island and “Inception” to name but three), but they are exceptions. Too many are the result of studio caution among the small circle of companies capable of making such films.

So with that in mind, I decided to look at the way the cloud has taken on the problem, and this article addresses one such service company, RebusFarm and their new upgrade, v 2.0.

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Hotrod by Rohner Retouche © Patrik Rohner 2015

Render farming with RebusFarm

Until I began writing for my living, my career was in the animation industry, both traditional and later in CGI, as a Character Animator, Director and Supervisor. I am not a render wrangler, never have been, though of course I have had to manage renders over the years, using in-house farms and management systems and so on. I mention this so you understand I had only a foggy memory of how this stuff works and had to figure out the RebusFarm 2.0 software from a fairly ignorant starting point.

I am pleased to report it was no problem. The notes that come with the software and on the website, and the UI all conspire to make it easy. Anyone with regular experience of setting up managed renders over any sort of distributive render software won’t take a minute to get in control of RebusFarm 2.0. As well as the UI on your desktop and the menu controls RebusFarm sets up in your CGI software, there is a user Control Center on their website where you can monitor the progress of your jobs in realtime.

Rebus Farm has one of the longest records in the business, and that doesn’t happen unless the service is pretty damn good. I researched various online chats to see how it was received. I only came across one bad review, and it seemed to me it was the result of a perfect storm – a high level of demand on the farm, some technical issues at the farm, and one rogue project that got into the system and caused problems due to poor preparation on the part of the client. The customer service response to the problem was as good as it could be. They got their team working on it at 3.00am, and they solved the issues within a couple of hours. Unfortunately the delay was a disaster for the client, who had a tight deadline that he missed. The good news was that he got a full refund from RebusFarm, along with a personal apology from their Customer Service Department.

My impression, looking at a lot more reviews, was that problems like this are very rare. To be honest, if there was no unfriendly feedback at all I’d be more suspicious than I was finding that one case, singular as it was.

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Grenades © Davide Di Giannantonio 2015

The user experience with RebusFarm

I spoke to some people about RebusFarm. Georg von Lieres works at RebusFarm in Köln (Cologne), and I wanted his answers to some questions from that side of the fence, as it were. The others were RebusFarm users. Scott Schroeder is an architect and animator, who is based in Denver, Colorado; Alexandre Jarek; .

My personal experience in the industry as a Character Animator mainly working on feature films was that most production companies would prefer their VFX service companies to use their own farm, for security reasons in these days of outlaw hackers trying to mess everyone up. The service companies where I worked were happy to go along with this, as it also gives them a closer control of the output. The best farm available will always give back some dropped or incomplete frames, render managers will stall or in some other way cause a problem and it is best if the render wranglers and TDs are there to handle the issue quickly.

But for lone freelancers, outsourcing to farms on the cloud is an optimum way to go. Investing in a full scale farm of your own is in the majority of cases out of the question, and working off a handful of CPUs will be a slow solution, will still give you problems from time to time, and if you are processing a heavy job, it will probably wreck your head. How nice to be able to share the burden with someone, as might be the TDs at the farm, especially if they are as pleasant and accommodating as the team at RebusFarm.

Scott Schroeder’s comment was that while it is always a good idea to have a farm of your own, if you can, and most small to medium studios will usually have at least a few workstations they can use for a night time render farm, the critical factor is having the time in your production schedule to render locally.

“It could take a week or more to render your animation, whereas using an online service like RebusFarm, you can get that animation back in far less time. For me personally, that’s the true advantage. My experience with RebusFarm was outstanding. For example, we needed a quick turnaround on an animation and were able to get the entire 3,500 plus frames done in a little over 4 hours using the service.”

Economies of scale – a quick, efficient service

Georg told me the farm renders around a hundred thousand frames a day, a hefty workload they handle adroitly, with around 99% of all jobs going through without a hitch, so with luck you will never need the assistance of their Customer Services, but if you do, rest assured it will go smoothly. I asked Georg about their Customer Service, always the point of contact most important when working with any online supplier. Georg told me the Customer Service team is small, around five people, and they are all TDs. Because of this, the Customer Services team know the farm’s technology inside out, and the smallness of the team helps speed things up as they are able to talk to each other and help each other solve any problem that crops up. They can all directly log into the computers handling your project and solve the problem for you themselves. This makes for quick and effective response.

I should add here that when I asked Scott if he had had any dealings with RebusFarm’s Customer Services his reply was short:

“Nope. I have not had any issue where I had to call them.”

I asked Georg how the distribution of jobs works. He told me “When the job arrives on the system within seconds it is assigned to several CPUs, depending on how many jobs are on the farm, and also the file size of the job plays a role in this. Usually around a hundred computers will start rendering. The download of finished frames begins as soon as the files are complete, so as soon as the first hundred frames are done the next one hundred are already started.”

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