AWS launches Amazon Nimble Studio

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unveiled Amazon Nimble Studio, which enables VFX studios to be spun-up or expanded on-demand with “elasticity that gives them near limitless scale and access to rendering on demand.”

Amazon Nimble Studio provides VFX and animation artists access to accelerated virtual workstations, high-speed storage, and scalable rendering across AWS’s global infrastructure.

There are no upfront fees or commitments to use Amazon Nimble Studio – customers pay only for the underlying AWS services used.

Amazon Nimble Studios aims to replace, or at least supplement, local high-performance workstations connected to shared file storage systems that have typically been used by VFX and animation houses.

AWS says 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. It argues it’s more convenient, timely and cost-effective to utilise on-demand cloud solutions that can be spun-up for the duration of each project, rather than invest in more and more on-premise workstations to cater for demand.

Using Amazon Nimble Studio, customers can create a new content production studio in a few hours. This provides high performance workstations powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud with NVIDIA Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), shared file storage from Amazon FSx, and ultra low-latency streaming via the AWS global network.

Kyle Roche, head of content production tech, AWS, said: “Amazon Nimble Studio is going to change the way customers produce content using a cloud-based production pipeline. 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.”

Amazon Nimble Studio is available 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.

AWS for Media & Entertainment aligns industry-specific cloud capabilities, including purpose-built media and creative services, hardware, solutions, tools, and partners. AWS for Media & Entertainment also aligns AWS internal resources, AWS Professional Services, and 400+ industry-specific independent software vendor partners and 100+ system integrators.