pixitmedia empowers Passion Pictures to scale intelligently into the cloud for job-by-job render and compute
- October 7, 2021
Combined with the independent production company’s 30 years of innovation in motion results, pixitmedia’s solutions are the perfect partner for delivering memorable characters and Oscar winning stories.
London, UK, 22nd September 2021 – Leading storage and data management solutions provider, pixitmedia, celebrates the success of another integration with a longstanding customer Passion Pictures, demonstrating the company’s integrative value for businesses in the media and entertainment industry.
As an independent production company, Passion Pictures has been a long-established beneficiary of pixitmedia’s high-performance software defined storage solution, pixstor. In 2020, the Academy Award-winning production studio began exploring new media workflows to take on larger projects, requiring a means to scale their business quickly without suffering the consequences of time, money and, in turn, maximising capacity.
Leveraging the existing knowledge and industry experience of the pixitmedia team, Passion Pictures was able to drive towards a solution that was orientated around the challenge and avoid the common pitfalls of re-mapping data infrastructures.
Passion Pictures is now ahead of the curve in how animation production studios are using the cloud to meet the needs of their customers. Using an on-premise storage to house all of their data, when Passion Pictures work on a project that requires cloud compute, every time they publish a new version of their data, whether it is a 3D model, an image file or a cache file, an automated push to the cloud server and storage using ngenea is triggered. ngenea, which is built entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS), offers the ability for artists to share, access and use their data across the entire company, wherever they are located.
pixitmedia’s media workflow orientated solutions offer businesses in the industry the performance, scalability and flexibility that exceeds those generally expected of an on-premise storage facility. When Passion Pictures starts the rendering process, the scene files that needs to be rendered are pushed into the cloud to be queued and pre-warmed for rendering. Once renders have been completed, a script pushes the data back home to Passion Pictures on-premise solution.
Now with complete control over their data flows and egress costs; Passion Pictures tailors their workflows to only queue and receive complete render sets back from the cloud. Passion Pictures can now confidently deliver their specialty of short form projects and expand into producing more longform content, ultimately focusing on their craft; telling award-winning stories that connect and inspire through animation.
Jason Nicholas, Head of CG at Passion Pictures comments, “A lot of the team at pixitmedia have worked within the industry and have been through these pain points themselves so you can have these solution orientated conversations with them. For us, different solutions have come along as we have changed the scale of our business. We’ve moved along with that as we have moved our compute to AWS. pixitmedia has helped us take that next step again with ngenea to allow us to have a more linear scalability to the business.”
Ben Leaver, CEO & Co Founder of pixitmedia added, “It’s because of our trusted relationships with customers like Passion Pictures that their invaluable feedback enables us to be industry leading and forward thinking in our development of our solutions that enable the effective movement and storage of assets to make business function. The past 18 months has shown the production industry that there is never a better time to be prepared for the unexpected, and our solutions provide that confidence to our customers.”
About Passion Pictures
Passion is a talent-driven entertainment company that creates and tells incredible stories. Oscar-winning in animation and documentary, Passion uses the moving image to push boundaries and inspire audiences.
A deep connection with directors, artists and technicians allows Passion the freedom to develop and realise extraordinary work from independent studios with teams in the UK, USA, Paris, Barcelona and sister-studio Strange Beast.
Committed to nurturing diverse talent, Passion has launched the career of many acclaimed creatives, working together to make beautiful, thought-provoking films.