Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1496872
Yan Chen, a 25-year film veteran and the CEO and founder of Aurora AI, has made a career out of bring- ing creative visions to life. Now, faced with a budding studio of artists and major film production deadlines, he is challenged to bring those visions to life quick- ly and efficiently. On any given day, the technology that powers the creative content is as critical as the content itself. His existing storage solution was creat- ing significant lag times in render and simulation. Then, Dell Technologies delivered the PowerScale F200 all-flash solution and turned everything around. In a recent conversation, Chen describes the challenge in greater detail, "After unblocking the rendering slowdowns, the need to feed these processes with high fidelity data became a challenge. With eighteen artists visualizing different creative segments, we found that data read and write became the showstopper. There was a noticeable delay as soon as multiple artists began loading scenes. A typical 1–2-minute operation became closer to 4-5 minutes. When half the studio would arrive in the morning, the 4-5 minutes would go up to 30 minutes, with artists forced to take coffee breaks waiting for the scenes to load. Obviously, this is not a desirable outcome." Aurora AI is responsible for creating cutting-edge VFX for motion pictures in record time. Advanced machine learning (ML) techniques combined with re- al-time visualization game engine technology create compelling and high-fidel- ity visuals with a 10x increase in speed and efficiency compared to traditional pipelines. High-fidelity models/textures/rigs/image plates are all designed for real-time visualization using ML, combined in a real-time game engine environ- ment to develop visuals that rival final pixel looks but still run at 60FPS. By le- veraging this pipeline, creative visions can be realized and visualized accurately and efficiently. In other words, there is no room for lag time. With the implementation of the Dell PowerScale solution, they were back up to speed on their high throughput workloads. A Dell engineer came onsite to as- sist with the storage installation. The rest of the commissioning was, in Chen's words, "clear, quite painless and easy." Once the technology was in place, the PowerScale F200 stopped slowdowns in any loads or saves across the whole studio. Whether the entire studio was getting in and starting work simultane- ously or multiple people were running a hundred frames, and 4k AI simulations, everyone was working at top speed- a dramatic change over the previous storage solution. When asked how the new Dell PowerScale solution improved pipeline effi- ciency, Chen comments, "With the faster storage, the entire studio's output dramatically improved. Getting rid of file IO slowdowns increases the efficiency of work. Renders, simulations, and real-time reviews all go off without a hitch now." He adds, "The positive emotional impact on the studio cannot be ig- nored. Previously, artists had to be conscientious about when they would need to load and save their large data sets or when to kick off large simulations. They would have to notify the rest of the studio to avoid bottlenecks. This would not only slow down their work but also add to the stress of time and resource management. With the PowerScale F200, all this goes away, and the studio can get back to making art and beautiful simulations." Chen offers advice to other studios and content creators who might be consid- ering an upgrade to Dell's PowerScale all-flash solution, "If a studio is looking for a storage solution that is best in class in terms of speed, PowerScale is the way to go. The other benefits important to content creation are scalability, stability, and ease of use. PowerScale has all of this and more. As the industry evolves to rely on more real-time visualization tools, it is important to consider a real-time capable storage solution, the F200 with three nodes can feed more than a dozen artists working on simultaneous real-time streams with software from Epic, Adobe, Autodesk, SideFX and Foundry, and it is scalable both up- wards and outwards from there." For more information on Dell's Emmy® award-winning PowerScale solutions for media and entertainment, please visit us online at www.Dell.to/media. Author, Alex Timbs, is a former head of IT for a leading animation and VFX studio and a valued member of the Dell Technologies Media and Entertainment storage team. He is passionate about bridging the gap between Technology and Art and feels that neither exists without the other in the modern context. Understanding that true business value can only be uncovered by first establishing trust and answering the "Why". HOW A VETERAN PIPELINE ENGINEER ACCELERATED NEXT-GENERATION MEDIA WORKLOADS WITH DELL POWERSCALE BY ALEX TIMBS, DELL TECHNOLOGIES MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT SPONSORED CONTENT Yan Chen, a 25-year film veteran and the CEO and founder of Aurora AI Advanced visualization concept piece courtesy of Aurora AI concept piece for our tech and what it brings to the table in terms of advanced visualization