Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1536119
22 cgw a p r i l • m ay • j u n e 2 0 2 5 O ut-of-home viewing experiences are redefining the art of storytelling, offering audiences more immersive ways to connect with content. Combining visual, audial, and 4D el- ements, media organizations face the challenge of creating high-im- pact, multisensory productions on a massive scale, pushing the limits of traditional storage and compute capabilities. Only the most innovative providers can deliver the technology needed to manage data, enable real-time processing, and support scalable infrastruc- ture for the next generation of immersive media. Scaling solutions for the Sphere Nexus Studios is an award-winning creative studio known for its artistic and technical expertise spanning animation, VFX, and expe- rience design. When the studio collaborated with Antigravity Acad- emy as the global production partner for For Mexico, For All Time, a cinematic tribute to Mexico's rich history, culture, and future, the team knew they required an innovative, intelligent approach to man- age the scale of the project. With its trusted partner, Pixitmedia by DataCore, Nexus worked to expand its storage and computing capa- bilities to meet the vast technical demands of production. The six-part film, led by Oscar-nominated director Carlos López Estrada, was designed to premiere alongside the highly anticipated UFC 306 at Riyadh Season Noche on the world's largest LED dis- play at the Las Vegas Sphere, a groundbreaking 16K wraparound screen with a resolution totalling 144 million pixels. "The Sphere is the most exciting screen in the world to be creating stories for right now," said Nexus Studios' co-founder and chief cre- ative officer, Chris O'Reilly. "We had to decode how to bring narrative to a screen that is completely immersive, while also figuring out how to technically render images that are 70 times bigger than a tradi- tional HD frame." An intelligent approach to data management To support its busy, high-performance studio infrastructure, Nex- us already relied on Pixitmedia's robust on-premises Pixstor stor- age solution to manage data across powerful workstations, NVID- IA GPUs, render farms, and proprietary tools. However, with an immense resolution of 12,000 by 12,000 pixels, the data demands of the Sphere project pushed storage and computational resources to a new level. To meet these growing requirements, Nexus integrated Pixitme- dia's on-prem Pixstor storage and in the cloud via AWS, along with Ngenea, Pixitmedia's data orchestration tool for intelligent data movement. The hybrid setup ensured that high priority (hot) data was kept accessible locally for Nexus' global talent, while less fre- quently accessed (cold) data was archived to the cloud. Ryan Cawthorne, head of IT and engineering at Nexus Studios, ex- plained the impact: "This solution enabled us to deliver our largest project to date in terms of data volume and resolution. We burst into the cloud and leveraged over 200 GPU instances, giving us access to more than 30TB of VRAM. That level of GPU power is something we could never have accessed on-prem—and we achieved it at a frac- tion of the cost of building equivalent infrastructure." The inclusion of Ngenea allowed Nexus to create a single global namespace, establishing a true hybrid solution that efficiently man- aged growing data demands across its own on-prem infrastructure and AWS Cloud resources. AWS Thinkbox Deadline's compute re- sources were leveraged for scalable rendering, offering the flexibili- ty to handle high-resolution, data-intensive projects without com- promising performance. The solution mirrored the entire dataset in Amazon S3 for disaster recovery, ensuring redundancy and data protection. With cold data offloaded to the cloud when system capacity was reached, Nexus Studios was able to prevent storage bottlenecks and maintain operational efficiency. This approach optimized stor- age costs while ensuring seamless workflows for the high-resolution, data-intensive process. Enhancing efficiency for high-resolution workflows With the hybrid implementation of Pixstor and Ngenea, Nexus was able to manage For Mexico, For All Time without compromising cre- ative integrity or technical performance. With tight workflow integra- tion, the solution reduced unnecessary cloud egress expenditure by transferring only the required assets, keeping costs under control at every step of each project. Cawthorne noted, "The setup supported cost optimization, allow- ing us to scale compute independently of storage and spin resources up and down based on demand." As Nexus looks ahead, it will continue refining its cloud-render- ing workflows with plans to expand the Pixstor solution and lever- age AWS's powerful GPU rendering capabilities. This evolution of the studio's storage capabilities will enhance efficiency, scalability and cost-effectiveness, enabling it to take on increasingly complex and high-resolution projects. The integration of Pixitmedia's solutions will enable Nexus to maintain high performance, streamline cloud ren- dering, and ensure efficient data storage—setting a new standard for modern media production workflows. More about Pixitmedia by Datacore: pixitmedia.com FOR MEXICO, FOR ALL TIME NEXUS STUDIOS PUSHES THE BOUNDARIES OF MEDIA PRODUCTION WITH PIXITMEDIA BY DATACORE.