Google Cloud and Autodesk enable 10x improvement in media rendering efficiency
Todd Prives
Product Manager, Cloud Rendering
We're at NAB this week and are thrilled to announce new Google Cloud Platform partners and product updates that underscore the growing role of cloud computing in the media and entertainment industry.
We’re collaborating with Autodesk to launch a new cloud-optimized rendering service called Autodesk Maya for Cloud Platform ZYNC Render. Autodesk software has been behind the past 21 Academy Award winners for Best Visual Effects and we’re bringing this capability to Google Cloud Platform.
The combined offering captures the aim of both companies to enable individual artists and developers to focus on content, abstracting away the nuances of managing infrastructure. Small teams of artists can tap world-class infrastructure to realize the creative vision of what was once limited to much larger studios.
Here’s how it works:
- Product teams at Google and Autodesk have developed a cloud-optimized version of Autodesk® Maya®, the popular tool for animation, modeling and rendering. Via a Maya plugin, 3D scenes are transferred to Google Compute Engine in the background, while the artist is working. Because Maya is capable of running on the artist’s workstation and also in the cloud on GCP, this allows artists to run massively parallel rendering far more efficiently than before — taking advantage of the scalability, performance, and price benefits of GCP
- Compared with the non-optimized version, Maya® customers see up to 10x improvement in file upload efficiency. This allows many rendering jobs to start instantaneously, cutting wait time and accelerating time to finished shot
In addition to our collaboration with Autodesk, we've made some big strides in our offerings for the media and entertainment industry. Here are some recent updates:
Cloud Vision API graduates to General Availability
The goal of Cloud Vision API is to provide vision capability to your applications in the same way that Google Photos does. It's a powerful tool for media and entertainment companies enabling you to classify images and analyze emotional facial attributes. To further improve our customer experience, Cloud Vision API is going into general availability today with new features:- Logo Detection expanded to cover millions of logos
- Updated OCR for understanding more granular text like receipts
Cloud CDN graduates to Beta
We’re launching Cloud CDN Beta, allowing your media content to be pushed out to Google’s network edge and cached close to users. As always, data travels via Google’s network and reaches users who expect instantaneous access to images and live-stream video experiences. Cloud CDN is also fully integrated with Google’s global load balancing and enterprise-grade security to distribute media workloads anywhere they originate, so jobs never get bogged down. Lytro chooses Cloud Platform and The Foundry
One question we see today’s top innovators ask continuously is: with massive cloud infrastructure at our fingertips, how can we make a major leap forward in the way things are done today? Lytro is one example. Its technology seems to defy the traditional physics of photography, capturing massive volumes of visual data with such fidelity that infinite creative choices abound: unprecedented control over focus, perspective, aperture and shutter angle, all in post-production. Lytro selected GCP and The Foundry to help power their amazing invention. Learn more by watching their video.For more on what's possible with cloud-enabled media, visit cloud.google.com/solutions/media and zyncrender.com, or contact us to discuss how cloud can enable your creative workflows.
