Amazon Nimble Studio makes it easy to set up a content production studio in hours, scale capacity based on demand, and render content faster and more cost-effectively
Anjekumi, CalState University, Evil Eye Pictures, Shomen Productions, Sinking Ship Entertainment, and Spire Animation Studios among the first customers to build creative studios using Amazon Nimble Studio
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon Nimble Studio, a new service that enables customers to set up a content production studio in hours instead of weeks, with elasticity that gives them near limitless scale and access to rendering on demand.
With Amazon Nimble Studio, customers can rapidly onboard and collaborate with artists from anywhere in the world, and produce content faster and more cost effectively.
Artists will have access to accelerated virtual workstations, high-speed storage, and scalable rendering across AWS’s global infrastructure so they can create content faster.
There are no upfront fees or commitments to use Amazon Nimble Studio, and customers pay only for the underlying AWS services used. To get started, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/nimble-studio/
Visual effects
To bring high-quality visual effects, animation, and creative content to life, studios historically have relied on local high-performance workstations connected to shared file storage systems over low-latency, on-premises networks.
Increased consumer appetite for premium content and experiences has driven greater demand for compute-intensive rendering of visual effects and animations.
This ever-growing demand causes content production studios to over-provision their compute, networking, and storage infrastructure for peak capacity, which proves expensive, difficult to manage, and hard to scale. For example, 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.
Consumer demand for more content has also required studios to onboard talent from around the world, who then require high-powered workstations, specialized software, and high-speed storage and networking. All of these constraints can result in production delays, increased expenses, and lost opportunity for content production studios.
Content production
Using Amazon Nimble Studio, customers can create a new content production studio in just a few hours. The creative talent then has immediate access to high performance workstations powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) G4dn instances with NVIDIA Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), shared file storage from Amazon FSx, and ultra low-latency streaming via the AWS global network.
Amazon Nimble Studio gives content production studios the ability to start with as few resources as needed, scale up those resources when rendering demands peak, and spin them back down once projects are completed.
Content production studios can onboard remote teams from around the world and provide them access to just the right amount of high performance infrastructure for only as long as needed—all without having to procure, set up, and manage local workstations, file systems, and low-latency networking.
Amazon Nimble Studio supports both the Windows and Linux operating systems so that artists can work with their preferred third-party creative applications. Additionally, studios can use custom software applications and bring them into Amazon Nimble Studio via Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), ensuring a seamless migration from on-premises to cloud infrastructure.
Entertainment customers
Amazon Nimble Studio is the latest AWS solution for media and entertainment customers, joining the AWS Thinkbox Deadline render management application as a core capability supporting content production.
Media and entertainment leaders like Discovery, Disney, EuroSport, Formula 1, FOX, HBO Max, Peacock and Weta Digital use purpose-built AWS solutions that help content creators, rights holders, producers, and distributors accelerate reinvention across five key industry business areas: content production, direct-to-consumer and over-the-top (OTT) streaming, broadcast, media supply chain and archive, and data science and analytics.
AWS Head of Content Production Tech Kyle Roche 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,” said Kyle Roche.
Creative community
Kyle Roche also said the company is excited to announce Amazon Nimble Studio, a transformational new service for the creative community built for the cloud to make it much faster, easier, and less expensive to produce the content that consumers want to watch.
Amazon Nimble Studio is available today 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.
Anjekumi connects gamers and enables them to play games from anywhere in the world using next generation devices. “Amazon Nimble Studio allows us to concentrate on the creative result rather than the technical journey as it solves some key issues in our production pipeline,” said Kurt Rauer, CEO, Anjekumi.
“Our business is a global one and with Amazon Nimble Studio we are able to engage creative people globally without the associated friction,” said Anjekumi.
The California State University is a public university system in California with 23 campuses. “As the largest public higher education system in the nation, the California State University system pride ourselves on having an innovative mindset in Media & Entertainment education, empowering a majority-minority, diverse student population,” said Dina Ibrahim, Executive Director, San Francisco State University.
Education experience
“AWS is a perfect partner to represent a path forward for our creative programs, as we look to moving more of our education experience to the cloud in the near future, and solutions like Amazon Nimble Studio provide our students with easier, hands-on access to the latest tools in content creation technology, which better positions them for success in their careers.”
Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management.
The AWS services can be accessed from 80 Availability Zones (AZs) within 25 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.
