Avatar 2 rendered using cloud services from Amazon Web Services Weta FX specializes in visual effects beyond the capacity of its own computing core

The company responsible for the effects on movies like the Lord of the RingsAnd the Aquaman And the Dr. Strangetraditionally uses its own data center to show its films.

The company considered going cloud as early as 2014, but found cost and data bandwidth to be the biggest hurdle.

But creating a sequel to Avatar posed a challenge for the company. It usually uses its data centers to process several movies at the same time. With Avatar: TWOWEven the entire data center was not enough.

“There’s the complexity of the water and all that simulation, and what you saw in the trailer is really just a small part of the mission and the massive challenge.said producer Jon Landau at Amazon’s re:Invent event.

The film also doubled the frame rate, from 24 to 48 frames per second. “This doubles the submission workload“, he added.

To get the perfect shot, the company performs an average of 500 iterations per shot, each of which contains thousands of images. It took 8,000 thread hours to render each frame, or the combined power of 3,000 CPUs in the cloud for one hour.

David Conley, executive visual effects producer, noted that the move to the cloud was “standard transitionfor Wētā because of its history of using its own data center.

But the decision came down to the fact that “We haven’t been able to expand our data center from an architectural point of view, because it would require infrastructure subject to city council, and we all know what it’s like through local government“, He said.

Wētā leveraged capacity across three AWS Australian data centers. The cloud company plans to open its first cloud region in New Zealand in 2024.

The company plans to continue using AWS after this unique mega-project and its aftermath. With the pandemic forcing remote work, in 2020 Wētā signed a multi-year agreement with AWS to build a visual effects workflow on the cloud.

The company said it will use AWS for its newly formed animation division, which will create original content.

Source: Wetā FX

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