Prana Studios, the award-winning 3-D graphics and visual effects company behind Disney hits like Planes, is using IBM Cloud infrastructure in the production of an Ultra-High Definition project for an upcoming deluxe theme park attraction.
Who Prana Studios Is
Prana isn’t a household name, but its work has reached big audiences. Variety described it in 2013 as a visual effects and animation studio with offices in Los Angeles and India, with credits including Hoodwinked and Disney’s Planes. That same year, a holding company connected to Prana agreed to buy Rhythm & Hues, the bankrupt Los Angeles visual effects studio.
Prana already had serious computing power of its own. In 2013, the Mumbai studio chose PipelineFX’s Qube software to manage its growing 2,000-node render farm, the bank of machines that turns 3-D scenes into finished frames.
A Project Too Big for One Studio
Over 1,000 bare-metal IBM Cloud servers were used in rendering the photo-realistic 3-D stereo presentation. The project’s resolution was twelve times larger than 1920×1080 Full HD, and designed to be played through 12 projectors on a 400-ft wide screen at 60 frames per second—nearly three times HD’s frame rate.
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IBM’s own announcement, as reported by ChannelDrive, added more detail. The show was rendered as a highly photo-realistic 24K 3D-stereo presentation, around twelve times larger than the 2K content Prana typically worked with. The 12 projectors would run at the same time across a 400-foot-wide, U-shaped screen inside the attraction, which is why the frame count and file sizes were so large. For comparison, most movies are projected at 24 frames per second.
“Scaling to cloud was the logical next step for us to continue to operate efficiently even on such a complex project,” said Anish Mulani, President and COO of Prana Studios.
Mulani also explained why Prana chose IBM. “In our experience with other cloud vendors they relied too much on virtual machines and a template approach to the technical and cost aspects,” he said in the announcement. “This was further augmented by the excellent support team from IBM who were available on site to understand our specific workflows and engineer the cloud infrastructure to our performance requirements.”
According to ChannelDrive, Prana runs a large data center of its own, but turned to IBM for its high-performance bare-metal servers, its 47 data centers around the world, and flexible infrastructure and pricing.
With significantly large file sizes involved, Prana Studios also needed the cloud solution to help reduce download times so that it would work within their tight time constraints.
Moving the Files Back Home
Rendering files were output from IBM Cloud to Prana’s on-site servers using IBM Aspera high-speed file transfer technology. Prana was able to make creative changes under client direction without dramatically altering the production schedule of the show.
That speed mattered because the work was highly iterative, with creative changes at every step. IBM Aspera is built around FASP, a high-speed transfer protocol created by Aspera, a company founded in 2004 and later acquired by IBM. It’s designed to move very large files over long distances much faster than ordinary internet transfers, and Aspera’s technology won Emmy engineering awards in 2013 and 2014.
Why Bare Metal and the Cloud Made Sense
Rendering is one of the most demanding jobs in computing. Every frame of a 3-D scene has to be calculated, and a stereo show needs a separate image for each eye. Multiply that by 60 frames per second and a resolution far beyond HD, and even a big in-house render farm can fall behind a deadline.
Bare-metal servers are physical machines rented whole, rather than virtual machines that share hardware with other customers. For heavy, steady workloads like rendering, they avoid the overhead of virtualization, which is the point Mulani was making about other vendors. Renting them in the cloud means a studio can borrow a thousand extra machines for a crunch period instead of buying hardware that would sit idle once the project ships.
What Happened Next
The cloud brand in this story didn’t last long. In October 2017, IBM rebranded its cloud offerings as IBM Cloud, retiring the Bluemix and SoftLayer names.
For visual effects studios more broadly, “burst” rendering in the cloud has become a normal part of the toolkit. The approach Prana took here, keeping a core render farm in-house and renting extra power when a project outgrows it, is the same trade-off studios weigh today: owned hardware is cheaper for steady work, while the cloud handles the peaks.
Frequently Asked Questions
What project did Prana Studios use IBM Cloud for?
Prana Studios used IBM Cloud to render an Ultra-High Definition 3-D stereo show for an upcoming theme park attraction in the U.S. More than 1,000 bare-metal IBM Cloud servers were used for the rendering.
How big was the Prana Studios theme park project?
The show was rendered as a photo-realistic 24K 3D-stereo presentation, designed to play through 12 projectors at 60 frames per second on a 400-foot-wide, U-shaped screen.
Why did Prana Studios choose IBM Cloud?
Anish Mulani, President and COO of Prana Studios, said other cloud vendors relied too much on virtual machines and a template approach. Prana chose IBM for its high-performance bare-metal servers, global data centers and flexible pricing.
How did Prana get the rendered files back from the cloud?
The rendered output was transferred from IBM Cloud to Prana's on-site servers using IBM Aspera high-speed file transfer technology. That let Prana make creative changes without dramatically altering the production schedule.
What is a bare-metal server?
A bare-metal server is a physical machine rented whole, rather than a virtual machine sharing hardware with other customers. It avoids virtualization overhead, which suits heavy workloads like rendering.