Launch your rendering fleet in AWS with Deadline 10

Deadline 10, our powerful and easy to use render management system, is now available to all customers. Deadline 10 allows customers the freedom to easily access any combination of on-premises or cloud-based resources, and features new, cost effective pricing for broader accessibility.

Rendering is a highly distributed compute-intensive process with dependencies between render jobs and digital assets. The rendering pipeline is comprised of thousands of client instantiations of the same rendering process. Deadline is a pipeline manager that orchestrates this distributed job.

Since the Thinkbox acquisition by Amazon Web Services (AWS), many customers have asked us how to make the rendering experience in the cloud as simple as the one they have on-premises, while still leveraging the elasticity and flexibility of cloud. While we stay committed to delivering new and improved capabilities for on-premises deployments, like dynamic licensing and improved remote connection server, Deadline 10 is our first step into making rendering in the cloud a few click process through the new AWS Portal feature in Deadline.

Deadline 10 includes usage-based licensing on AWS with Deadline for Autodesk 3ds Max, Maya and Arnold through the Thinkbox marketplace. Chaos Group’s V-Ray has also been added to the marketplace, joining current Thinkbox partners - The Foundry’s NUKE and KATANA, Maxwell Render, Next Limit RealFlow, NVIDIA Iray and Mental Ray, Redshift and Peregrine Labs’ Yeti.

Enabling simple and secure expansion of on-premises render farms, Deadline 10 natively integrates with AWS via customers’ existing AWS accounts. It automatically connects to customers’ on-premises farms, tags AWS instances for tracking and synchronizes with local asset servers automatically to ensure all appropriate files have been transferred before rendering begins. With flexible third-party licensing options, Deadline 10 customers using AWS resources can purchase software licenses from the Thinkbox marketplace, deploy existing licenses or leverage a combination of the two.

The new remote connection server feature enhances the secure connection to and interactions with remote and cloud-based render farms over public internet, reducing communication overhead and accelerating data transfers. Dynamic licensing allows Deadline workers to switch between floating licenses and usage based licensing so that users can expand render farms with AWS Portal without having to configure render nodes. By using a new unlimited option for third-party usage based licensing, customers can grow render farms elastically by tapping AWS resources.

Deadline 10 is now available for usage based license customers; a new license is needed for traditional floating license users. Pricing for yearly Deadline licenses has been updated to $48 USD annually. Perpetual Deadline licenses continue to be available upon request or users may transition to yearly licenses. For more information on Deadline 10, visit: www.thinkboxsoftware.com/sales.