The artists at Encore create visual effects for television sci-fi thrillers including 'Black Lightning', 'SEAL Team', 'The Flash', 'Supergirl' and 'Legends of Tomorrow'. Encore creates monstrous creatures and digital doubles, superheroic feats, environmental effects and set extensions, all of which add up to a large volume of work. In the past year, Encore delivered more than 15,000 VFX shots, a number that continuously grows each year. To keep up with the demand, the studio has significantly expanded in terms of creative talent and technical resources.
Encore currently shares a 1,200-node farm across its facilities in Burbank, Vancouver and Atlanta. The bulk of the machines are hosted in a data centre with small portions of them hosted locally at other facilities. To manage all of their compute power as a single resource, Encore has been using Deadline render management software from AWS Thinkbox for several years. The studio recently deployed Deadline version 10, which adds functionality for accessing cloud resources among its updates, and has consequently been adding cloud-based resources to its workflow.
The team can burst and manage cloud resources as needed from a single familiar interface, which makes it easier to automatically scale instances to existing farms while maintaining control and security at all times.
Draft is a compositing and video processing tool used to automate routine post-render tasks, in particular the creation and processing of QuickTimes, thumbnails and other deliverables in a pipeline. It automatically processes renders for review and can connect with production management systems to tag videos. Examples of tasks that Draft can be used for include creating simple edits, adding frame counters, annotations and, in some cases, compositing images.
As well as its dedicated farm, Encore also uses around 300 artist workstations for rendering during non-business hours. Through Deadline, all of Encore's compute resources are managed in a single repository and grouped for different departments based on need.