back to article Next blockbuster you watch could be rendered on Google: Star Trek fx biz Zync gobbled

Google has confirmed its gobble of Zync, a cloud-based special effects rendering service. "Creating amazing special effects requires a skilled team of visual artists and designers, backed by a highly powerful infrastructure to render scenes. Many studios, however, don’t have the resources or desire to create an in-house …

  1. batfastad

    Amazon

    Sounds like an effort to try and get near Amazon's Elastic Transcoder service that's been around for quite a while now. Up until now MS and Google's public cloud offerings have only been attacking Amazon on price of storage and compute, with everyone seemingly ignoring the vast breadth of Amazon's other cloud service offerings. Still got quite a way to go to match Amazon when you compare all the other stuff they have tucked up their skirt.

  2. David Dawson

    Transcoding and rendering are unrelated.

    This allows people using Maya, blender(?) etc to gain extra compute/ storage power to generate new video. Transcoding that into an mpeg suitable for iPad afterwards, for example, is what you'd go to AWS' elastic transcoder service for.

  3. PaulyV

    Excuse the ignorance, but I never understood how these kind of services avoid being 'slow' to do their work, given that they rely on the speed of the internet connection to pass their data back and forward?

    I must be missing something and would appreciate any explanation.

    Pauly

    1. wikkity

      RE: missing something

      Passing the data back and forth is quicker than the processing on the data.

    2. Oninoshiko

      Because takes a lot of time to process the render compared to the time it takes to upload the source files and download the output. The source files may only be a a hundred meg, The output may be a couple of Gig, but it takes (2hr film * 60 min/hr * 60 sec/min * 60 frame/sec=) 432,000 frames. Now if each frame takes 5 minutes to render (it's a fairly simple film) that's 1,500 computer-days. far longer then it takes to download the output.

      1. PaulyV

        Got it. Thank you.

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