Raynault VFX in Canada Opts for Qumulo

Raynault VFX has partnered with Qumulo, Inc. and AWS to innovate its rendering workflow, enabling the company to quickly scale to over 1,000 render nodes within a few minutes.

Raynault VFX is a premier visual effects studio located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. A few of its premiere film and TV VFX projects include Aquaman, Watchmen, Maniac, 6 Underground, and Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

It moved from a legacy rendering host to AWS. Working with AWS Thinkbox Deadline and Qumulo Cloud Q, part of the Qumulo File Data Platform, it more than tripled the pilot project’s 300 cloud render nodes to over 1,000 nodes within the same short timeframe.

Whenever the company needs to build a render farm, it simply orders extra nodes in AWS and launches render jobs using AWS Thinkbox Deadline. Once the frames are rendered, they are quickly copied back to Raynault’s on-premises storage.

“Since we deployed the Qumulo File Data Platform, the game changed. The platform lets us spin up one thousand computers within hours, not days or weeks. And we’re confident we can scale to three thousand nodes,” said Simon Ouellet, pipeline developer, Raynault.

This level of scalability boosts the creative team’s productivity, enabling artists to order high-quality VFX renders and meet critical client deadlines.

Teams from Raynault, AWS, and Qumulo worked together to build the rendering stack. Qumulo customer success was responsive during the pilot project and remains highly available with near-immediate engineer response 24×7.

“With the Qumulo File Data Platform, we flip a switch to get the additional render power we need on AWS. The business outcome of fast rendering is that if we hit a major crunch, we can flow through it smoothly without any concerns,” said Curtis Linstead, system administrator, Raynault.

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