Increasing render speeds three-fold at UNIT Media

When Soho-based post-production house UNIT Media moved into their new Great Marlborough Street facility, they found themselves in need of a dedicated rendering solution that would integrate with their new systems, as well as their existing range of VFX and 3D software applications, including NukeX, GenArts, After Effects and Maya.

A dedicated render farm solution

UNIT's artists previously rendered all their projects locally on individual workstations, meaning valuable working hours were being spent waiting for renders to complete. They saw the move as the perfect time to increase their efficiency by switching over to a centralised render farm.

As speed and flexibility were the major factors for UNIT, Jigsaw recommended a dedicated farm consisting of powerful 12-core HP blade servers, managed by PipelineFX's highly scalable Qube!. The servers would provide a three-fold increase in render speeds - although the real benefit was that their workstations were no longer tied up for rendering, so their artists could be much more productive.

Flexible render management

Qube! was chosen to manage the farm because it would give UNIT's artists greater flexibility - allowing them to manage thousands of jobs simultaneously while customising each one as required. Every job is controlled through a single GUI, and jobs can even be submitted from OS X systems to a Windows-based farm. Qube! is also compatible with a wide range of effects software and can handle work from multiple applications at the same time, so UNIT were able to continue using their staple software (which includes programs by Autodesk, The Foundry and Adobe), and incorporate new applications as they become available.

Following the installation and configuration of the render farm, training on Qube!'s day-to-day operation was provided for the artists, and on administration for the engineering team.

Developing a comprehensive storage system

One of the major requirements of any post house is a fast collaborative storage system, providing fast online and effective nearline storage, all reliably backed up and archived. So, alongside the render farm, we also designed and installed a 120TB mirrored SAN and a 24-slot LTO-5 library to hold the vast amount of data for past and present projects that UNIT's artists had worked on.

"We're proud to have been involved with the system design and implementation of one of the leading facilities in the UK", says Jigsaw Solutions Architect, Jamie Allan. "Working closely with UNIT, the expertise of our professional services team facilitated the move of key IT infrastructure, as well as the integration of new systems. Despite the project's complexity, we achieved all this without downtime or disruption to UNIT's essential services, and all on schedule."

What they had to say

"The real eye-opener was how good Jigsaw's technical sales staff and consultants were, and its engineers were nothing short of exceptional."
- UNIT

Find out more about how Jigsaw can build a tailored render farm for you. Speak to one of our consultants on 03332 409 306 or email 3D@Jigsaw24.com.