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32 cgw j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 2 I N D U S T R Y I N S I G H T S CGW Partner Promotion Carbon Unifies Multi-Studio Creative Workflow on AWS C arbon is an award-winning creative production studio offering design, direction, and character animation, as well as motion graphics, color grading, finishing, and photoreal visual effects. With 60 artists distributed across three studios in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles – the majority of whom continue to work remotely – the creative studio has worked on a range of live action and full CG spots for clients such as Sony, Google, Porsche, Pringles, Verizon, and Nike. A naturally innovative company at the forefront of develop- ments, Carbon is always on the hunt for new workflows. As demand for the studio's talents continues to grow, Carbon chose an efficient, streamlined workflow built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). "Our entire VFX studio and most of our finishing work uses AWS," shared Jeff Drury, Carbon Head of Engineering. "Having our work- flow on AWS gives us the flexibility to easily expand and contract depending on the project needs." Carbon's cloud-based workflow is built around a shared storage system on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) that con- nects VFX and finishing artists across the studio's locations. WEKA is used to accelerate file throughput and optimize storage; active files remain on hot tier Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in- stances with NVMe drivers, but, if not accessed for a set amount of time, they are automatically moved to Amazon S3, which provides low-cost, accessible storage. "AWS allows us to build and connect teams across the US and beyond. We can create a shared workspace in AWS and match the right artists for each project, regardless of where they're based," Drury said. "We've also been able to work with freelancers as far away as Saskatchewan, Portugal, and Mexico City. This not only helps to balance our user load but also is a tremendous boost to creative input. If we can seat an artist, we have no bounds. It's made a truly significant impact to our creative work." Most of Carbon's VFX work is done using Autodesk Maya and Arnold, Foundry's Nuke, and Maxon's C4D, with some projects also leveraging Epic Games' Unreal Engine or Adobe Creative Cloud. Autodesk Flame is the studio's primary finishing solution. Artists run their respective creative applications on virtual workstations pow- ered by Amazon EC2 G4dn instances, connecting using PCs or thin clients with Leostream and the Teradici PCoIP protocol. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances render the studio's work, and AWS Thinkbox Deadline is used for compute resource management. "The amount of nodes we've spun up is astronomical," noted Drury. "We were looking to increase our capacity, and AWS has Images courtesy of Carbon Verizon - Got Any Games On Your Phone?