When you watch the epic superhero fight scenes in
Avengers: Endgame you don’t think about the IT team on call in the middle of the night, making sure there’s enough compute power for the creative work of visual effects artists to be rendered properly. But that was exactly what David Lennox, Lead Systems Engineer at the British creative studio Framestore, found his team doing.
“To do this ourselves was extremely unrewarding,” Lennox said. “We’d have to find all these creative solutions to deliver our work.”
Rendering a single frame of visual effects in a film could take Framestore up to three days. The team was aggregating 50-60 Gbps via more than 100 VPN tunnels, in search of high capacity to cloud computing resources over the public internet. When throughput was high, the tunnels would break and the rendering process would fail.