Broadcast Beat Magazine 2017 NAB Show NY/SMPTE Special Edition | Page 24

Deadline’s mass command option allows the team
to control multiple nodes from a single worksta-
tion. “Deadline really clears up the time artists
were forced to waste managing the render farm,”
confirms Mathews.
“After two months of real problems with our pre-
vious render solution, I convinced RealtimeUK to
buy Deadline,” Kirkham adds. “It’s just fantastic.
It does exactly what you need and doesn’t get in
the way. With Deadline, we can simply get on with
the fun thing we all enjoy doing!”
Stability drives creativity
Realtime UK renders with V-Ray on its local farm
and uses a pool system to divide up nodes for
tackling large or multiple projects. “That does a
pretty good job out the box,” says Kirkham, “obvi-
ously there are times when not everything can fit
into a pre-defined solution. But there are plenty
of overrides that allow us to easily manipulate it
and get jobs through in the order we want.”
and I wouldn’t know if I had any renders or not,
because the software had probably crashed,”
he continues. “You don’t experience that with
Deadline. You know your renders have gone
through. And with mobile view and remote work
capabilities, you can monitor it all the time. If any-
thing does go wrong, the alerts will let you know
– but that really doesn’t happen.”
Real growth ahead
As resolution requirements have increased, so
too has the size of RealtimeUK’s render farm. The
studio projects further investments in hardware,
memory, storage and talent to stay ahead of the
curve.
“The biggest requirement increase has been
memory, and the expansion needed on memory
to fit everything in,” says Kirkham. “Everything’s
meant to get quicker, which lets you push the
quality more, so in a sense everything just gets
slower. It’s a weird paradox!”
While RealtimeUK began with a standard Deadline
installation, the studio has augmented the soft-
ware as they’ve grown more comfortable with it.
One enhancement that’s made a big difference is
a central repository for V-Ray plugins, making it
easy to roll back to a past version if required. Deadline’s expandability means the studio will
have no trouble adding further nodes as complex-
ity increases, whether they choose to stick with a
local farm or implement cloud rendering – some-
thing that at the time of writing RealtimeUK is just
starting to seriously consider.
The studio’s favorite Deadline feature is the reli-
ability it brings to processing, especially when
tackling large jobs. There’s no uncertainty around
whether or not render jobs will complete –
Deadline ensures they get done. By redistributing
resources to where they are most needed, and
prioritising jobs according to user specifications,
Deadline keeps all renders on track. Even when at
full capacity. The Smite cinematic reveals that the studio is
capable of creating incredible-looking wotime
and time again. Beyond the several million trailer
views on YouTube, they’ve also received industry
recognition for the trailer: Will Eades won for best
character animation at last year’s Manchester
Animation Festival.
“Stability is the most important thing,” affirms
Kirkham. “If it can’t do anything else, that’s the
one thing a render solution needs to do. You
want to come in and know your work is getting
done. With Deadline managing hundreds of tasks
across the farm without issue, artists can spend
more time creating and less time with technical
debugging, translating into a huge productivity
boost.”
“With our previous setup, I’d come in on Monday
24 • Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com
No matter how large the studio grows in the
future to accommodate its many upcoming proj-
ects, it will always have Deadline to help them
keep their render needs under control.
“Anyone that needs to get heavy rendering done
with lots of machines, and wants something that’s
reliable and easy to use for artists to use, then
Deadline should be your choice,” Kirkham con-
cludes. “Nothing else comes close.”