W!LDBRAIN Selects Qube!? for Film and Television Render Pipeline ManagementAward-winning California animation studio picks Qube! after extensive competitive evaluation to manage increased pipeline complexityHonolulu, HI ? July 11, 2007 ? PipelineFX, makers of Qube! ? software, the leading render farm management software for film production, game development, and digital media education around the world, today announced that W!LDBRAIN has selected Qube! as their render management platform for feature film and television animation projects.
?As CTO at W!ILDBRAIN, I ensure that we are scaleable in all directions, including network throughput, data storage and render farm management,? said Steve Maggioncalda, technical lead at W!ILDBRAIN. ?Qube! fits in perfectly and is able to scale dramatically when we need it. Some of the reasons we chose Qube! were:
Total Cost of Ownership: The TCO is lower with Qube!. With most other render farm management systems, much of our time is spent tweaking basic functionality leaving little time to actually add custom value. With Qube! you quickly establish a solid core and with open APIs you have all of the inroads to build on top of it. I rely on my developers and TD?s to ?develop turbo chargers? not ?re-invent wheels?.
Flexible License Model: Another huge bonus is the ability to run Qube! workers on every single machine in the studio. With Qube!?s licensing model, the worker is issued a license as it needs it. I spend less time dedicating machines based on available queue management licenses and more time just working. You run a job and the job determines the licensing layout ? it?s very flexible, much more cost conscious and does not require a lot of overhead. It just runs.
Global Resource Management: The Qube! Supervisor makes it so much easier to keep track of render licenses via Global Resource Management. With other queuing solutions it?s not an easy task getting FlexLM, spm, etc to talk to the render management queue without encountering race conditions. This allows jobs to be queued and processed much more proactively.
Key Strategic Partners: We like the fact that PipelineFX is spending time developing interfaces inside the applications we use and not just around them. Seeing where PipelineFX has been and where it is going gives us all the more confidence in our decision to choose Qube! We have a product that works well now and the future looks even better. We like the fact that PipelineFX plays with the same players we do and supports the same platforms that Autodesk? supports.
Designed for Digital Media: Many grid systems are so generalized that they require a lot of core customization to get them to understand CG production workflow. With Qube!, out of the box, it knows Maya. And so does Qube!'s tech support --an enormous value-add. It's a high-end CG production application. And that's what we needed. A solution that just works.
Openness: Qube! delivered the extra granularity and flexibility we were looking for in a render management system. The way Qube! breaks down jobs into subjobs, plus all of the hooks to grab other information needed makes custom development at all levels very attainable ?even the ability to customize priorities and develop custom queuing algorithms. We need this type of functionality for our ever changing production pipeline. We like the fact that we have open APIs in Perl, Python and C++. That gives us the tools to address all of the functionality we need as we need it.
Ease of Use: We really like the look and feel of the Qube! GUI. In fact, I?ve heard artists call it pretty! Plus, since it?s written in Python, it?s completely customizable which allows us to tweak it to our specific needs. We also found consistency in Qube! across all platforms which makes it nice for our artists. We love the fact that Qube! is MySQL?-based. We appreciate the value that client-server topology offers render management software.
Technical Support: The support we received while evaluating Qube! was a determining factor in making our choice. First-hand knowledge of applications and guidance was a bonus.?
?Qube! is by design a platform for render farm management,? said Troy Brooks, CEO of PipelineFX. ?We ship in-application submission interfaces for all the major digital media programs and an easy to use artist GUI so smaller shops can use it right out of the box. But we also make sure to provide cross-platform support, open and modern APIs, advanced capabilities, an event-driven queuing model, and database functionality so that studios can quickly roll out their production pipeline and continue to scale into the future. W!ILDBRAIN is an ambitious studio driving a high-performance pipeline. After a thorough evaluation of all options on the market, we are proud to have been selected as the studio?s render farm management platform of choice.?
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About W!LDBRAIN: Founded in 1994, W!LDBRAIN is an award-winning entertainment company that develops and produces unique and compelling content across the media spectrum. Powered by its distinctive pool of talented animators and directors and renowned for blending traditional animation methods with state-of-the-art computer graphics, the studio and its artists have consistently won top industry awards. In film, W!LDBRAIN has garnered numerous awards including an Annie for its computer graphics short film Hubert?s Brain and currently has a number of film projects in development. In television, the studio has produced an exceptional slate of original work, including the top-rated and critically acclaimed animated series Higglytown Heroes airing daily on Disney Channel and the upcoming Nick Jr. series Yo Gabba Gabba.
For more information on W!LDBRAIN, visit
www.wildbrain.com
