Render Farm Management Software Increases Efficiency, Maximizes Throughput and Promotes Easy Integration With Key Pipeline Components; See Qube! 6.6 at SIGGRAPH 2014
Los Angeles, CA (Aug 7, 2014) – Today PipelineFX, creator of the leading render farm management software for VFX, will enable production companies to create a more efficient pipeline with the release of Qube! 6.6. The new Smart Share feature helps studios achieve maximum throughput, while Universal Callbacks and Flight Checks promote tight integration with production management/reporting tools so Qube! can be pipeline friendly from day one.
“As pipelines grow more sophisticated, the need to protect against bottlenecks becomes even more important,” said Richard Lewis, CEO of PipelineFX. “From customer discussions, it’s obvious that efficiency, multi-platform support and easy integration with both new and legacy tools is where Qube! needs to be. Qube! 6.6 takes them there.”
“Qube! 6.6 has been our sole render manager on films like “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” “Noah,” and “Rio 2,” said David Mitchelson, Production Systems Engineer at Deluxe and Qube! 6.6 beta tester. “We put a huge emphasis on stability and it has yet to disappoint. Features like “Flight Check” are great because they allow us to create custom scripts that prevent jobs that are going to create bad renders from ever running on the farm. This helps keep us on track and on schedule.”
New Qube! 6.6 Features
- Smart Share: Improves overall render pipeline throughput by automatically re-assigning idle workers once they conclude a job without intervention from an artist or wrangler in a fair, balanced and controllable way
- Universal Callbacks: Some jobs require an action every time they are run on the farm. To help, universal callbacks are automatically executed for every job, instance or frame, giving operators an easy way to maintain integration with other software and scripts
- Flight Checks: Registers scripts that will be executed on a worker immediately before or after a job or task runs. Use cases include ensuring assets that are essential to the job exist, pushing or pulling data from a production tracking system for targeted jobs or tasks, and/or transferring the results of a render job to a studio’s dailies system
- ArtistView improvements: Centralized preferences and plugins; job, frame, and instance filters (similar to WranglerView); OpenEXR image support in the preview window, as well as a new “thumbnails” tab with mouseover information
- New platform support: All Autodesk 2015 products and Ubuntu 12.04 Linux are fully supported; Python 2.7 supported on applicable OS platforms
- Windows platform improvements: An upgraded version of MySQL server (5.5.37) is bundled to significantly improve supervisor performance and Python “load-once” jobs are now fully supported
“Efficiency is the easiest way to weather storms and increase your margins,” added Lewis. “You can’t control everything, but with Qube!, you can control that.”
Pricing and Availability
Customers currently on subscription can download version 6.6 immediately from the PipelineFX ftp site. Please contact support@pipelinefx.com to request a 6.6 license.
About Qube!™ and Smart Farming™
Qube! is an intelligent, mature and highly scalable render management solution that can be quickly integrated into any production workflow, and is backed by world-class technical support. Smart Farming delivers intelligence to production pipelines by providing business-critical insight into render pipelines, maximizing investment in rendering infrastructure and automating manual processes. Qube! works out of the box with all leading content creation applications and is truly cross-platform with all software components available on Windows®, Linux®, and Mac OS®X operating systems.
About PipelineFX
As the leading provider of intelligent render farm management solutions for digital content creation, PipelineFX provides software, support, consulting and training services worldwide. Qube! runs on more than 30,000 render nodes at over 700 customers in 51 countries and is used to render film and visual effects, post production, broadcast, design, games and education media. Clients include Apple, Arc Productions, Base FX, BBC, Cinesite, Deluxe, Digital District, Digital Domain, Dyson, Efilm, Electronic Arts, Google, HBO, Hasbro, L.M.U., Laika Studios, Lockheed Martin, Method Studios, MPC, NBC Sports, Nvidia, NHK, NYU, Original Force, Pratt Institute, Procter & Gamble, ReelFX, South Park Studios, SVA, Target, Technicolor and many others. PipelineFX is headquartered in Honolulu, HI, and has offices in Los Angeles, London, Portland, Las Vegas, and Vancouver.