Pixomondo Standardizes on Thinkbox Software's Deadline for Render Queue Management Across its Worldwide Studios

Thinkbox Software, developers of Deadline, the popular network rendering solution, announces that global visual effects company Pixomondo has standardized on Deadline across its worldwide studios. Deadline has been installed at Pixomondo's facilities in Los Angeles, Burbank, London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Beijing, Shanghai, Munich and Toronto.

Deadline offers a host of management options for render farms of all sizes, and the flexibility to run the software on the industry's widest range of platforms and rendering packages. Pixomondo chose Deadline after a lengthy research process in which the facility evaluated a number of render management solutions, eventually purchasing 500 licenses of Deadline to run on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux-based workstations. Said Felix Fissel, Head of IT Los Angeles at Pixomondo. "Because we're an international company with 10 facilities on three continents and literally a 24/7 production cycle, communicating seamlessly across locations is critical. Deadline has a remote rendering feature that allows us to control and manage our massive global render farm. This means that if one of Pixomondo's facilities in China has a huge project to render, they can parse it out to another one of our locations that may not be so busy. This feature has turned out to be an incredible time saver."

Pixomondo's recent growth has also necessitated an expansion of its infrastructure and rendering capabilities. The studio is currently in production on "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" and "Fast and Furious 5" and recently delivered visual effects for "Percy Jackson The Lightning Thief," "A Nightmare on Elm Street," "Ninja Assassin" and "Sucker Punch."

"Hugo Cabret is a stereoscopic 3D feature, which requires a huge amount of rendering - taking about 1 ½ to 2 times as long to render as a non-S3D movie," added Michael Thalmann, Head of IT. "We wouldn't have been able to handle as many render nodes with the toolset we were using before Deadline. Since we ported to Deadline, we've been very impressed with how robust, efficient and worry-free the tool is. We're going to be putting it through the test in the months ahead on these massive VFX jobs, and we're very confident Deadline will be able to handle it."

"The core design philosophies behind Deadline are stability, flexibility and ease of use," said Thinkbox President Chris Bond. "Pixomondo's render farms use a mix of operating systems and applications, and they're separated by thousands of miles. The fact that they chose Deadline for management shows us that flexibility is critical to today's working model of a VFX facility. It has been rewarding for us to hear how making the switch to Deadline has helped Pixomondo streamline their workflow and utilize their international network more effectively, and we love having them as a customer!"