DENVER - International engineering services company WSP|Parsons Brinckerhoff specializes in civil infrastructure and architecture. In collaborating with its clients, visual communication is a crucial storytelling tool, for which the company leans on a dedicated Project Visualization division. Offering services that span design visualization, Web development, multimedia and graphic design, the group is based in WSP-PBs Denver office, with a small contingent in Seattle and New York. On average, the 30-person group juggles 20 to 30 projects at a time, relying on Thinkbox Softwares Deadline (www.thinkboxsoftware.com) to stay organized and optimize resources.
The team leverages a 50-machine Windows-based render farm spread across WSP-PB's Denver and Seattle offices. Deadline unifies the machines into one farm and helps keep them running efficiently. Deadline has also proven an effective tool to deploy software patches and updates to machines, without working through IT.
WSP-PB project visualization technical lead Mark Kauffman, who manages the technical aspects of production, the render farm and IT infrastructure, shares, Quick turnaround is paramount. When something goes wrong with a render, we need to be able to resubmit failed jobs quickly. Deadline enables that and also helps us spit out and manage animation frames. We're generating hundreds of thousands of frames a year, so every second counts.
The team primarily uses Deadline for Autodesk 3DS Max project renders, though it also comes into play for distributive rendering in Chaos Group's V-Ray and Adobe After Effects. We use a lot of products across projects, and Deadline works with a lot of software; it's more than paid for itself, adds Kauffman. It's the simple things Deadline allows us to do that make it so great. We can break jobs into parts, quickly render passes, send them to After Effects, process files and spit them out for encoding.
Deadline's Jigsaw feature makes it easy for the team to isolate and render specific areas of extremely high-resolution images and spread the job out across multiple machines. Jigsaw has been a big bonus for us, Kauffman explained. For a new Chicago Transit Authority station, we were looking at 14 hours to render one interior shot, and Jigsaw made life a lot easier.
WSP-PB recently served as part of the engineering team on LaGuardia Airport's (LGA) redevelopment, and delivered a range of animations, stills and interior renders for the project. Tapping Deadline DBR, the team was able to complete V-Ray distributed rendering through 3DS Max - a task that formerly required manual oversight and tied up workstations. We used DBR hard core for this project; it allowed us to bring all the machines online in the farm, bang out stills as fast as we could and edit them to meet client requests on the fly, Kauffman said. With all fair conscience, we couldn't have accomplished what we did so quickly on LGA at the scale we did without Deadline.
For Fort McMurray (pictured), a major Canadian oil production hub, the team developed a promo video featuring animations, stock photography and other visuals illustrating how the city would look once redeveloped. Deadline enabled rapid access to 3D models for re-rendering on client-demand. With Deadline, we can fix issues without dilly dallying, and saving 5 minutes here and there makes a huge difference in delivering on time, says Kauffman. We select machines for jobs gone wrong, remove them from the farm and resubmit in two minutes, which would've taken an hour before Deadline.
When tasked with producing a high volume of visualization work for Presidio Parkway, a revamped roadway linking the Golden Gate National Recreation Area to San Francisco, the team also banked on Deadline to render multiple passes, in floating point and color, and manage After Effects renders. Whatever the project, Kauffman is confident that the team will be able to tackle it with Deadline, and if they need assistance from Thinkbox, support is easy to access. The nice thing about Deadline is that it's extensible enough that we can develop custom scripts to make changes, but it's already such a great turnkey solution out of the box, he notes. And if we run into any issues, the Thinkbox team is awesome. They listen to and value feedback, which we appreciate.
Most recent headlines
25/12/2025
Holiday lights are twinkling, hot cocoa's on the stove and gamers are settling in for a well-earned break.
Whether staying in or heading on a winter getawa...
24/12/2025
What is AI good for? Posted by MTI Film on December 24, 2025
What is AI good for?
What is AI good for?
It's been three years since ChatGPT first cap...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Back to All News
Love, Fights, and Everything in Between: Badly in Love' Returns for Season 2
Entertainment
24 December 2025
GlobalJapan
Link copied t...
24/12/2025
Scripps Research study links sleep variability with sleep apnea and hypertension How consumers' digital activity trackers could enable personalized health s...
23/12/2025
How guilas Cibae as Dominican Winter League Games Are Locally Produced for Glob...
23/12/2025
BitFire's Jim Akimchuk on Supplying Scalability and Customization in the Clo...
23/12/2025
CAMB.AI Enables European Athletics to Offer Multi-Language SupportPlan is to eventually offer translation into all languages spoken in EuropeBy Ken Kerschbaumer...
23/12/2025
Analysis: As sports media values trend negative, scarcity and quality are king By Callum McCarthy, Editor-at-Large
Monday, December 22, 2025 - 14:08
Print ...
23/12/2025
ESPN, Disney, and NBA Return to the Animated Altcast Fray With Second Edition of...
23/12/2025
End the Year on a High Note and Donate to the Sports Broadcasting Fund Today! By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Tuesday, December 23, 2025 - 12:25 pm
...
23/12/2025
The year is winding down, the weather outside is frightful, and it's the perfect time to escape into a story that warms the heart. For listeners looking for...
23/12/2025
A Zeus motor is hot fire tested at L3Harris' Camden, Arkansas, solid rocket ...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Lightware will exhibit several major product innovations at ISE 2026, including the new USB-C BOOSTER-V1, Google Meet. integration for various Taurus UCX models...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Taking the Stage at Carnegie Hall-On a Global Scale Boston Conservatory Orchestra students reflect on their epic concert marking the 80th session of the UN Gene...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
Netflix's The Great Flood and Culinary Class Wars 2 Top Gl...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
Stranger Things By the Numbers: How the Global Phenomenon Shap...
23/12/2025
Experience the power of WO Automation for Radio's newest service, the System Effectiveness Review. Designed to help you achieve more, a System Effectiveness...
23/12/2025
23 Dec 2025
VEON's Beeline Kazakhstan and Rakuten Symphony Collaborate to A...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
How Steamy Can It Get? Single's Inferno' Season 5 Pre...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
33 Million Global Viewers on Netflix Watched Jake Paul vs. Ant...
23/12/2025
New technique lights up where drugs go in the body, cell by cell Scripps Research scientists developed a technique that maps drug binding in individual cells th...
22/12/2025
SVG New Sponsor Spotlight: Presidio's Neerav Shah on the Role of Its Captiva...
22/12/2025
Hitting the bullseye: Sky Sports readies itself for the biggest PDC World Darts ...
22/12/2025
Unique skillset: Bringing new directors to the world of darts at The Worlds with...
22/12/2025
Gravity Media prepares for a flight of fancy with the PDC World Darts Championsh...
22/12/2025
One hundred and eighty: Gravity Media on hitting the production bullseye at the ...
22/12/2025
The Famous Group's Jon Slusser on Fascinating Fans Through Immersive Content...
22/12/2025
ESPN's Meg Aronowitz on Continuing High-Quality Broadcasts of Collegiate Spo...
22/12/2025
ESPN Takes Data-Driven Storytelling to New Heights with MNF Playbook with Next ...
22/12/2025
For a decade, popular German podcast Fest & Flauschig has hosted an annual Chris...
22/12/2025
Paramount Scores Largest Share Increase Among Distributors as Paramount and CBS...
22/12/2025
New multi-year deal integrates Roku's data to fuel Nielsen's measurement suite
Roku gains access to Nielsen's streaming ratings, showing The Roku C...
22/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
22/12/2025
Berklee Wrapped 2025: Our Top News and Stories A look back at a year highlighted by faculty milestones, major film and television projects, Bob Dylan's ho...
22/12/2025
The works of Plato state that when humans have an experience, some level of change occurs in their brain, which is powered by memory - specifically long-term me...
22/12/2025
Partnership integrates complementary satellite data and AI analytics to enhance security, infrastructure, and environmental monitoring solutions for global cust...
DENVER - International engineering services company WSP|Parsons Brinckerhoff specializes in civil infrastructure and architecture. In collaborating with its clients, visual communication is a crucial storytelling tool, for which the company leans on a dedicated Project Visualization division. Offering services that span design visualization, Web development, multimedia and graphic design, the group is based in WSP-PBs Denver office, with a small contingent in Seattle and New York. On average, the 30-person group juggles 20 to 30 projects at a time, relying on Thinkbox Softwares Deadline (www.thinkboxsoftware.com) to stay organized and optimize resources. 
