When a Hollywood animation studio gears up for a deadline, it does so with a render farm already consisting of hundreds or thousands of active machines. But when New Yorks School of Visual Arts (SVA) gears up to render its students graduation shorts, its farm goes from almost complete inactivity to processing 800,000 frames in a period of six weeks.
That transition used to be a major headache for the SVAs Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects department. Now, thanks to Qube!, PipelineFXs scalable render farm management system, staff can face deadlines with the confidence that all of their students needs are covered.
And best of all, thanks to PipelineFXs innovative Education Burst License program, developed in response to the SVAs feedback, colleges around the world can share that confidence, doubling their Qube! license capacity for a month (twice a year) to meet deadlines, at no extra cost.
Training Hollywoods Rising Stars
Founded in 1947, the SVA is the largest arts school in the US. Over 5,000 students pass through its Midtown Manhattan campus each year, 280 of them as undergraduates in the computer art program. The school has a strong relationship with local visual effects facilities - notably Framestore, which it supplies with many of its junior staff - but alumni also include artists at Pixar and Blue Sky Studios, and Industrial Light & Magics Johnny Han, CG Supervisor on Pacific Rim.
Students are taught on a range of industry-standard software packages, including Maya and Nuke, and have access to a dedicated render farm consisting of 300 dual-processor machines.
To manage render traffic, the SVA relies exclusively on Qube!, with students submitting jobs directly within Maya, and using the Qube! ArtistView to monitor them. The school praises the softwares dynamic allocation system and shallow learning curve, as well as its ability to handle all of the render engines it requires - including mental ray, V-Ray and Arnold - straight out of the box.
Equally importantly, Qube! is a production-proven solution. Everything we do is focused on giving our students familiarity with the commercial environment, says SVA Chair John McIntosh. Were big advocates of guerilla film-making, but our students are ultimately going to work in production, so we felt obliged to go with a commercial solution - and one that was as widely used as possible.
Developed for Studios, Driven by Students
While a commercial production house can rely on the fact that jobs submitted to its farm will be optimized and time-managed professionally, the need to cater to student work places a much greater strain on SVAs resources.
Theyre all new users, so all the jobs are unique, and theyre very rarely optimum, says McIntosh. The students are going for broke trying to achieve Hollywood quality, so theyre often doing overly lit, overly complex scenes. They can hit render times of four hours per frame.
And with 70 senior projects, averaging between two and three minutes of finished animation - not to mention countless freshman, sophomore and junior assignments - thats an awful lot of traffic to put through the render farm. Worse still, its users generate much of that traffic on the same day.
Theyre students: we assume that everything is going to be rendered the night before, says McIntosh. When youre involved in it, its frightening. There are periods where we actually shut down our facility just for rendering, and throw everybody out for days at a time.
Burst Licensing to the Rescue
As well as these logistical problems, the sudden spike in render traffic creates problems with software licensing. We go from an environment where we make little use of the render farm to one where we have maximum use, says McIntosh. When that happens, all of a sudden we dont have licenses to fit the production, because were only going to be scaled up for six weeks.
Enter PipelineFXs Education Burst License program. Born of a chance conversation between the SVA and PipelineFX staff, the program lets any education user on subscription contract double their existing license capacity twice a year, either for a calendar month, or for 30 consecutive days.
We were stunned when we heard the news, says McIntosh. It was just an off-the-cuff remark, and within a month, it was done. The new policy on extending licenses is brilliant.
Building the Render Farm of the Future
Thanks to burst licensing, SVA has the confidence that its farm will cope with everything that its students can throw at it, without having to place creative or technical restrictions on their work.
It lets us get through deadlines without trying to impose any aesthetic restrictions, says McIntosh. Any student can do a project of any length, and we put very little limitation on them when it comes rendering.
The SVA currently has 100 seats of Qube! and hopes to purchase 50 more this year, aiming to use the extra capacity to meet new technical standards within the industry. The school is currently switching from mental ray to V-Ray and Arnold for rendering, and is in the process of adding other computationally intensive tools to its syllabus.
Were committed to having high-end solutions here, and PipelineFXs new licensing policy gives us the freedom to embed them into our curriculum at a much earlier stage, says McIntosh. Weve just brought Houdini and Nuke into our freshman and sophomore years, and thats unheard of in the US. Most people in education have to restrict those tools because they dont have the infrastructure.
Helping Artists, Inside and Outside Schools
Empowered by Qube!s powerful, scalable render-management tools, and PipelineFXs flexible new licensing policy, the SVA feels confident that it can meet the needs of the next generation of Hollywood effects professionals.
We couldnt do half of what we can do now if it wasnt for PipelineFX, says McInt
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
When a Hollywood animation studio gears up for a deadline, it does so with a render farm already consisting of hundreds or thousands of active machines. But when New Yorks School of Visual Arts (SVA) gears up to render its students graduation shorts, its farm goes from almost complete inactivity to processing 800,000 frames in a period of six weeks.
