Press Release from Prime Focus Software

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (August 3, 2010) - Prime Focus Software, the R&D arm of Prime Focus, announces the release of Deadline 4.1, the latest version of its popular easy-to-use administration and rendering toolkit for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX-based render farms. This release features several new features and performance enhancements and will debut alongside the Deadline Mobile iPhone app, available for a free download on the Apple App Store starting August 3rd.

Deadline 4.1 follows several months of beta testing, in which VFX, production and post facilities put Deadline through its paces on real-world productions. Said beta tester Mike Owen, senior technical director at Burrows Nvisage, “Our company has experienced unprecedented growth in 2010 and as a result, increased demand on our hardware and software resources. Deadline has easily handled everything we’ve thrown at it and I'm proud to state, never failed us! For our new artists, extensive training was unnecessary as Deadline’s interface is highly intuitive and customizable to their needs. The v4.1 beta program has provided an excellent opportunity to refine Deadline with yet more performance increases and innovative additional functionality, like the remote-farm job transfer plug-in, Pulse multi-thread data loading and 'environmentally friendly' power management improvements. I think it’s often overlooked quite how refined and advanced the custom Python submission scripts and plug-ins are for the software packages Deadline supports. We couldn't survive without them! The Python / .NET API has been of particular use recently in rapidly building custom in-house tools."

New Features in Deadline 4.1 include:
* Speed improvements: Deadline now handles thousands of active render jobs with ease while Pulse is running. Pulse uses multiple threads to load data from the Repository, which makes the managing of jobs and slaves much faster and more robust.
* Increased usability: Intuitive interface that allows you to assign Pools and Groups to slaves from within the Monitor using the improved Manage Pools or Groups option.
* Simplified power management configuration: Groups are defined at the top level, and all features apply to all slaves within their respective group, thus making it easier to maintain settings for specific groups of machines.
* UAC compliant: Windows users can run all Deadline applications without requiring elevation, even when UAC is set to the highest setting.
* New software support: After Effects CS5, Arnold Standalone, Lightwave 10, RVIO, RealFlow 5, and Softimage 2011.

Prime Focus Software is also excited to announce the debut of Deadline Mobile, available as a free download from the App Store on iPhone or at http://www.itunes.com/appstore/. Deadline Mobile is compatible with Deadline 4.1 and lets users remotely monitor Deadline jobs from anywhere. With the simple touch of the screen, users can keep tabs on the render farm in real time and check the status of their renders within seconds.

Added Gavin Greenwalt, digital artist, Straightface Studios, “Deadline is an invaluable component of our pipeline. As a relatively small studio with no dedicated support staff but a comparatively heavy project load, we need a render management solution that works with minimal attention. Deadline allows us to manage a large number of render nodes and hundreds of render jobs per week with almost no user supervision thanks to its flexible job prioritizations, clear artist notifications and robust power management features. Because of Deadline, we've been able to centralize all our software's render jobs into a single queue. Prime Focus Software understands our production needs, listens to our comments and is quick to implement many requests—sometimes even on the same day. Deadline has handled everything we've thrown at it and thanks to Prime Focus’ responsive and attentive development team, we're confident that it’ll be able to tackle new challenges we face in the future.”

Deadline 4.1 Pricing and Availability: