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Drive Studios Enhances Render Pipeline with Deadline

Boutique VFX house Drive Studios turns to Thinkbox Software’s Deadline to manage their render farm and workstations.

Boutique VFX house Drive Studios, with credits ranging work for Comedy Central to music videos for Maroon 5 and Lana del Rey, has turned to Thinkbox Software’s Deadline to manage their render farm and workstations.

Creative Director Rich Lee and Executive Producer Justin Diener founded the Los Angeles-based company in 2016.

“We’re a small company and Deadline is such a professional tool that it felt a little overwhelming in terms of setup, but after less than half a day, we understood how it works, and it’s hard to believe we ever got by without it. Deadline has made everything easier and allows us to focus on the creative and not get bogged down in technical details,” shared Lee.

Drive assembles teams suited to particular projects, allowing studios to adapt their pipelines and punch above their weight.

“Deadline has made us more efficient because of how easy it is to launch and distribute a render. If there is a problem with a file, we can easily pause and fix it, or if a box goes down, the other computers pick up the slack. Once you set it up, Deadline just works and it’s awesome. And most of our artists are already familiar with it, which is great,” Diener said.

Lee said they appreciate Deadline’s plug-and-play functionality, explaining, “We gravitate towards software that works out of the gate, and you don’t necessarily have to dig around under the hood. Deadline already comes with so many great features like data tracking; we can reference historical render times and use that information to optimize our farm’s performance for new jobs. It also seamlessly manages all of our dedicated and workstation resources, and we’ve recently added a few GPU cards to the mix, which have been performing beyond our expectations.”

Source: Thinkbox Software