Press Release from PipelineFX
Honolulu, HI -- June 22, 2009 -- PipelineFX, makers of Qube! software, the leading render farm management software for film and post production, broadcast graphics, game development, and digital media education around the world, today announced that Pratt Institute's Department of Digital Arts has adopted Qube! to manage their render pipeline.
Brooklyn, New York-based Pratt Institute School of Art and Design offers a diverse range of degree offerings including art, architecture, fashion design, illustration, interior design, digital arts, creative writing, library science, and other areas. Enjoying a history of artistic accomplishment since its founding as the Department of Computer Graphics and Interactive Media in 1987, the Department of Digital Arts (formerly CGIM) is one of the first degree-granting programs in the digital arts.
Qube! has been used to manage Pratt's Department of Digital Arts student rendering for over four years. The school started with a single dedicated farm of 12 machines. "In the past, we have maintained a farm but it always consisted of less powerful machines and was not cost effective to keep up," said Rob O'Neill, Director of Digital Arts Research Laboratory at Pratt Institute. "We wanted to setup Qube! to take advantage of the powerful 8-core Mac Pro systems for Maya rendering in all our computer labs."
Pratt has expanded both their Qube! license count and their number of labs and machines being managed by and submitting jobs though Qube!. Since Qube! only requires a license to be purchased for a machine that is currently running a rendering job, schools and studios can submit jobs from every desktop without purchasing a license. Since all licenses are floating, only the desktops or labs that are available for rendering require the use of a license.
"Now that we have our entire five lab department running Qube we can schedule usage around class times, dedicate labs to rendering in the evenings, and upgrade the farm each academic year as we buy new systems," says Peter Patchen, Chair of the Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute. "It stays in step with our purchasing and in parallel with the systems our students are working on."
Since Qube! licenses are also available for rent online at www.pipelinefx.com, Pratt can scale up on the fly should the need arise.
"For our students, Qube is making it possible to make the critical move to producing their projects in HD," noted Patchen. "It is also allowing them to make creative decisions after seeing final frames which in the past was not as possible. As soon as we had the farm up and running it was maxed out but we saw stunning results and expect a great year of work."
"Pratt was an early adopter of Qube! and has really leveraged the flexibility and power of our system," said Richard Lewis, VP of Sales for PipelineFX. "Most schools have idle CPU's at various times and until now it's been difficult to easily harness those spare cycles. Pratt is a great example of maximizing rendering power for students, allowing for more iterations or creative work even in the highest resolutions like HD."
