Juno Innovations is about to bring VFX at scale closer to home

IBC

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The dream of every VFX facility is to be able to run dynamic and cost-effective pipelines tailored to each project. In theory, cloud offers the most flexible infrastructure to do this but with legacy hardware and legions of artists tied to workstations it is proving harder in practice to make the shift. A U.S startup is on the verge of launching a VFX studio as a service which answers many of these problems.

“Everybody says cloud is expensive and painful but the reality is that cloud is not the problem. It's a design issue,” says Alex Hatfield, CEO Juno Innovations and Juno FX. “If you design it right then cloud is insanely effective.”

He and six colleagues have spent three years developing a platform that can be run on-prem or in the cloud offering almost instant access to workstations for freelance VFX artists located anywhere.

“We could theoretically out scale any studio in the world if we wanted to,” Hatfield claims. “And at a fraction of the cost of traditional workstations.”

It is running trials with several major studios. The innovation that has caught their attention is the ability to ‘slice’ GPUs to allow multiple artists to work on the same machine at the same time. 

Modern GPUs play a pivotal role in AI and ML by handling parallel computations and processing large datasets rapidly.  Juno has found a way to adapt the concept to VFX pipelines so that the same GPU is shared among different workloads.

Hatfield explains, “With the AI boom the major developers were horizontally scaling out to train their models. While they have huge budgets they're also trying to squeeze as much as they can out of every single server. The margins are nowhere near as good in visual effects, but we're trying to squeeze as much out of each render node as we possibly can, so every single dollar you spend is actually being used.”

There's an environmental benefit too. “Because you're squeezing more performance out of the servers you don't need to power nearly as many. You don't need as much hardware because you get more out of it. The slicing is what enables density and density enables the ability to scale. Slicing becomes more and more valuable as your team becomes more active.”

All of this is orchestrated in Kubernetes, the open source system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management, and hosted in AWS (although any cloud provider could be used).

“The idea is that if a large scale studio decides to come and use us they can then use the render operator to essentially go through and launch render nodes dynamically and slice their servers to get more utilisation out of the servers that they have, whether on-prem or in the cloud.”

Origins story

Hatfield started in the industry as a gaffer in LA before joining Digital Domain in Florida as stereoscopic compositor then VFX compositor. After leaving DD, he worked at a number of studios on the East Coast which is where his vision for developing a way for an artist to work securely from home was born.

“I'm originally from South Florida and I found myself travelling up to Boston or New York City for work, staying there for six months compositing on commercials, renting a supercheap apartment, and coming home to stay with my parents in Florida for half a year so I could wakeboard.  I did that for three years straight. I wanted a way that I could avoid extensive travel, enjoy the outdoors life and still do what I love which is to work on movies.”

Right from the start of his career Hatfield had been both artist and technician, learning scripting languages like Python on his own initiative, so he could expand and enhance on existing pipelines. 

“I was trying to figure out how I can use the cloud so that myself and fellow artists can do great work from home.”

An earlier attempt to found his own cloud-based studio in 2013 didn’t work out. “It was clunky, like a glorified Dropbox and we didn’t have the security that studios required.”

While working at Cinesite including on projects including Spider Man: No Way Home he started learning Kubernetes and began to wonder if he could containerise workstations in the cloud. This involves building self-sufficient software packages that perform consistently, regardless of the machines they run on. 

“Some of my friends said this was impossible. But I was at least going to try.”

Further clues came from observing the way large banks had set up IT systems to handle masses of simultaneous transactions. “I realised that 90% of the infrastructure had already been solved over the past 10 years by other industries. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You just need to go look for inspiration elsewhere.

“For instance, when a massive influx of transactions hits a bank server and the bank is running on Kubernetes, Kubernetes can react to that and issue more servers to be able to handle the workload. Then when its finished it will automatically scale back down.

“Our idea was to create a system with the exact same mentality, but one that is able to handle a massive amount of render tasks. Once done, we delete the render nodes out from underneath it. If you looked at our infrastructure, we look nothing like a VFX studio. We look way more like a financial institution.”

When the VFX industry was hit by redundancies as a result of the pandemic, Hatfield and his colleagues resolved to go for the final push.

“Could we build tools and applications to make working in our industry easier and enjoyable for both studios and artists? Why can't we just sacrifice the infrastructure instead of the people?”

They prototyped the technology using inexpensive Raspberry Pi boards, a miniature PC and an old game server. “I thought, I’m never gonna be able to pay for a cloud provider’s bill so what I have to do is build everything locally and then hopefully if we get a project we'll push it up to AWS and see if it works.”

They trialled the home-built server on student film projects managing to run three compositors working off the same stack. “It was far from perfect but we proved that it worked and at that point I reached out to AWS to talk about what we were doing.”

With ECR (Amazon Elastic Container Registry) every component is containerised allowing rapid replication to any region in the world. They use EFS (Amazon Elastic File System) for storage along with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud). Juno is also able to rely on Amazon’s security.

“When you bring in Kubernetes the actual infrastructure is so abstracted that you're basically describing concepts,” he says.  “That means we can deploy anywhere, scale to as many workstations as needed and operate with extreme efficiency. We literally sync the media back and forth which eliminates a lot of the ingest and download issues.

“We wanted to do really cool work and we also felt like if we can build it in such a way where we could scale down just as fast as we could scale up. That means that we could technically compete and even lead the rest of the industry in a new way of working, to be able to actually work remotely and access talent anywhere in the world.”

Prepping to launch

In theory, Juno FX could take on projects of huge scale and work with artists located anywhere in the world. In practice, the startup is taking things step by step.

“We could go out and compete for the biggest VFX projects if we wanted to but we’re not really targeting that right now. We want to grow in a very controlled manner.”

All development to date has been done by the colleagues in their free time. “We're trying to get enough funding to be able to hire more full time developers early 2025. We are actively doing PoC deployments for on-prem density on rack. When they finish in the spring we'll be able to start supporting bigger accounts. Plus, we're starting to invest a lot of our effort into getting business from other industries [including medical research, AutoCAD and architectural visualisation].

“It’s so hard to get through building a startup to the point where you finally see a workstation turn on, you deliver a frame and you get that first pay check but every second has been worth it. This has been our passion. All my colleagues came to my wedding, so they are literally like family to me. And as a side effect, because we believed in it so much, we literally built what we think is the future of visual effects.”