Interview with Chuck Harold.
Chuck
Everybody. Welcome back. My next guest, Mr. Eric Pinkel. He’s also executive and business development lead at Center Grid Virtual Studio. Mr. Eric, welcome to the show, my friend. Thank you so much for having me. Now, your Web site is CG Virtual Studio.com. I got to say, took a look at the Web site. I got all excited. The thing that really jumped out at me, first of all, was that you have a private data center. Yes, it’s cloud oriented, but it’s not sitting in somebody’s cloud. It’s in your private data center, which makes it so important for intellectual property and such. It sounds easy to explain that a Virtual Studio is what it sounds like, but for people don’t know run through what CG Virtual Studio does.
Eric
Virtual Studio is really designed to allow a large creative team to come together and produce visual effects, animations, 3d modeling, texturing, lighting, editing, and comp you basically have a complete computer graphics production online, for example, you might be working on a feature film where you need, lots of creatives each working on different shots. Essentially what we’re doing is we’re providing the infrastructure, the visual computing hardware infrastructure that you’d have in a typical CGI post-production studio. So that is basically what virtual studio is. We found that in the very beginning, you know, people would want one or two machines. And then as things began to grow, people started getting more and more of their team members on our remote hardware and that’s kind of how virtual studio evolved.
Chuck
Now, how did you get involved in it? Did you have movie background experience or data center computer stuff?
Eric
Yeah, actually I’m a computer artist and was working with the Accenture and Mackevision team doing automotive CG and we were acquired by Accenture. And at that particular point we wanted to work more closely with Nissan and we needed to have a facility set up in the U.S. very quickly. In order to enable that, we looked all around to try to find someone who would be able to host our entire 13 people without necessarily having an office. So I did some research and I found CenterGrid and we had a long conversation about what they could do and what technologies they would have to enable a Virtual Studio, and they helped us get it all set up.
So basically, we came onboard and they set up the infrastructure, all the cloud hardware, all the cloud GPU workstations, all the cloud render nodes, and we essentially just brought our own software and we started working and it proved to be amazing. Our team worked on that for a couple of years and continued to and we continue to expand the services based on what we actually needed for each project. So, we are primarily automotive based. Our team. Most of our team is out of Detroit and out of Yokohama, Japan, so we kind of share the globe. And that’s another thing that made virtual studio really work well, is it’s great if you’ve got a bunch of remote locations that all need to work together on a single project.
Chuck
Well, that’s got to be a game changer for budgets. I mean, you know, it used to be back in the day Fox studio, Fox and Disney had two of the best post-production studios out there, Right. Soundstages and things. And, you know, you would book it, bring all your people there, do all the stuff. No need now. Right. You can have the best find in CGI in five different countries working virtually all together.
Chuck
Tell me a little more about your cloud platform. I’m very intrigued about the security aspect, that this is not sitting in a cloud that you may be interacting through to get there, but that seems to be a game changer, especially intellectual property rights these days. Stuff gets stolen so easily. I agree. Right. So tell me. And we found that specifically.
Eric
The game changer when it comes to intellectual property really is having the private data center. Automotives are very, very particular. And most studios are particular about where their content lives, especially in a global environment. And so when we found Center Grid and we started with virtual studio, one of our key criteria was data security and encapsulating the project in a private and not having it be on the bigger public cloud we wanted. And we were able to work with Center Grid, specifically with Virtual Studio to pass all of the security requirements that the automotives actually need, which are extensive. So Nissan, Honda and Mercedes, all of them that when you’re working with their data, you have to be certified. And so by having a small private data center and having them be and having the team at center grid help us, we were able to get all of the authorizations required to have our have to have our productions fully in the cloud So that that was a game changer for us. And we had tried some other methodologies and we ran into a lot of security red tape. And so this was one of the few solutions that we were actually able to get being a global environment, you know, with different people working around the world to actually be signed off for on the security side.
Chuck
So now you’re telling the client your subscription based. So, tell me a little bit about that. What kind of options are available for people?
Eric
So basically, we have a minimum of a month. What we did is we looked at like, how long does a project usually last? Right? So projects are usually from a month to three months to six months to 12 months, and then sometimes they’re multi-year projects depending on if you’re in the film business or not. But most projects we found the minimum requirement is going to be about a month. Typically by the time everybody gets together, you sign everybody up and they all get to work is around 30 days. So what we did is we actually set up our subscription model based on what the CGI teams typically need to get a project delivered. it’s great. Now instead of going out and for example, in an investment in a lots of hardware that may be setting while we’re waiting to get the next gig if we have downtime, we can wait until we have the next project and then we can basically upgrade Virtual Studio to whatever size we need.
So, let’s say, for example, we have a smaller project. We may need five people, we finish it up in a month, two weeks later or three weeks later, after we’re done with the project we get and we hear that, you know, there’s a big project. It might take 15 or 16 people. Our modeling staff in the Philippines needs to come on board early and work for a month just to create assets.
That’s perfect. Now we can say, okay, we need 15 machines that we need in the Philippines, and then in a month we’re going to spin up six more machines that are basically going to start doing all of the major animation. And then three months later, we can start we can kick in 150 render nodes and we can actually start rendering and we can kind of change that and move that based on what we need instead of having to have all that investment upfront for just one project.
-Continues in part two…
