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HUAWEI CLOUD Powers Special Effects Rendering in Macrograph's Post-Production of Operation Red Sea

Operation Red Sea, a 2018 Chinese action film, has 2200 special effects scenes and 1000 3D-rendering shots. The special effects took two years to complete, and the latter more than 25,000 hours. This blockbuster was highly acclaimed nationally and internationally, and left viewers with spectacular scenes and an immersive-like experience. Yet, few consider the effort that goes into the thousands of elaborately rendered shots that make it feel real.

Macrograph, a famous film and television post-production company based in Seoul, South Korea, has taken on several films in recent years, including Operation Red Sea and The Mermaid. These films are noteworthy because they have captivated audiences everywhere with sophisticated production and extravagant special effects.

Viewers these days are expecting to be thrilled in their movie-going experience. Intense special effects have become the norm, and new tech is helping improve film production. The special effects in the 2016 movie The Mermaid accounted for 37.5% of the total budget. While making the movie, Macrograph and dIFFERENT dIGITAL dESIGN lTD, a studio in Hong Kong specializing in visual effects (VFX) and animation, produced a total of 1000 special effects shots. Qin Render Cloud, a leading cloud-based rendering platform, completed 600 3D-rendering shots taking more than 10,000 hours. Think that's impressive? Think again. These figures doubled in Operation Red Sea.

Special effects in movies, TV shows, and online series are improving dramatically. In addition to satisfying the VFX requirements of audiences, studios face problems in the production cycle with all the work that needs to go into the post-production. During film production, rendering takes a relatively long time, and this bottleneck is becoming increasingly more apparent.

Cloud-based Rendering Dramatically Improves Special Effects Production

For the average scene in a film, if a single frame takes half an hour to render, and there are at least 24 frames per second, rendering a one-minute video clip would take a month. The rendering time has a direct impact on the standby time of special effects personnel  the longer the rendering time, the lower the overall production efficiency. To improve turnaround, many producers elect to place this process in the hands of rendering farms (centers specifically dedicated to rendering that have a certain number of servers depending on the needs). Large special effects companies typically purchase large-capacity rendering farms.

Macrograph's annual project production volume and use of rendering farm capacity are often hard to predict, frequently encountering large fluctuations. The dynamics of production leave some rendering farm devices idle in certain phases of each project. For example, many movies are released during the Chinese New Year holiday. The actual filming starts at the beginning of the year, leaving post-production for the second half of the year, which is when rendering farm device use significantly increases. In contrast, rough estimates put the average utilization rate of rendering farms in China during the first half of the year at generally less than 25%, a situation that requires remedy as idle devices are unable to produce revenue.

With massive computing and elastic scaling capabilities, cloud rendering is becoming the solution to improve the utilization of rendering farm devices while reducing the number of idle resources, space taken up by devices, and depreciation costs. Cloud rendering has become the future direction of special effects in post-production.

HUAWEI CLOUD Delivers Unlimited Computing Firepower for Macrograph

Cloud computing provides virtually unlimited computing power for visual effects, bringing creativity to life. To explore the potential of cloud computing in film-making, Macrograph has partnered with HUAWEI CLOUD to benefit from cloud-based rendering. On the Xi'an leg of the HUAWEI CLOUD China Tour in 2018 (a series of activities held in eight cities), Lee In-ho, CEO of Macrograph, described plans to build a cloud-based rendering and special effects production platform supported by Huawei's leading ICT infrastructure and global service capabilities. With these platforms, the best film and TV special effects artists worldwide can participate in project production anytime, anywhere  revolutionizing work methods.

HUAWEI CLOUD provides high-performance, reliable, and secure computing, storage, and network services to fully satisfy even the highest of requirements in rendering, yielding the much sought-after reductions in the production cycle while increasing the bottom line for studios. Lee In-ho added that Huawei has strong O&M and industry-leading infrastructure capabilities and resources worldwide.

How does HUAWEI CLOUD integrate with Macrograph's businesses? Mr. Lee says HUAWEI CLOUD's high-performance cloud services allow their rendering work to be carried out quickly and smoothly. HUAWEI CLOUD provides diverse, cutting-edge technologies, such as Elastic Cloud Server (ECS), Image Management Service (IMS), Auto Scaling (AS), Elastic Load Balance (ELB), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and NAT Gateway (NAT). These technologies enable Macrograph to customize the rendering environment to suit their in-the-moment requirements.

In addition, with the strong manageability of ECS, Macrograph can effectively manage multiple rendering nodes using Queenbee (a Macrograph-developed special effects process management software) and apply these ECSs to their automatic management system. Based on HUAWEI CLOUD's excellent ECS performance and AS and ELB functions, Macrograph has developed a rendering farm management software (RMS) that can scale up or down the number of rendering nodes on demand and automatically analyze and render shots without any additional programing or operation, adding in all new conveniences to special effects processes.

Macrograph knows HUAWEI CLOUD is investing heavily and in it for the long run, finding ways to combine VFX and cloud technologies to improve rendering while reducing overall production and operation costs. CEO Lee commented, "We agree that future investment in the VFX field is very important. Therefore, we plan to conduct joint research and development with HUAWEI CLOUD to explore the future of special effects technology."

Macrograph is able to run a stable production environment on the HUAWEI CLOUD. The build not only serves the development of the film industry in China and South Korea, but also extends the global stage for Macrograph to produce top creative digital content.

HUAWEI CLOUD Accelerates Innovation

The innovation binding HUAWEI CLOUD and Macrograph is technology-driven. HUAWEI CLOUD dedication to technological development is echoed in its new slogan, "HUAWEI CLOUD: Leading Edge, Future Ready, Trustworthy". HUAWEI CLOUD continues to open up its capabilities so companies can upgrade their services and innovate with intelligent utilities.

In 2018, Zheng Yelai, President of Huawei's Cloud BU, shared the brand's general approach to technical development and project experience in a series of speeches on accelerating innovation. He often spoke to the new tech graft-ins and how HUAWEI CLOUD is committed to building inclusive, affordable, effective, and reliable AI-enabled platforms. HUAWEI CLOUD has released a series of AI-related services, such as Deep Learning Service (DLS), ImageSearch, Enterprise Intelligence, and Video to promote commercialization with the affordability of mature-tech pricing.

HUAWEI CLOUD helps smooth out transformation, supports growth, and provides the tools organizations of all sizes need to overcome business challenges. HUAWEI CLOUD is fostering a robust ecosystem supporting application, content, and cloud-based developments for customers and partners.

HUAWEI CLOUD provides advanced platforms and the latest technologies tunable to the specifics of industries and individual customer requirements, becoming a solid base for enterprise innovation. Customers, partners, developers, and a long list of others are all benefiting from the power, convenience, and innovation capabilities of the HUAWEI CLOUD  find out what the cloud brand can do for your organization!