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In this comprehensive guide, we delve into the efficient deployment of AWS Thinkbox Deadline, a powerful render management solution. By leveraging the Render Farm Deployment Kit (RFDK), you’ll learn how to streamline the setup process, ensuring smooth operation and maximizing productivity. Explore the step-by-step instructions, best practices, and valuable insights to optimize your render farm’s performance. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out, this article is a must-read for anyone seeking to harness the full potential of AWS Thinkbox Deadline.

AWS Thinkbox Deadline 

AWS Thinkbox Deadline is a powerful rendering management software used in the film, animation, and visual effects industries. It manages the rendering of complex computer graphics projects through the automation of rendering pipelines and optimization of resources.

One of the key features of AWS Thinkbox Deadline is its ability to scale up or down to meet the demands of any rendering workload. This makes it an ideal solution for studios who sometimes require a high level of rendering capacity but don’t want to invest in their own infrastructure. Deadline also gives studios the ability to select more cost-effective EC2 Spot instances to address rendering requirements. TrackIt has recently published a blog post titled ‘Using the Spot Plugin to Burst Render Farms’ that explores this topic in detail. 

Thinkbox Render Farm Deployment Kit

AWS Thinkbox Deadline can be deployed in various environments including on-premises, cloud, and hybrid setups. When deploying Deadline in a studio in the cloud (SIC) environment, AWS recommends using a deployment kit. 

The Thinkbox RFDK (Render Farm Deployment Kit) is a collection of tools that allow the deployment of Deadline in an SIC environment quickly and easily. The kit is a set of CloudFormation templates that automate the deployment of the required AWS infrastructure for running Deadline. This includes the setup of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), and other necessary resources.

Once the infrastructure is deployed, the Thinkbox Deadline installer can be used to install the software on EC2 instances. The installer can be configured to automatically connect to the repository and allow users to manage their render farm from a single location.

The following tutorial details the steps required to deploy Deadline for a studio in the cloud environment with the Thinkbox RFDK (render farm deployment kit) v1.2.0.

Specific Integrations RFDK adds to a Studio in the Cloud (SIC) Environment