Veterans in the media and entertainment industry are no strangers to change. The industry has undergone a near-constant transformation for many years – first with content streaming, then cloud-enabled production studios, and now with generative AI. While each wave has come with its challenges, they have also opened up incredible new possibilities and opportunities for organizations willing to lean in. Successful creative organizations can navigate these changes by recognizing that amidst the change, a few central tenets remain – foster creativity wherever possible, enable artists with the best tools, find ways to move fast and keep infrastructure costs under control. As with any reasonable set of tenets, there can be tension between them. How do you move fast and enable artists with the best tools while controlling infrastructure costs? How do you foster creativity while moving fast? 

For years, visual effects shops, content creation agencies, and production companies have turned to WEKA to solve these challenges. Parliament VFX turned to WEKA to enable their studio in the cloud strategy.  Preymaker uses WEKA to accelerate production pipelines from months to hours while running on AWS infrastructure. Untold Studios relies on WEKA to enable artist collaboration across a globally distributed talent network, all running in the cloud. Forward-looking organizations across the Media & Entertainment (M&E) landscape are looking to the performance, scale, agility, and cost efficiency WEKA enables to transform their businesses further.  With this in mind, in 2023, we introduced this reference architecture for deploying WEKA on AWS for visual effects and finishing solution, Autodesk Flame. This provides a baseline architecture for running WEKA in the cloud. The architecture gives prescriptive guidance to WEKA on AWS, and the principles apply directly to Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud deployments, all supported environments for WEKA. 

Now, we’re pleased to share that the WEKA Data Platform is included as a certified storage solution for managed media for Flame.

Here are a few ways your creative teams can benefit from using WEKA for Flame workflows:

1. AI-driven content development
Many creative organizations now incorporate generative AI into their content workflows. WEKA provides the fastest data platform for generative AI model training, tuning, and inference used by leading generative AI companies like Stability AI and Midjourney. The zero-tuning, zero-copy architecture enables these companies to accelerate AI model training times from months to days.

2. Studio in the cloud
Creative talent is globally distributed, so it’s a requirement to support geographically distributed VFX and finishing artists using Flame workstations integrated with the public cloud and utilizing cloud resources efficiently and elastically. Companies need the ability to support multiple VFX and finishing sites and individual artists working in remote locations. Creatives can render Flame directly from AWS at 120 frames per second with zero frame loss and zero frame lag, ensuring artists get the best experience possible from their Flame workstations.

3. Follow-the-sun content creation
Enable artists at multiple sites in different regions across the globe to collaborate on the same project. Facilitate a follow-the-sun post-production model where the artists have quick access to the same media regardless of their location. Artists can collaborate on projects using a single copy of data, eliminating the need to maintain multiple copies or ship physical media for shared content.

The Past is Prequel for Creative Innovation
Production studios, creative agencies, and media organizations will continue to evolve and transform amidst a rapidly changing technology landscape. The team at WEKA has built a revolutionary approach to data management that enables that transformation. We’re excited to continue to partner with industry-leading partners like Autodesk, as we work together to solve customers’ most pressing data management challenges and help empower the next generation of creative innovation.

Learn More about WEKA for M&E