It’s the beginning of a new year and, as it’s our tradition by now, we’re sharing with you some of the behind-the-scenes activity from our farm. So, if you’re curious to learn how and what we did last year, read on.
If you’ve been using (or just following) us for a while, you know by now that we’re continuously improving our service and 2017 was no exception. We’ve rolled out a number of new features, both visible and invisible, sharing the same goal: to make your life easier. The ones that I’d add to a quick highlight list are: adding Modo support, unifying the payment system, adding upgrades to the monthly plan RenderStreet One and adding cloud operations for upload and download. And just a couple of weeks ago, in December, we released a network optimization upgrade for RenderStreet One for easier management of large assets. The effects have been very positive: the transfer time for large projects has been cut by up to 60% in some cases. This means more rendering power available to you!
Moving on to the numbers, here are the most relevant facts for our activity:
- 99.97% uptime. Our systems are running 24/7 so we can be ready whenever you need us, without any advance notice or prebooking
- Over 9.3 million frames delivered with our monthly plan RenderStreet One alone. With Modo support and more time for your frames, I’m not surprised that the program had a significant boost. The infrastructure for the program had a few rounds of on the fly upgrades throughout the year so we can maintain the performance levels, and we have the ability to keep the same rate in the future, too. I know this is a valuable resource for those of you who are on a budget, so we’re putting some elbow grease into it to keep it dependable and with good performance.
- We have maintained the same success rate in delivery of over 99% throughout the board. It’s the fourth year in a row when we’ve kept the bar really high, and we’re very proud of this achievement.
- Along with the average job length, the percentage of longer jobs has also increased. More than 2,000 jobs rendered last year had over 1,440 frames – or 1 minute of animation at 24 fps. This means that there were almost 6 such jobs per day, every day. You are showing confidence in our systems, so you ‘send and forget’ your renders. Which is perfectly fine with us.
- The Studio plan has really shined in delivering some interesting (and difficult at the same time) projects. You’ll see some of the numbers below, and I’m hoping we’ll get permission to talk about at least about some of the projects in detail. This plan offers one of the best value propositions in terms of cost and speed for professional work. If you have a large project or your pipeline handles more than 500 hours of rendering per month, drop us a line to learn more.
- Our most busy day delivered the equivalent of 685 days of rendering on a 2017 top-of-the-line Core i7 MacBook Pro. (By the way, if you guys are moving away from this laptop, let me know what’s becoming the preferred choice for the road warrior so we can refer to it in the future 🙂 )
And now, as usual, a few projects that stood out from the crowd (in rendering-related terms):
- The most demanding single frame render took 346 server-hours to complete – over two weeks. In real-time, it was delivered in 7 hours, almost to the minute, using our split function.
- The longest job (in term of the number of frames): 29,500 frames, the equivalent of 20 minutes of movie at 24fps.
- The longest job in terms of total render power needed: 301 days cumulated server time. Delivered in under two days with the Studio plan, along with the rest of the shots in the respective project.
- The longest job in terms of total render power delivered with RenderStreet One: 41 days of cumulated server time. Again, not a bad value for $50 per month.
- The biggest resolution in a single frame rendered: 65,536 x 65,536 pixels, or 4,294,967,296 pixels in total. That’s probably Blender’s hard limit at the moment. Challenge accepted 😉
- Most memory used for rendering a project: between 144 GB and 155 GB of RAM per frame. Again, completed successfully with the Studio plan. In term of disk space, the renders for the respective project took around 5 TB in total. Everything was rendered and also delivered to the client in time.
- We’ve also allocated 300 servers to a single project while maintaining regular operation for the other projects that were rendered in that period of time.
I hope this information will give you a bit of insight into our activity and will help you get a picture (pun intended) what our regular day looks like. We’ll keep working at the same pace, all for your benefit. The planning for the next platform updates has been made. And the first new feature for 2018 has already been released: now the invoices are available for download in your account. More interesting things are in the works, so keep close!
Thank you for being with us on this journey and let’s start making 2018 better-looking!
Marius
