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Hi, Since a family member happens to work in the industry, I can tell you why they keep it in house: - Confidentiality. These guys practically have to sign the official secrets act before starting work. - Downtime and / or data loss. The cost of computing is completely insignificant compared to the time of 10s-100s of skilled artists (most of whom get paid a lot more than us). - Latency. They need serious bandwidth. External providers are not typically able to provide that. Even the smaller studios (spot effects, compositing, etc) have their gear in house. Dave On 27/03/2013 09:07, Andrew McNab wrote: > This may be relevant to assessing our scale during the meeting today compared to some large commercial operations: > > http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9237880/DreamWorks_tops_compute_cycle_record_with_The_Croods_ > > > "The new 3D animated movie "The Croods" may be about a stone-aged family, but DreamWorks said it is by far its most sophisticated production to date, topping all others in compute cycle hours. > > The movie, out in theaters last Friday, required a whopping 80 million compute hours to render, 15 million more hours than DreamWorks' last record holder, "The Rise of the Guardians." > > Between 300 and 400 animators worked on "The Croods" over the past three years. The images, from raw sketches to stereoscopic high-definition shots, required about 250TB of data storage capacity to make, > > DreamWorks' five petabytes of disk storage is tiered, from solid-state drives and volatile cache for high-performance applications > > The network connection between its Glendale and Redwood City studios consist of two 10Gbps Ethernet networks with automatic fail over > > Those networks are tied into a central hub that offers up to 500MB/sec to artists in Bangalore, India > > DreamWorks has a "render farm" of servers made up of about 20,000 processors. The image rendering jobs are broken up into small pieces, distributed out to the server farm, and are later recompiled to create the final images for a film." > > > It's interesting that they own this kit themselves, rather than outsourcing it. > > Cheers > > Andrew >