Nexus Studios is a renowned creative studio celebrated for its artistic and technical excellence across animation, VFX, and experience design. The studio has earned numerous accolades, including Academy Award and Grammy nominations.
In 2024, Nexus Studios partnered with Antigravity Academy, to deliver a groundbreaking immersive experience for the Sphere in Las Vegas. At the heart of the event was the world premiere of “For Mexico, For All Time”, a six-chapter film directed by the Academy Award nominee Carlos López Estrada. Designed exclusively for the Sphere, the film harnessed the venue’s cutting-edge technology—including the world’s highest-resolution LED display that wraps around and above the audience—to create a truly transformative viewing experience.
The Burst Rendering Bottleneck
As a leader in high-resolution content production, Nexus Studios is renowned for managing technically demanding projects.However, with 12,000 x 12,000 resolution footage and 144 million pixels per frame, the team faced one of the most extreme rendering challenges in media production today. With tight delivery timelines and zero room for error, their team needed rendering power far beyond what their on-premises infrastructure could support.
Traditional cloud rendering posed risks of cost overruns and inefficient asset management. Bursting to the cloud at scale typically requires juggling compute allocation, managing redundant data, and risking delays if render assets are lost or misrouted. The stakes were high, and the timeline was tight.
Smart Storage and Scalable Cloud Burst Rendering in Action
To overcome these challenges, Nexus partnered with Pixitmedia by DataCore to deploy a hybrid storage and compute solution that enabled cloud burst rendering — a strategy designed to temporarily scale cloud resources on demand, exactly when needed.
Pixitmedia’s hybrid solution combined Pixstor’s high performance storage, the Ngenea orchestration platform, and AWS Thinkbox Deadline. Ngenea served as the intelligent backbone, tightly integrating cloud rendering with local workflows. When rendering workloads peaked, Nexus burst into the cloud — spinning up 200 GPU instances and accessing over 30TB of VRAM, without overprovisioning or overspending. By mirroring the entire dataset in Amazon S3, the solution ensured disaster recovery, removed duplication, and established a Single Source of Truth (SSoT). The solution automatically offloaded cold data to the cloud, optimizing both local performance and cloud cost efficiency.
This infrastructure allowed Nexus Studios to render at massive scale without bottlenecks, and even more importantly, without distracting artists from the creative process. With burst rendering on demand and seamless data flow between local and cloud environments, the team delivered one of their most ambitious projects on time, on budget, and without compromise.
The solution sets a new benchmark for efficient, scalable burst rendering in high-resolution media production.
Learn more
Want a deeper look at how Nexus redefined immersive production? We have got you covered. We have documented the entire project, and it’s packed with valuable insights for forward-thinking media organizations. Download the case study now.
