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© Copyright 2017 HP Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP
products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed
as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
NVIDIA and Quadro are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.
The Foundry®, its logo and product names are registered trademarks in the UK, USA and/or other countries.
Adobe and Adobe Photoshop are trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
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the USA and/or other countries.
Images courtesy of Guru Studio.
4AA6-9046ENW, March 2017
Guru Studio | Media & Entertainment
leverage NVIDIA® Quadro® M6000 Graphics to
drive GPU-based workows. GPU-accelerated
computing enhances performance by
ooading compute-intensive portions of
applications to the GPU, while the remainder
of the code still runs on the central processing
unit (CPU). Redshift software, Guru’s GPU
renderer of choice, accelerated rendering by
a factor of up to 10 times compared to the
studio’s previous workows.
“ Our biggest challenge is
delivering high quality,
aordably. HP Z Workstations
are reliable, rock-solid, and
they support accelerated
workows that give us the
competitive advantage of
multiple creative iterations.”
– Jason Burnard, IT director, Guru Studio, Toronto,
Canada
“This is a huge paradigm shift in how rendering
is done here at Guru Studio,” Rocha says. “The
old model of rendering, getting nal pixels
onscreen, was to send your data to a render farm
that was mostly CPU-driven. But given the costs of
operating a high-end facility in the creative core
of downtown Toronto plus the risk associated
with o-site farms, we built a small GPU-based
render farm in-house. Within one workstation
now I have the rendering power of ve previous
desktops.” The cost of building this in-house
render farm, he adds, was approximately one-
third that of co-location.
Underlying the success of this strategy is the
power of the HP Z840 Workstation with HP Z
Turbo Drive. “The NVIDIA® Quadro® M6000 GPU
works so fast that it’s constantly trying to pull
data,” Rocha says. “If it were trying to pull that
data o a hard drive, there would be a bottleneck;
even milliseconds make a huge dierence. But
the HP Z Turbo Drive feeds the GPU very quickly.
It gives us a further 20% speed increase.”
Creativity without limits
The impact, Rocha says, is better quality in less
time. Faster rendering enables more creative
iterations. Gone are the days when series
artists could accommodate just one or two
scene renders before they had to move on to
the next shot. Now they have the computer
speed and power to use more-sophisticated
features of their software tools and to
experiment, revise their work multiple times.
“It becomes like a gamication of the iterative
process,” Rocha says. “You try something, see
it immediately, try something else. People are
exploring ideas they couldn’t before. It’s taken
technology limitations out of the process and
brought creativity back in.”
Using these advances, Guru went to work on
their new series True & the Rainbow Kingdom,
a Netix Original set to premier globally in
summer 2017—and take its place alongside
feature lms of the highest production values.
The studio also is developing a number of
series such as Big Blue for CBC.
The creative freedom and production
eciencies enabled by HP Z Workstations
enable Guru to absorb risk, try new things
Rocha says.
“Our competitive advantage comes from the
ability to do more creative iterations. It comes
from being able to do more with less. It comes
from aligning with a company that’s invested
in this sector—now and for the future. HP is
always ahead of the curve when it comes to
media and entertainment.”
Learn more at
hp.com/go/zworkstations
hp.com/go/media-entertainment
Customer at a glance
Application
Production workloads for 2D and 3D
storyboarding, animation, editing. Software
applications employed include:
• Adobe® Premiere Pro® CC for editing
• Adobe Photoshop® for photo editing
• NUKE software from The Foundry® for
compositing
• Autodesk® Maya® 3D modeling & animation
• Toon Boom Harmony 2D animation software
• Toon Boom Storyboard Pro
• ZBrush from Pixologic for 3D sculpting
• Substance Painter 3D painting software from
Allegorithmic
• Redshift for GPU rendering
Hardware
• HP Z840 Workstation, congured with:
– NVIDIA® Quadro® M6000 Graphics Card
– HP Z Turbo Drive G2 PCIe SSD 250GB
• HP Z640 Workstation
• HP Z620 Workstation
• HP Z440 Workstation
• HP Z420 Workstation
• HP Z Display 22i
• HP DreamColor Professional Display