See this? This is a hack Ryan Summers developed for the CGI team working on the Dolby job. It’s a GPU cluster: a series of five $600 boxes that could soon disrupt the world of render farms. A standard motion graphics render farm has roughly 60 nodes, each with one processor and four cores, for a total of 240 cores. In contrast, each of these five GPU’s contains around 2500 cores. They don’t need cooling, they require far less power, and they’re infinitely scalable; all huge advantages over current render farm technology. GPU’s like this were developed by the gaming industry to process heavy math. Ryan’s repurposed them for our needs to generate more renders, quicker and cheaper

As an industry solution, these types of GPU’s are not entirely ready today, but in a few months, they could be. And that’s the point; until the industry generates software to catch up to these processor speeds, Digital Kitchen can leverage this technological advantage to make us more competitive in the marketplace. While others have lower cost margins based on how they’re structured, getting more done more quickly helps us to close that gap.

Innovative thinking like this doesn’t only relate to hardware. As technology reinvents itself on increasingly shorter cycles, all sorts of opportunities will become available to anyone paying attention. Most of us recognize we no longer need to build websites from scratch; we can customize existing platforms already coded for security and responsiveness. We no longer need to settle for a stock shot or set up our own second unit shoots; we can access a community of DP’s on something like https://genero.tv/ and get a bespoke shot reasonably quickly and for a fraction of the cost. Hacks like these won’t work for everything, but in the right situation, they lend DK a real advantage.

But that advantage relies on embracing change and innovation. As it does for any company. After all, it’s at the heart of no less than Steve Jobs’ famous mantra: stay hungry, stay foolish, stay curious.”

Let’s…