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Cloud-rendering companies consummate relationship following marriage

Conductor cloud rendering service can now be used with CoreWeave cloud.

Karen Moltenbrey

Months after CoreWeave acquired Conductor, the cloud rendering solution is now fully supported on the CoreWeave cloud, opening its bank of assorted GPUs to Conductor users.

Early this year, CoreWeave, which builds cloud solutions for compute-intensive applications, acquired Conductor Technologies, a cloud-based rendering service. At the time, the companies said the acquisition would enable CoreWeave to expand and broaden its solutions to include delivery of burst rendering to VFX studios. Conductor customers, meanwhile, would be able to leverage CoreWeave’s solutions including access to a wide range of Nvidia GPUs, responsive autoscaling out of the box, and access to greater scale. Now, approximately six months after the acquisition was announced, Conductor customers can access CoreWeave compute resources, in addition to those previously supported.

Coreweave
Conductor on CoreWeave. (Courtesy: Microverse Studios)

Conductor was born as a cloud rendering platform for the M&E industry and amassed a following within that segment, where compute resources are needed for rendering VFX, animation, motion graphics, and design projects. With the growth of other compute-intensive applications like machine learning and AI across the industry, Conductor had been attracted to CoreWeave’s ability to offer GPUs like Nvidia’s RTX A5000 and A6000 cards.

Conductor is now fully cloud-based on CoreWeave, bringing key benefits mainly in the areas of price and performance. For instance, CoreWeave provides on-demand access to the Nvidia Ampere GPU architecture. Also, with a wide selection of GPUs from which to choose, users are able to select a solution that more closely aligns with their needs. Moreover, the compute resources are economically priced, contend the companies, with no fluctuation in costs during times of high demand.

According to Brian Venturo, CTO and cofounder of CoreWeave, when the company benchmark-tested Conductor on CoreWeave for GPU rendering against the most widely used cloud provider in M&E, renders returned faster and were less expensive in almost every case, even accounting for the reduced pricing of spare compute. No further details were provided about the test.

Conductor runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems. In addition to CoreWeave, it can be used with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, and supports most industry-standard DCC applications out of the box.