Øyedrops: bringing brand designs to life with Google Cloud

About Øyedrops

An award winning motion & design studio located in Oslo, Norway with over a decade worth of experience. A collective thinkbox of creatives, motion, design and sound. Diving in at the first steps of production, its designers are experts in solving complex briefs with clever ideas, smart design and engaging motion. To learn more, visit www.oyedrops.no.

Industries: Media & Entertainment
Location: Norway
Products: ZYNC Render

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Norwegian creative studio chooses Google’s ZYNC Render, a cloud-based farm, to efficiently and affordably boost its render power.

Google Cloud results

  • Renders HD frames up to 20 times faster than Øyedrops’ physical farm with ZYNC Render
  • Integrates seamlessly with industry standard 3d software like Maya, Houdini or Cinema 4D
  • Cuts costs with per-minute billing and preemptible nodes

Render tasks in hours instead of days

By focusing on motion design, Norwegian creative studio Øyedrops has produced animations for some of the country’s biggest names such as retail outlet Urban and football league Eliteserien. As visual standards grow from high definition to 4K resolutions and beyond, Øyedrops has been hunting for an affordable way to upscale its technological muscle and produce top quality work for its clients. With ZYNC Render on Google Cloud, they found it.

“Nowadays, we create motion design with crystal clarity in 4K. When you move to these higher pixel ratios, the workload on the machines rises dramatically, says Christopher Sæther-Larsen, Manager and Partner at Øyedrops. “Our biggest challenge on a day to day basis is render time. That's the most important factor. So when we use cloud services like ZYNC Render on Google Cloud, we save a lot of time which is beneficial to us.”

Great power, great flexibility

Animation requires an enormous amount of computing power. A single HD frame typically takes one hour to render, often longer, on a high-end computer. With 25 frames per second of film, the rendering process can seriously slow down work on even short animations. To minimize bottlenecks, Øyedrops has invested in an on-site render farm of twelve machines, but as clients demanded higher quality visuals on tight deadlines, the studio began to reach the limits of what it could do with physical machines. Øyedrops needed a way of quickly and affordably boosting its rendering muscle to deliver projects on time without having to sacrifice quality.

Øyedrops chose Google’s ZYNC Render, a cloud-based farm, to efficiently and affordably boost its render power. Accessed through an easily installed native plugin on Øyedrops’ 3D software, ZYNC Render fits seamlessly into the studio’s workflow. As projects change or deadlines shorten, Øyedrops can quickly scale up their render power by orders of magnitude with minimal preparation and no need to install and configure new hardware. Preemptible nodes and per-minute billing ensure that Øyedrops only ever pays for what it uses and avoids sinking costs into servers that stay idle. When the project is done, Øyedrops can power down its virtual farm and move on.

“ZYNC Render is so much faster than what we have in house. We can boost the quality and still have frames back much faster than with a local render farm. Then with things like AR and VR - future rendering times will increase dramatically, making on-site rendering almost impossible. So it’s clear that from both a creative and technical perspective, Google's solutions will be an important part of our business going forward.”

Christopher Sæther-Larsen, Manager and Partner, Øyedrops

“With ZYNC, our creative process is no longer constrained by rendering times. We now have the ability to render high quality sequences on the fly while working on a project, instead of only single frames,” says Steffen Sæther-Larsen, Senior Designer and Partner at Øyedrops. “This ability completely changed our workflow. The ZYNC rendered sequences just fall into your selected folders when they’re finished. It’s easy.”

High speed, high quality

With ZYNC Render, a boutique studio like Øyedrops can harness the power of Google’s cloud infrastructure to react quickly and effectively to last minute setbacks and schedule changes. Render tasks that would once have taken days now come back to Øyedrops within hours. When time is tight, Øyedrops can meet its deadlines without compromising on quality or breaking the bank. ZYNC Render’s speed and ease of use means that the studio can focus on designing great animations instead of optimizing hardware. As animation evolves into new forms such as virtual reality, Øyedrops knows that cloud-based rendering is the future. With ZYNC Render, they’ve made a great start.

“ZYNC Render is so much faster than what we have in house. We can boost the quality and still have frames back much faster than with a local render farm,” says Christopher. “Then with things like AR and VR - future rendering times will increase dramatically, making on-site rendering almost impossible. So it’s clear that from both a creative and technical perspective, Google's solutions will be an important part of our business going forward.”

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Øyedrops

An award winning motion & design studio located in Oslo, Norway with over a decade worth of experience. A collective thinkbox of creatives, motion, design and sound. Diving in at the first steps of production, its designers are experts in solving complex briefs with clever ideas, smart design and engaging motion. To learn more, visit www.oyedrops.no.

Industries: Media & Entertainment
Location: Norway