Arch Platform Technologies, provider of the Arch Platform, a SaaS platform to create and manage powerful, cloud-based studios for content creation, announced support for the AWS for Media & Entertainment initiative from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate and simplify the move to the cloud for the entertainment production industry.

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“Arch is the best thing that’s happened to movies in the last five years”

AWS for Media & Entertainment is an initiative featuring new and existing services and solutions from AWS and AWS Partners, built specifically for content creators, rights holders, producers, broadcasters, and distributors. AWS for Media & Entertainment also simplifies the process of building, deploying, and reinventing mission-critical industry workloads by aligning AWS and AWS Partner capabilities against five solution areas: Content Production; Media Supply Chain & Archive; Broadcast; Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming; and Data Science & Analytics.

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Entertainment production communities are seeking to leverage the cloud to lower costs, increase efficiencies and decrease time-to-market as the demand for new content grows exponentially. The Arch Platform is designed to accelerate the jump to the cloud with the seamless creation and management of fully resourced, digital content creation studios for VFX, post-production, virtual production, and other collaborative creative efforts – without requiring specific knowledge of AWS services and technology. Utilizing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Thinkbox Deadline, and AWS CloudFormation to coordinate a multitude of AWS services, Arch has created industry-standard and industry-tested configurations for creative resources and workflows, bringing the time needed to deploy a new cloud studio down to minutes, instead of days.

With the Arch Platform’s intuitive SaaS dashboard, orchestration service and machine image pipeline studios, networks, producers, and post-production companies can easily build interconnected workstations, render farms, storage and licensing servers, as well as create users and teams and manage facility and project permissions – in one virtual location or many connected ones around the world. The Arch Platform on AWS has enabled a number of post-production companies to be born entirely in the cloud. With no upfront capital cost or technology expertise, these companies utilize cloud computing and Arch’s entertainment domain expertise to work in powerful cloud-based facilities with integrated collaborative workflows. Artists can also access the tools they need without being limited by hardware or location.

For its workstations, Arch uses Amazon EC2 G4 Instances. The Amazon EC2 G4dn Instances are cost-effective, versatile GPU instances for deploying machine learning models that enable massive performance improvements. The key to the Arch Platform’s ability to orchestrate is AWS CloudFormation, a cloud-provisioning and resource-management service that enables Arch to script repeatable deployments with ease. Currently, every company using the Arch Platform may choose to integrate with Arch’s workflow pipeline which supports AWS Thinkbox Deadline, a render farm orchestration service, and features a highly flexible data ingest and delivery system.

Studios using the Arch Platform on AWS realize the benefits of cloud-based production facilities and integrated creative teams. Scalable infrastructure allows them to source the best talent anywhere in the world and set up in areas with high incentives to reduce overall costs.

“Arch is the best thing that’s happened to movies in the last five years,” said Mark Gill, CEO of Solstice Studios. “The Arch platform allowed us to save $1.2M or 65% on the VFX budget for our first film UNHINGED, starring Russell Crowe. The savings and flexibility are too good for us to do it any other way. We will be adding Arch to our post-production efforts on all of our upcoming movies.”

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