Special effects are awesome; they are also expensive, which is one reason why budget movies look like budget movies. However, if Google Inc has its way, special effects will continue to become cheaper and more accessible.
The Internet giant on Tuesday announced that it has bought Boston-based Zync Inc, the producer of Zync Render, a “cloud-based rendering software.”
The software helps movie studios take simple, computer-generated pictures of things like a giant robot smashing through a wall and make it look real (or at least kind of real) in movies like the Transformers series.
According to an announcement on Google’s Cloud Platform Blog, Zync Render has been used in films like Flight, the Denzel Washington picture about a drunk, drugged-out airline pilot, as well as Star Trek Into Darkness, which, needless to say, had a lot of visual effects.
Google would not say how much it paid for Zync. The company will integrate Zync’s data and technology into the Google Cloud Platform, and move off Amazon.com Inc’s Web Services.
Cloud computing is the term technology people use to describe systems of networked computers that work highly efficiently and have ripped costs out of data storage.
Cloud networks — the biggest being Amazon Web Services and the Cloud Platform — help firms grow quickly because, instead of having to buy 1 million computers to host their data, they can rent them from giants like Amazon and Google.
Google has been beefing up its Cloud Platform recently, buying Stackdriver, a maker of cloud-monitoring software, in May.
While the Google Cloud Platform already had rendering services, Zync, which was spun out of the visual effects studio ZERO VFX, has deep ties to the movie industry.
Industry watchers expect Google to keep adding technological bells and whistles to its Cloud Platform — including through acquisitions — in a bid to get more customers and industries to rent space on its cloud.
Cloud computing has allowed the lightning fast growth of services like Pinterest, the photograph sharing company, by drastically reducing the cost of data storage. The same is true of visual effects.
In the past, studios that wanted to go nuts with special effects had to buy lots of computers and stuff them in temperature-controlled closets, to be used only when effects were needed and not really anytime else. Zync’s system helps smaller studios get in the game by allowing them to rent server space by the hour.
With Google’s financial might, it is a decent bet that the cost of special effects will continue to fall.
In the statement on its blog, Google said: “Together Zync + Cloud Platform will offer studios the rendering performance and capacity they need, while helping them manage costs. For example, with per-minute billing studios aren’t trapped into paying for unused capacity when their rendering needs don’t fit in perfect hour increments.”
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