Case Study: Fin Design + Effects achieves on‑demand scalable rendering and 50% cost savings to meet tight VFX deadlines with Amazon Web Services

Fin Design + Effects - Customer Case Study

Fin Design + Effects is a boutique design and VFX studio with offices in Sydney and Shanghai that produces ads and film visual effects for major brands and movies. Its 30-person team faces highly variable rendering workloads—compute peaks that exceed on‑premises capacity—so the studio frequently relied on costly external render farms. Fin needed a hybrid approach that preserved its on‑site investments, delivered fast performance for distributed teams, and met MPAA security requirements.

Fin implemented AWS Direct Connect and integrated Amazon EC2 on‑demand and Spot instances with its on‑prem render farm, adding scripts to auto-scale and shut down idle machines and scheduling through its render manager. The solution lets the studio double or triple compute capacity in minutes, clear backlogs overnight, maintain MPAA‑compliant security, and cut operational costs by about 50% with Spot pricing—improving iteration speed, artistic quality, and on‑time delivery.

Fin Design + Effects

Chris Spry

Operations Manager and VFX Supervisor