Case Study: Jellyfish Pictures achieves scalable on-demand rendering to win bigger projects and cut costs with Microsoft Azure

Jellyfish - Customer Case Study

Jellyfish Pictures is a London-based visual-effects and animation studio behind major films and TV shows that faced a growing rendering bottleneck: movie-quality frames are extremely compute-intensive, their eight on-premises server racks were heavily taxed, and episodic spikes in demand forced expensive last-minute hardware purchases, wasted studio space and idle creative staff. The studio needed a way to access large, temporary compute capacity without moving half a petabyte of data over the public internet or blowing out capital and operational costs.

Jellyfish built RenderWise on Microsoft Azure—using HPC VMs, ExpressRoute, Azure Storage and GPU-powered N‑Series virtual workstations—to burst rendering into the cloud and deliver remote artist workstations. The hybrid setup lets Jellyfish provision thousands of cores in minutes (6,000 cores in ~30 minutes), bid on much larger projects with confidence, cut CapEx spikes, halve render wait times, reduce workstation purchases, better protect IP, and even package RenderWise as a service for other studios.

Jellyfish Pictures

Jeremy Smith

CTO