Case Study: Outpost VFX achieves faster rendering and reduced overtime with Microsoft Corporation Azure

Outpost VFX goes all Azure with Avere vFXT for a lion’s windblown mane, artist positivity, and global impact

Outpost VFX, a UK media and entertainment studio, faced a major VFX challenge on the film *Greed*: a highly complex photorealistic lion sequence, an aggressive deadline, and a need for far more render capacity than its on-premises farm could provide. The studio turned to Microsoft Corporation’s Azure platform, including Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets, and Avere vFXT for cloud bursting and caching.

Microsoft Corporation helped Outpost VFX move rendering workloads to Azure, spinning up capacity in about 30 minutes while keeping artists’ workflows transparent. The results were significant: rendering efficiency improved by 80%, overtime dropped by almost 90%, and the team could render 150 frames in 10 hours instead of 1,500 hours for the same cost, with up to 80% savings on many low-priority workloads.

Outpost VFX

Duncan McWilliam

Founder and Chief Executive Officer