Award-winning visual studio chooses Couchbase for effective worldwide collaboration for film, TV and streaming projects

Cinesite, an award-winning digital entertainment studio behind blockbusters such as “Wakanda Forever ”and “No Time to Die”, has selected Couchbase to power its production pipeline. 

Using Couchbase Server, Cinesite will enable artists at its studios around the world to collaborate on largescale visual effects (VFX) and animation projects. 

The result will be a truly global production pipeline that can complete projects quickly, efficiently and to the highest quality.

In its 30-year history, Cinesite has worked on multiple award-winning productions: from the first digital effects in a James Bond film in “Goldeneye” to Academy Award and BAFTA nominations and wins for “The Revenant” and “The Witcher” season two. 

It has also grown rapidly: since 2012 it has taken on seven new studios, and now operates across the UK, Canada, Germany, Serbia, FYR Macedonia and India. 

Collaborative art

Cinesite’s artists work on a variety of project types—from high end TV series to blockbuster feature films, to full-length animated films. These are true collaborative artforms requiring hundreds of artists working across multiple disciplines, producing thousands of iterations and hundreds of terabytes of data, to work closely together. 

Each individual artist needs to be able to make changes to a shot, a character or an animation quickly, then review and update as necessary—all while ensuring every change is fully tracked at all locations, and that there is complete version control to ensure a consistent, final product. 

In the modern VFX and animation industry, where projects can consist of thousands of elements over tens or hundreds of thousands of frames and changes can happen right up until release date, the ability to coordinate employees across locations to deliver work on time and at high quality is essential.

“The nature of modern VFX and animation means we have to be able to work efficiently at scale,” said Michele Sciolette, CTO of Cinesite. “Coordinating hundreds of artists across multiple studios on each project; distributing workloads so that projects are completed on time and to the highest quality require a strict version control over every element of every frame we work on.” 

Cinesite’s previous solution, according to Colette, was originally designed a few years ago when the teams were all working under one roof, and was no longer up to the task. 

“We needed a replacement that could support the data requirements of modern VFX and animation and replicate data across all our studios to ensure we have a consistent view on the data that each one of our artists is creating” said Sciolette. 

“It also had to guarantee the scalability, performance and reliability we need, all without demanding extensive and expensive reskilling. We considered several offerings, but Couchbase was the only one which met our full demands.”

Synchronized data and activity

Couchbase’s Cross-Data Center Replication (XDCR) capabilities will allow Cinesite to synchronize activity on projects regardless of size. 

Instead of keeping production limited to a single studio, Cinesite will be able to collaborate effectively, whether it is a large-scale collaboration between two Cinesite studios or a small-scale one with one artist contributing for a few hours to a project led in another location. 

Studios working on different elements of a single shot—such as character animations, background effects or lighting—can be certain that all of their hard work is combined perfectly in the final frame.  “We are delighted to support Cinesite in breathing life into filmmakers’ creations while allowing the team to work more efficiently,” said Ravi Mayuram, CTO of Couchbase. “Modern applications require always-on and near real-time availability of data across the globe for a responsive and reliable experience.”