Rodeo FX with Alan Fregtman

Mark is back right on time to interview Alan Fregtman, a pipeline developer working at Rodeo FX. Alan will explain how Google Cloud Platform enables Rodeo FX artist to create amazing visual effects faster.

Rodeo FX is very well known for their work on Game of Thrones, Deadpool, and many others. I recommend watching this demo video to get an idea of their talent.

Game Of Thrones - Season 6 - VFX Breakdown from Rodeo FX.

About Alan

In the industry for 8 years ranging from commercials work to tv series and now film, Alan Fregtman (also on imdb) has been holding technical roles throughout his career, beginning as a character rigger and currently a pipeline developer at Rodeo FX in Montreal, where he has been for the last 4 years. He specializes in developing tools for the CG side of the film visual effects pipeline, including Rodeo’s integration of the Google Cloud Platform for use in cloud rendering.

Cool thing of the week

• Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable and Cloud Datastore are now generally available
• Improved performance, security and platform support for databases (Low-latency for Google Cloud Storage Nearline storage)

Announcement

Interview

• Rodeo FX has worked on many shows: demo
• GCE Custom Machine Types to adapt to the movie needs docs
• Preemptible VM instancesc for their reduced cost docs
• Salt Stack to keep all machines configured docs
• FDT: Fast Data Transfer for really fast transfer of … data docs
• Creating a Google Cloud VPN docs
• GlusterFS to manage their in-house file system docs

For more information:

• How GCP helps Rodeo FX extending their rendering capacity, presented by Jordan Soles YouTube
• Videos by Rodeo FX on vimeo

Question of the week

How to create a Managed Instance Group from a VM?

1. Delete your instance keeping your disk
2. Create a custom image from your disk docs
3. Create a new Instance Template with them image
4. Create an Managed Instance Group with the template

What if you can’t delete the instance?

1. Create a snapshot from your running disk docs
2. Create a new disk from the snapshot
3. Go to step [2] above