Google has acquired video and cloud-based special effects startup company Zync for an undisclosed amount.
Boston-based Zync, founded in 2011, has worked on developing technology that was used on several popular movies such as Star Trek: Into the Darkness, American Hustle, and Looper, along with hundreds of advertisements.
"Pairing this history with the scale and reliability of Google Cloud Platform will help us offer an even better service to our customers - including more scalability, more host packages and better pricing (including per-minute billing)," said Zync on its website.
The cloud-based software of Zync gives users added flexibility when creating both two-dimensional and three-dimensional effects, along with services for storage and data transfer. The company said that there have been a total of 6.5 million core hours of rendering time that has been processed using its services.
Google announced the acquisition on its Google Cloud Platform blog, which states that the company is joining the Google Cloud Platform Team.
"Creating amazing special effects requires a skilled team of visual artists and designers, backed by a highly powerful infrastructure to render scenes. Many studios, however, don't have the resources or desire to create an in-house rendering farm, or they need to burst past their existing capacity," wrote Google Cloud Platform Product Manager Belwadi Srikanth.
Srikanth continues by saying that Zync and the Cloud Platform will collaborate to provide studios with the rendering performance and capacity that they require, in addition to aiding the studios in keeping their costs down.
Having Zync on the Cloud Platform is much more cost-effective, as Google will be charging for usage of the services through a per-minute system. With this system, studios are not forced to pay for capacity that is not used in services that only offer per-hour charging.
The technology of Zync provides designers and visual artists the tools to process special effects and image rendering through the cloud, as opposed to requiring powerful hardware which would be both more time-consuming and expensive.
While Zync technology is currently optimized to function best on Amazon's EC2 cloud service, Google's acquisition will transition the technology for optimization on the Google Cloud Platform.
According to the company's website, Zync was developed to become an important in-house tool to address the issues of fluctuating project schedules and impossibility of predicting the date of final output. The company provides flexible solutions to its clients, while providing unbound creative freedoms and decreasing costs.
