Google is buying Zync, a special-effects firm, amid hopes the rendering company's cloud-based graphics software will attract Hollywood studios away from the traditional model of server farms.
Zync's graphics-rendering software has been used to flesh out and pretty up Hollywood blockbusters such as "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," "Star Trek: Into Darkness," "Looper" and "American Hustle."
"Creating amazing special effects requires a skilled team of visual artists and designers, backed by a highly powerful infrastructure to render scenes," says Google. "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."
Anyone who has ever played around with chroma keys or added filters to a home movie has undoubtedly waited anxiously for the assembled project to render down into a single video file. With the likes of Michael Bay directing, that render work is exponentially higher and Hollywood studios usually outsource the task of rendering to special effects companies and finished videos to organizations that rent out farms of servers by the hour.
Once Zync has migrated from Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) over to Google's cloud servers, the search company says it plans to bill studios more precisely than the existing Hollywood models have done in the past.
"Together Zync + Cloud Platform will offer studios the rendering performance and capacity they need, while helping them manage costs," says Google. "For example, with per-minute billing studios aren't trapped into paying for unused capacity when their rendering needs don't fit in perfect hour increments."
Zync, based in Boston, says it's thrilled to migrate over to Google's cloud platform. The roughly five-year-old company says its special effects software was born to leverage the power of cloud computing.
"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)," says Zync. "With a friction-free, affordable, and elastic rendering solution, visual designers and artists in the industry can continue to do their best work."
Terms of the deal between Google and Zync have not been revealed, making it unclear if the Android maker is merely looking to serve as an umbrella or has more aggressive plans to innovate in the field of visual effects. Amazon, which recently scooped up Twitch when Google couldn't because of antitrust issues, has also shown an interest in Zync and recently commissioned a study on visual effects.
