Zync Render

» see zyncrender.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Zync started in 2011 inside Zero VFX, a Boston effects shop, because Brian Drewes and Sean Devereaux needed more machines than their building held. The pitch was ordinary to describe and hard to build: upload the scene, rent a few thousand processor cores by the hour, get finished frames back. It ran on Amazon EC2 and sold itself as the first arrangement where cloud storage and cloud rendering came as one product instead of two problems for the studio to wire together.

The credits were real. Zync rendered work on Looper and Star Trek Into Darkness, and by 2014 the company counted over a dozen features and 6.5 million core hours of billed compute behind it. Google announced the acquisition on 26 August 2014 and never said what it paid.

The obvious follow-up took a year. Zync came back as a beta on Google Cloud Platform on 11 August 2015, off Amazon's machines and onto Google's, billed by the minute. For the next five years it was the render farm you could rent from inside the same console where you rented everything else.

This is a product I could only have met in another career. The arithmetic is familiar enough from my side of engineering, where you also count cores against hours. What a render farm sells, though, is not cores. It is a reproduction of somebody's pipeline, the scene file plus every plugin version it expects, standing up correctly on a machine the artist will never see. Zync spent its whole existence on that layer.

~ the record ~

~ the rewrite ~

On 2 May 2019 Google shipped Zync Render 2.0 and called it a complete Google-native rewrite. Jobs started faster and scaled further, with 96 processor cores available on a single virtual machine and up to 48,000 of them across one job. GPU rendering arrived on Nvidia's Tesla P100, and there was a new quota system built for studios large enough to need one. The supported list ran to five applications, from Maya through Cinema 4D, with Arnold and V-Ray among the renderers underneath.

Thirteen months later, on 21 June 2020, the service stopped accepting new users and development stopped with it. Whatever the rewrite was meant to prove, it did not get the time to prove it.

~ the email ~

Google never posted anything. No blog entry, nothing on the product page. What exists in the record is users forwarding the email they received, and the render farms that compete with Google Cloud reacting in public: GridMarkets offered former Zync customers a 20 percent credit bonus for their first month, and Conductor went after the same displaced accounts.

The service closed on 1 June 2021, in the same stretch of months that took Google Poly on 30 June and pushed Tilt Brush out as open source. Three graphics products went in one season, which reads less like three separate decisions and more like one department being counted.

~ what cloud rendering actually is ~

Rendering suits renting better than almost any other workload. It splits into independent frames without argument, and it arrives in bursts that ruin any plan to buy hardware for it, since the machines a studio needs in the last six weeks of a film are machines it does not want in January.

What gets in the way is everything around the frames. Studios carry security clauses about where footage may sit and licensing written for a fixed machine count. Zync's value was in absorbing that. When Google shut it, the compute did not go anywhere: Google Cloud is still there, still selling cores by the minute. The part that died was the translation layer, and that was the part that had taken ten years to build.

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