Weta Digital Ltd. said today it’s going “all-in” on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s public cloud infrastructure to host its visual effects tools and collaborative workflow platforms.

Weta Digital is a New Zealand-based company that provides animation and compositing software tools for visual effects artists. Its software is used to create immersive, computer-generated worlds for TV, movie and advertisement productions.

The company provides artists with access to an LED-stage virtual production service and more than 100 proprietary tools. They’ve been used to bring to life some of the most stunning artificially generated worlds, such as the beautiful landscapes of Pandora in “Avatar” and Middle Earth in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

The problem for Weta is that its workflows generate massive volumes of video and image file data that put an enormous strain on its own information technology infrastructure. As a result, it needs to perform a very delicate load-balancing effort to ensure its production facilities can operate at peak capacity. To achieve this, it said it intends to move the vast majority of its IT infrastructure to AWS, where it can take advantage of the company’s compute, storage, analytics, machine learning and security services.

By moving to AWS, Weta said, it will be able to spread its workloads more efficiently around the world, thereby freeing up more of its resources to create new visual effects technologies. One immediate advantage of moving to AWS is that it will be able to leverage the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to access specialized graphics processing unit instances that can integrate machine learning into the visual effects creation process more easily. That will enable artists to create more lifelike and detailed graphics, the company said.

“Weta established a remote collaborative workflow in March due to the pandemic to seamlessly continue work on the Avatar sequels and other films,” said Weta Chief Executive Prem Akkaraju. “With the power of AWS, we can now take that success to a global scale.”

Akkaraju said AWS’ virtually unlimited compute capacity will enable its visual effects artists to work safely and securely during the pandemic without suffering from any technical limitations. In addition, the AWS platform will enable the company to test new ideas and technologies to advance its visual effects capabilities more generally.

“AWS services such as machine learning and data analytics will help Weta deliver projects faster and more cost-effectively, and our customers will enjoy the fruits of Weta Digital’s continuous innovation,” Akkaraju said.

Weta Digital’s choice to go all-in on Amazon’s cloud is just the latest in a number of significant customer wins for the cloud giant. Just yesterday, AWS announced that the job listings website Indeed.com had selected it as its preferred cloud provider. And last month, the fast food chain Jack in the Box Inc. said that it was also going all-in on AWS.

Image: Weta Digital/Facebook