Wylie Co. Brings Blockbuster Visual Effects to Life with AMD Processors

Bringing Award-Winning Visuals to Life

AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO and AMD EPYC™ processors enable a leading visual effects company to take on the biggest film projects.

Jacob Maymudes founded Wylie Co. in 2015 with the idea that it would be possible to create a new kind of visual effects company for feature films. Maymudes built an agile team that provides the highest quality work faster than traditional visual effects vendors.

“To be successful in this business, you have to be incredibly efficient,” explains Maymudes. “And in order to do that, you have to have the best hardware.” At Wylie, that means harnessing dozens of Lenovo P620 ThinkStations powered by AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO processors.

Speed makes all the difference

Paul Lambert, the VFX Supervisor for Dune, brought Wylie on during the film’s postproduction phase. Lambert chose Wylie specifically because “they’re an experienced, nimble company who were able to turn around shots to a very high quality level really quickly.” In fact, Wylie Co. created a version of every single post visualization spot in the film.

Lambert explains that when it comes to postproduction, speed is everything. “In post-vis, it’s all about a turnaround,” says Lambert. “Because you get direct feedback from the director, he’s kind of expecting to see results either later in the day or the next day.” That’s where Wylie’s choice of AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors pays off.  “We needed to turn around hundreds and  hundreds of post-vis shots and hundreds and hundreds of final shots,” says Maymudes. “[The AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors] provides an immense number of cores and just an unfathomable amount of bandwidth, and that’s what we needed.”

Wylie Co. used Lenovo ThinkStation P620 workstations powered by AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors based on 7nm process technology delivering unmatched CPU core density for professional workloads. A single socket AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processor provides high clock speed and up to 64 cores to deliver the performance needed for even the most demanding animation, compositing, creative finishing, and rendering requirements. And with support for 128 PCIe® 4.0 lanes, AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO delivers twice the I/O performance over PCIe® 3.0. Having the right technology in place enabled Wylie to turn around incredible amounts of iterations and be exceptionally efficient with their team, according to Maymudes. By the end of production, Wylie had finished nearly 300 post-vis shots as well as approximately 900 final visual effects.

Quality you can see

But the Wylie team isn’t only about being fast. “Our post-vis shot quality was comparable to the finished shots being completed by other vendors,” Maymudes says.

“That enables the director and other heads of departments to see quickly what is really possible. That enables them to massage the look and feel and timing of big visual effects shots without spending a whole lot of money. And that’s really the point.” In one sequence, an actor had to interact with a holographic bush. “It’s quite a difficult thing to achieve,” explains Lambert. “The team at Wylie had to meticulously line up where the bush was relative to the actor’s body. They did it to a quality level in post-vis that we questioned what else there was to do to it. Ultimately, Wylie finished the sequence so well that they were nominated for an award from the Visual Effects Society.”

Handling blockbuster quantities of data

“Filmmaking generates an immense amount of data,” says Maymudes, “and when you’re creating a film like Dune, you’re probably going to create more data than any previous film. We’re talking thousands of terabytes.”

Big impact from a small remote operation

To accommodate the shift to work-from-home and supplement its AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processor-based Lenovo ThinkStation P620 workstations in 2020, Wylie designed a data center to support remote workers using AMD EPYC™ processors. “We can separate four or five workstations onto a single processor, which is an incredible value,” says Maymudes. “And you still get phenomenal performance. We can have several work-from-home artists, all working off of a single build on an EPYC processor.” Senior VFX Producer for Wylie, Kris Drenzek, says, “Whether we’re remote, whether we’re in the office, whether we’re on set, it’s important for us to not skip a beat for our clients. Having the AMD EPYC CPU based machines embedded in our data center allows us to do that.”

Change is a constant

Looking ahead, Maymudes is excited to build on the power of his company’s solid technology foundation. “Our relationship with AMD and Lenovo has really flourished in the past couple of years,” says Maymudes. “They just get visual effects.” Wylie is diving into machine learning and AI, which Maymudes predicts is the future of visual effects. According to Maymudes, those advances have “to be run on bleeding edge tech, and Lenovo and AMD can supply that.” As for Lambert, he not only agrees with the course Maymudes is steering for Wylie, but he has now joined Wylie as the firm’s executive creative director as it embarks on a new blockbuster project, Dune 2.