Moonraker

Ultra-high-resolution immersive environments are pushing VFX infrastructure far beyond traditional film and television norms. For Bristol-based VFX studio Moonraker, that shift now means delivering content at 10K, 12K and, in one recent project, 24K.

“We’re talking about renders over ten times bigger than those made for an average TV screen, upwards of 12K,” says Mark Hartshorn, Head of Technical Operations at Moonraker VFX. “In fact, the largest screen format we’ve worked on in the last few years was 24K wide by 12K high. That’s 36 times larger than a UHD render”.

Producing content at this scale puts pressure on every part of the VFX pipeline – not just compute power, but also on keeping workflows moving smoothly.

“When you’re rendering these big scenes, you’ve got large geometry and large background plates,” Hartshorn explains. “Camera plates are now typically coming in at about 8K or above, so we must match that with our CGI. Something that looks fine at 4K will look very soft at that size. Detail becomes far more important.”

“You need capacity to render images at this level, and you need to optimise the workflow to make the best of it,” he adds. “Every time you eliminate one bottleneck, you find another, whether it’s network, CPU or memory.”

Rather than relying on short-term fixes, Moonraker has built a substantial on-site render farm over the past decade, expanding capacity as immersive workloads have grown. Today, the studio runs around 100 machines, combining CPU and GPU rendering across dedicated servers and high-spec workstations.

Reducing risk

Supporting that push into high-resolution production is Escape Technology, Moonraker’s primary hardware supplier and technical partner through multiple phases of growth. Escape advises on hardware, coordinates procurement and arranges financing, enabling the studio to deploy systems as required. Escape also supports Moonraker with flexible software licensing, allowing licences to scale up or down with project demand. “The relationship with Escape has been quite pivotal to our success over the years,” says Hartshorn. “In this industry, it’s really hard to find good tech support. The high-performance computing that we do is very different to your average office. So having a company on our side that fully understands that workflow and can support that makes quite a big difference.”

Moonraker’s current infrastructure is built around the latest generation of HP Z4 G5 workstations. “They have fast cores – and lots of them – for CPU-based rendering in Arnold,” says Hartshorn. “They also have a high-powered GPU and lots of memory. So those machines can be rendering a CPU job one day, a GPU job the next, and happily shift between the two.”

“Our workstations aren’t just artist machines,” says Hartshorn. “They also contribute to our render capacity in the evening. And when a render hits the farm, you know it’s going to go through because it’s been built on the same hardware.”

As artists build scenes on the same class of hardware used to render them, performance remains predictable throughout the pipeline, reducing risk and surprises.

Such reliability is critical for time-sensitive projects, and all Moonraker’s workstations are covered by extended warranties, supported by Escape.

“A good example is a batch of HP Z4s we bought in 2021,” says Hartshorn. “When a motherboard failed in 2024, a HP engineer was on site within 24 hours and had it replaced at no cost.”

Supply and demand

After taking on the 24K project, Moonraker identified a rendering bottleneck early. “Based on frame times and delivery deadlines, we realised very quickly that we didn’t have enough machines to render the job in time,” says Hartshorn. “Escape was able not only to advise and offer us solutions, but also to arrange the purchasing really quickly and organise financing for the equipment, so we could get it on site in time to render the project. With Escape specifying the workstations, agreeing the deal and getting them delivered, we had 10 high-powered machines on our network within about three weeks, shipped on a weekly rental basis and ready to render.”

Cloud rendering would have been an option, but Moonraker chooses to use it selectively. For ultra-high-resolution immersive projects, Hartshorn feels practical limitations can outweigh the benefits.

“When you’re dealing with 8K and above, the size of the files becomes a serious consideration,” he explains. “It’s not just the compute; it’s the data management and transport. The cost of transferring that data can outweigh the cost of rendering it. And while you’re waiting for that data to synchronise, you’re effectively losing render time. Where possible, on-prem hardware is still the most cost-effective way to render these large-screen jobs.”

Hartshorn also values the direct control that the on-site HP infrastructure provides.

“It gives you a direct connection to the bare metal,” he says. “If you need to switch out some RAM or make a change, the machine’s right there.”

Computing at scale

As immersive workloads have evolved, Moonraker has strengthened both rendering capability and storage. “The most challenging thing is the growing size of the screens and the content, and adapting your workflow, hardware and networking to keep up with that,” says Hartshorn.

To avoid a storage bottleneck, a new file server was recently sourced from Escape. Expandable to one petabyte, it is designed to scale without disruption. The studio is currently operating at roughly one-third of that capacity, leaving significant headroom for future projects.

“We can just plug in more disks rather than migrate to a whole new system,” says Hartshorn. “We also shifted from gaming GPUs to enterprise-class cards across the farm. They’re more power-efficient, slightly slower clocked but more stable, which made quite a big difference – less farm wrangling, less management for error frames.”

Hartshorn’s team ran trials to validate card choices before committing. “Escape was great in supplying us cards to test; they sent us a couple of Ampere cards when we were initially looking at buying,” he explains. “With GPU rendering, VRAM is really your upper limit; with a nice balance of 24GB, we get a good price/performance ratio and, when you do that in volume, you end up saving money in the long run because you’ve got more machines rendering the job.”

The studio’s high-powered on-prem infrastructure also allows Moonraker to explore how AI can support parts of the finishing process.

Complex tasks such as denoising or large-format upscaling can be configured to run locally, without cloud transfer delays or variable usage costs. “We have workstation specs capable of running AI models or upscaling large images for us,” observes Hartshorn. “Rather than relying so heavily on enterprise technology in the cloud, we’re trying to build a similar structure internally so that we’ve always got that to rely on.”

Immersive future

“As we’ve started to establish ourselves in this space, we’ve had more people coming to us to price work,” continues Hartshorn. “With high-profile venues like Frameless in London and the Market Hall in Plymouth, which features a floor-to-ceiling dome, you’re seeing growing demand for fully immersive content. The days of a few touchscreens and projectors are over. Everyone wants augmented attractions and immersive experiences now.”

“The infrastructure we have now lets us take on projects we wouldn’t have been comfortable with a few years ago,” he continues. “That confidence changes how we approach bids and schedules, and by planning around the resources we have, we can bid more realistically and deliver consistently.”

“Over the years, we’ve taken all the experience we’ve had in shooting for TV and film and applied that to these live screen formats. Our end-to-end pipeline, from storyboarding and previs right through to final output, means we can work with live action or CG, combine the two, and give you a 24K render at the end of it.”

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