Introduction
The Mill is one of the top visual effects and content creation studios collaborating on projects for the advertising, gaming and music industries. Playing home to many talented artists and technologists, The Mill is no stranger to the industry–regularly partnering with the world’s leading agencies, groundbreaking directors, creative firms and visionary brands. For the past 26 years, The Mill has been consistently recognized by peers and clients for delivering outstanding work and has earned the most prestigious industry awards for craft, creativity and innovation. Some of their most outstanding accolades include Cannes Lions, AMPAS (EMMY), D&AD, VES, British Arrows, LIA, Shots, CLIO, and of course the Oscar they won in 1991 for Ridley Scott’s epic, Gladiator.
Products
Sohonet Media Network, Sohonet FastLane
Overview
Secure, quick and cost-effective access to the cloud with Sohonet FastLane
“We use Sohonet because they’re approachable and extremely knowledgeable about the post-production industry and its often-unique requirements”
- Have full control and visibility into how your data is routed
- Skip the risk of the public internet
Challenge
The Mill was looking at the use of cloud service providers such as Google and Amazon for 3D rendering. Before using the cloud, burst capacity for rendering was only possible by renting hardware and shoe-horning it in wherever we could find space in the office and it was a constant challenge, with many companies chasing the same rental pool, then once you had the hardware, finding space, power and cooling to install the kit in the building. The cloud provided the solution, but the question was, how to we reach it securely and quickly without blowing the budget?
Solution
As a longstanding customer of Sohonet’s, with existing SMN (Sohonet Media Network) connections to their global offices, The Mill turned to Sohonet, to provide a secure solution which could harness the power of AWS and Google Cloud’s computer power right to their corporate networks quickly and without blowing the budget. Sohonet FastLane gave them the capability to securely access cloud resources with speed and cost efficiency.
Result
After only a couple of days of using FastLane, it was apparent to the Mill Team that “this way of working was going to radically change the way we dealt with burst rendering requirements,” said Johnathan Brazier (Group Systems Manager at The Mill). He adds “We use Sohonet because they’re approachable and extremely knowledgeable about the post-production industry and its often-unique requirements. They’re also great at helping out with more unusual one-off requests extremely quickly. We know we can trust Sohonet to engineer cost-effective reliable connectivity solutions”.
Discover how Sohonet can help you with your remote collaboration and real-time review needs.
