Juno Innovations to bring VFX at scale closer to home

Every VFX facility wants the same thing: infrastructure that scales with the project, costs what the project is worth, and doesn't require a six-month hardware procurement cycle to get there.

Cloud was supposed to solve this. For most studios, it hasn't.

The reason isn't the technology. It's the design.

"Everybody says cloud is expensive and painful," says Alex Hatfield, CEO of Juno Innovations. "But the reality is that cloud is not the problem. It's a design issue. If you design it right, cloud is insanely effective."

The insight that changed the approach

Alex spent years in production before founding Juno. He started as a gaffer in LA, moved into stereoscopic and VFX compositing at Digital Domain in Florida, then spent years at studios up and down the East Coast — talented artists living out of temporary apartments six months at a time, six months working, six months home. Three years of that.

"I wanted a way that I could avoid extensive travel, enjoy the outdoors, and still do what I love, which is to work on movies."

That problem stuck with him. What if the infrastructure moved instead of the artist?

An early attempt in 2013 didn't survive contact with reality. "It was clunky, like a glorified Dropbox, and we didn't have the security that studios required." Back to production work. But the question didn't go away.

The breakthrough came while working at Cinesite on projects including Spider-Man: No Way Home. Watching how financial institutions handled massive concurrent transaction loads on Kubernetes gave Alex a different mental model for what a render pipeline could look like.

"I realized that 90% of the infrastructure had already been solved over the past ten years by other industries. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You just need to go look for inspiration elsewhere."

Banks don't buy more servers for peak load and then leave them running idle. They spin up, absorb load, and spin back down — automatically. That's the model.

"Our idea was to create a system with the exact same mentality, but one able to handle a massive volume of render tasks. Once done, we delete the render nodes out from underneath it. If you looked at our infrastructure, we look nothing like a VFX studio. We look way more like a financial institution."

What GPU time-slicing actually means

The part of Orion that catches attention fastest is time-slicing: the ability to share a single GPU across multiple simultaneous workloads.

Modern GPUs were designed for parallel computation. AI training shops have spent years squeezing every cycle out of their hardware. VFX pipelines haven't faced the same pressure, but the hardware is identical. Orion adapts the same approach for render and compositing workflows, so multiple artists can share the same physical GPU without contention.

"With the AI boom, the major developers were horizontally scaling out to train their models. The margins are nowhere near as good in visual effects, but we're trying to squeeze as much out of each render node as we possibly can, so every single dollar you spend is actually being used."

There's an environmental benefit that follows directly from the efficiency gain: fewer physical machines for the same output, less power, less cooling.

"The slicing is what enables density, and density enables the ability to scale. Slicing becomes more and more valuable as your team becomes more active."

How it's built

Orion runs on Kubernetes. Every component is containerized, allowing rapid replication to any region. Workstations are software packages that perform consistently regardless of the underlying machines. Media syncs back and forth, which eliminates most of the ingest and download friction that makes cloud VFX pipelines painful in practice.

The team proved the concept on a home-built server using inexpensive hardware and student film projects — three compositors working from the same stack. Far from perfect. Good enough to validate the core idea.

"When you bring in Kubernetes the actual infrastructure is so abstracted that you're basically describing concepts. That means we can deploy anywhere, scale to as many workstations as needed, and operate with extreme efficiency."

What this means for studios

A large-scale studio using Orion can launch render nodes dynamically, slice servers for higher utilization, and scale back down the moment the work is done — on-premises hardware, cloud, or a combination.

"We could theoretically out-scale any studio in the world if we wanted to. And at a fraction of the cost of traditional workstations."

Juno is building accounts one at a time, validating the platform under real production conditions before moving up-market. Controlled growth by design, not constraint.

"We could go out and compete for the biggest VFX projects if we wanted to, but we're not targeting that right now. We want to grow in a very controlled manner."

Why it took this long

The honest answer: it required production experience to understand the problem correctly, and engineering experience to solve it. Most teams have one or the other.

"It's so hard to get through building a startup to the point where you finally see a workstation turn on, you deliver a frame, and you get that first paycheck. But every second has been worth it. Because we believed in it so much, we literally built what we think is the future of visual effects."

This post is adapted from an interview originally published by IBC on 05 March 2025. Read the original piece at IBC.org.

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