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VFX & Animation

How R3D Studios turned 60-minute workstation launches into 60 seconds

How R3D Studios turned 60-minute workstation launches into 60 seconds

R3D Studios cut workstation launch from 60 minutes to 60 seconds and doubled GPU density — without new hardware. See how.

60s

Workstation launch time — down from 60 minutes

2×

GPU density from existing hardware

About

R3D Studios delivers high quality feature-film stereoscopic conversion. Their global team supports GPU-intensive rendering, simulation, and compositing across teams collaborating around the clock from multiple time zones.

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VFX & Animation

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"Orion shifted our focus from finding stability to using the stability to iterate."

Donald Strubler

,

Head of Development & Co-Founder, R3D Studios

The Company

R3D Studios renders the kind of visual effects that audiences see on the screen of a feature film and assume are simply real. Their pipelines combine real-time previz, GPU-accelerated rendering, and physical simulation across teams collaborating in multiple time zones.

With 10 artists running AI-accelerated 3D conversion workflows on AWS around the clock, they deliver feature-quality work in weeks — not months. Their goal heading into 2026: double headcount without adding a single GPU node.

That constraint isn't theoretical. It's their production requirement, and it's what brought them to Orion.

The Challenge

Before Orion, R3D's infrastructure forced a tradeoff between stability and velocity.

Workstation provisioning took up to 60 minutes — every artist start was a delay before any creative work could begin. GPU utilization was inconsistent across artist shifts: instances sat warm and billing while work paused between sessions. When something broke, the engineering team stopped shipping and started firefighting.

The deeper constraint was structural. Traditional architecture required one dedicated GPU instance per artist, regardless of actual utilization patterns. As headcount increased, infrastructure costs scaled in lockstep — and every new team member triggered a manual provisioning cycle that could take 24 to 48 hours.

Launching a workstation wasn't self-service. It was a ticket.

For a studio trying to stay lean and move fast, that was a ceiling on growth.

The Solution

R3D deployed Orion as their unified compute plane — orchestrating GPU workloads and rendering jobs across the same fabric, running directly in their own AWS environment. Their data stays in their infrastructure.

GPU time-slicing on existing instances doubled effective capacity without new hardware. Ten artists now run concurrently on five GPU nodes. The same pool that serves Helios workstations during the day automatically routes to the render queue overnight — idle capacity eliminated.

Instant workstation launches replaced the 60-minute provisioning cycle. Helios gives artists pre-configured environments they can spin up in seconds. No Kubernetes knowledge required. No IT ticket. Admins define templates once — artists click and go.

New team members onboard themselves. The infrastructure team got their week back.

The Results

Six months of production — April through September 2025 — validated the business case across every dimension R3D measured.

GPU density doubled. Ten concurrent artists now run on five g5.2xlarge instances. Compute spend dropped approximately 40% on a direct On-Demand EC2 comparison, with no Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, or promotional credits applied. Workstation launch time fell from 60 minutes to 60 seconds.

The infrastructure impact was larger than the compute line showed. When factoring in team reduction and eliminated idle capacity, total cloud spend dropped approximately 78%. The infrastructure team went from five engineers to two — the same workload, fewer people.

Since April 2025, the platform has run without a single critical failure or infrastructure ticket across time zones.

R3D's goal of doubling headcount without growing the GPU fleet isn't a 2026 aspiration — it's already how they operate.

"Juno just works for us. We can't imagine running without Juno."

Donald Strubler

,

Head of Development & Co-Founder, R3D Studios