About the Client - Aspect Film & Video are a video production company based in Bristol and London. The company creates high-quality videos for the likes of North Face, Nationwide, Pukka and The University of South Wales.

Aspect Film & Video

We sat down, virtually, with Adam Etheridge, Director & Founder of Aspect Film & Video. For the last month, Adam has been using the PL Ultimate system, to deliver a number of VFX projects, including a TV commercial for a national F&B brand, an innovative WebGL project for an international charity, and proof of concept piece for a Feature Film. 

What workstation were you using previously? 

Custom build Scan Workstation:

18 Core (Intel Core i9 7980XE s2066)
Windows 10 Pro 
64 GB RAM (4 x 16GB Cores Veng LPX DDR4 3000)
Asus WS X299 PRO Motherboard
2 x GTX 1080 Turbo 11GB

What software do you use daily?

• Cinema 4D
• Houdini
• Arnold renderer
• Redshift renderer
• Fusion Studio 
• Substance Painter
• Mari

Since switching to the PL Ultimate, how has your workflow transformed?

The switch to the PL Ultimate has impacted every aspect of the creative process. Through much faster and more reliable processing, production efficiency has taken a major leap forward. Render times are now 25% (x4) of what the production team were previously planning for, allowing us to hit deadlines faster and with a lot less stress. 

However, the efficiency uplift goes far beyond production and timeframe deliverables. For Aspect, the technology packed into the PL Ultimate has hit a creative tipping point that we’ve been waiting years to reach. As many CG and VFX processes migrate away from CPU and onto GPU tasking, many creative challenges that were once hugely time intensive, such as pyro and fluid simulations, are now virtually real-time. The impact this has on creativity is profound.  It eliminates perception fatigue for the artist, and render frustrations for the wider creative team, allowing everyone involved to go through many more creative iterations within an equivalent timeframe. This faster, in many cases real-time, feedback is having a real uplift on creative quality, and at the same time transforming the wider creative team’s relationship with process.

Summary from our Chief Technologist, James Lupton:

It is always great to see hard work pay off, and with our PL-Ultimate we couldn’t have seen a better result. Working with Adam proved to be a great opportunity, as we got a lot of great feedback, and saw results above and beyond what we expected. To see a reported 4 times increase in productivity was frankly stunning. We knew we had something great, but even that beat our expectations. Now we are as confident as ever that we have a workstation that can absolutely deliver best-in-class performance for the film, video and VFX industry. We can’t wait to see what more people will do with the PL-Ultimate.

For more details, please visit Aspect Film & Video.