By Karen Moltenbrey

Vancouver Film School (VFS) is one of the most distinguished entertainment art schools in the world, offering intensive yearlong programs for talented students looking to pursue a career in film production, animation and visual effects, game design, and more. The curriculums are demanding, encompassing a great deal of hands-on instruction whereby students generate hundreds of productions during their time there, including animated short films, video games and feature-length movies, depending on the program they are pursuing. The students must demonstrate an unwavering commitment in order to succeed. They also must have the latest technology at their fingertips to complete their complex coursework within the school’s environment, which mirrors that of real-world production studios.

To this end, VFS recently leveraged cutting-edge solutions from Dell Technologies throughout the campus IT infrastructure and ecosystem, ensuring that students, faculty and administration could work as creatively, productively and efficiently as possible. The new equipment includes more than 900 Dell Precision 5820 tower workstations with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 GPUs used across all the school’s programs, in addition to more than 600 Dell UltraSharp and S-series displays. There is a range of Dell EMC infrastructure solutions and VMware virtual servers running behind the scenes as well.

“Our students are challenged to create industry-quality projects and images. They work closely with current industry professionals, and using similar high-quality equipment allows them to learn in real time alongside the changing industry,” says Colin Giles, VFS’s head of animation and visual effects, noting the importance and advantages the new investment brings.

15 VFS Programs — One Solution
The Dell install was part of the school’s campus-wide refresh of its hardware, which occurs every three years as manufacturers change their technology specs. In keeping with this schedule, several months ago VFS began evaluating replacements for its HP Z workstations in all the classrooms and labs.

“We have about 15 different programs here and collectively determined what each program’s hardware limitations were,” explains Bernard Gucake, head of IT at VFS. “Then we had to make sure we were giving the [roughly 1,500] students at least 20 to 50% more room to push the equipment.”

Indeed, students in graphics-heavy programs, such as Film Production, Animation and Visual Effects, and Game Design, work with intensive creative applications that require more robust solutions than, say, those enrolled in Entertainment Business Management. However, the school decided to have one hardware configuration for the whole facility, so as not to restrict student access.

“Historically, VFS has done two or three types of configurations, but we found that was limiting on course scheduling, where we could only schedule certain programs in certain campuses or in certain labs,” explains Gucake. “We wanted to remove that restraint so students could move among all eight VFS campus [buildings] and work without system limitations.”

VFS reviewed hardware solutions from the industry’s top vendors and was impressed with the architecture of the Dell hardware. “It was a more robust unit and had the longevity we needed,” Gucake says, referring to the school’s update schedule. “As for the graphics cards, in our previous refresh, close to the end of year three, they caused a real bottleneck. So instead of going for the RTX 4000 series, we decided to move up to the RTX 5000, because we didn’t want to get close to that third-year mark and have students limited by their graphics cards again.”

The Need for Speed… and More
Without question, speed was vital in the selection process: VFS’s program structure gives students just one year to complete their assignments and a final project in order to graduate. Therefore, it was necessary that the hardware run the required high-end DCC applications efficiently and without lag, giving students more time to complete their projects and, thus, more time to innovate.

The equipment also had to handle complex rendering scenarios and support real-time raytracing. With this in mind, VFS’s pipeline supervisor performed a render test using Maxon’s Redshift (GPU-accelerated) and Autodesk’s Arnold (CPU-accelerated at the time) renderers, and the Dell workstation performed nearly two and three times faster, respectively, than the previous HP Z440 model.

Those results have been proven in the classroom, too, Giles notes that students have noticed a dramatic increase in response time and in lowered rendering times since the Dell/RTX 5000 install. As a result, he says, “they will be able to iterate much quicker than before. Being able to see results more rapidly will save time and allow them to grow further than they could before.”

Durability and cooling were other important considerations when making the workstation decision. “It’s a lab environment; you are putting [the machines] in front of students where things happen,” notes Gucake. “Also, we had to make sure there was no overheating, especially with the graphics cards we have, so the 5820 (with 16 gigs of video RAM) was definitely our number one choice. Our campuses are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and when students are rendering on their machines, the computer CPU is running at 100%. If there’s not enough cooling within the unit, the computer could shut down as a safety precaution.”

As for convenience and interoperability, Dell offered an end-to-end company in terms of workstations, servers, monitors and so forth. “Dell also gave us insight as to what professional studios are using, what other Dell technologies work well with the RTX 5000s, what optimizations can be done — it gave us a broader perspective of choices,” Gucake points out.

Accommodating Change in a Suddenly Different Environment
VFS ordered the Dell equipment with plans to deploy the full installation in April 2020. But then COVID-19 hit in March, forcing VFS, like many others, into a virtual learning scenario practically overnight, right before the refresh began.

Although VFS’s strength lies with its hands-on instruction, the school already had been exploring how it could leverage that into an online curriculum down the road, according to Gucake. COVID, however, accelerated that timeline from three to five years in the future to the present. “And from an IT perspective, we were not 100% online-capable [when the pandemic hit],” says Gucake.

So with the refresh looming, VFS’s IT department had to transform this brick-and-mortar institution into an online school, so that the students, who were now located off the campus, could access the workstations in the various classrooms and in the school’s 50-some labs. This required a good deal of work, preparation and testing, and encompassed infrastructure changes, network changes and internet upgrades so that each student could be assigned and connected to a specific computer done using remote access technology from Teradici.

Then a few short weeks later, the refresh took place. More than a dozen IT specialists from VFS worked with six people from IT infrastructure provider Powerland, from whom VFS made the Dell purchase, to set up the new equipment within this now remote learning environment. While such a changeover typically takes about a week to complete, this one took close to a week and a half due to shipping delays with the new equipment because of the pandemic.

When the animation and VFX students began using the new equipment for remote learning, they experienced “increased response and performance from the software, most specifically rendering times, which allowed students to work faster and free their time to engage with their education in a deeper way,” notes Giles. “This was especially important while working remotely, as we could be more responsive to their needs.”

Gamers for the Win
A performance difference was readily apparent for the game design students as well. About one-third of the game design students use Unreal Engine, while the remaining students use Unity for their final project builds — two engines whose technology is exceptionally robust. “The Unreal teams, in particular, were getting hammered remotely because the projects are quite complex, and they are throwing a lot at the engines,” says Christopher Mitchell, head of game design.

“When the new machines arrived and [the game design] students were connecting remotely, it was like they suddenly had full access to the computers. It was a night-and-day transformation, which is why we are grateful that we got the hardware that we did, including the GPU horsepower,” adds Mitchell, noting some students are doing things they couldn’t with the previous hardware, such as raytracing, because it was too slow. “Now they have playable frame rates.”

In fact, Mitchell expects to see a lot more projects with GPU-based particle systems. “That kind of VFX in game development in particular is going to explode here.” He also expects a lot more AR and VR projects, “as students are able to push their imaginations and get it into their games, rather than being constantly aware of optimization at every step.”

Like many schools, VFS is continuing along the remote learning path presently, but that hasn’t changed the high level of education its students receive. VFS alumni can be found in practically every renowned VFX, animation and game studio in the world. And it’s a sure bet this current class of students will be ready to embrace that same success when their time comes.