ABOUT CONDUCTOR® TECHNOLOGIES

At the core of Conductor's DNA is the idea that cloud computing will replace the traditional "render farm"

Conductor® was developed as a cloud-native application for rendering visual effects (VFX) at creative studio Atomic Fiction - makers of “Deadpool,” “The Walk,” “Game of Thrones”. When VFX supervisors Kevin Baillie (“Pinocchio”) and Ryan Tudhope (“Top Gun: Maverick”) founded Atomic Fiction, they wanted to minimize the overhead of physical machines and not follow the traditional rendering path.

At first, the studio used an off-the-shelf solution for cloud-based rendering but ran into problems achieving enough scale, so they built their own tool. After being refined and tested on many projects, Conductor was released for public use in 2017, with new features and capabilities being regularly added – including support for most digital content creation (DCC) programs.

Conductor has been used on tent-pole films, including Hellboy, Star Trek Beyond, Ghost in a Shell, Blade Runner 2049, Marvel’s Shang-chi: Legends of the Ten Rings and Pixar’s Lightyear, and on indie films; episodic television shows; commercials; motion design; and medical visualizations.

Check out our history timeline below

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Our Journey So Far

2014 - 2016

2014
Kevin Baillie and Ryan Tudhope start realizing a vision - to rethink traditional rendering and develop a way to render that was scalable, secure, flexible, and could meet the economic requirements for A-List feature production - prototyping of Conductor starts

2015
Conductor first used in production to render all the shots in the cloud on Robert Zemmickis ‘The Walk’
Conductor Tech is formed as a separate entity, spun out of Atomic Fiction to focus on Conductor development

2016
Conductor Technologies completes Series A funding round, led by Walden Venture Capital and with participation from Autodesk
Conductor used on Robert Zemeckis’ - Allied; Justin Lin’s - Star Trek Beyond; Tim Miller’s - Deadpool

2017

SIGGRAPH 2017, LOS ANGELES
Conductor launches - Conductor is now available commercially for VFX, VR and animation studios, multi-cloud (GCP, then AWS), supporting Autodesk Maya and Arnold, Foundry’s Nuke, Cara VR, Katana and Ocula, Chaos Group’s V-Ray, Golaem, Ephere’s Ornatrix, and Miarmy. New partnerships with Isotropix for Clarisse and Pixar for Renderman are announced at show
First external customer using Conductor in production
LATE SUMMER

2018

SPRING
DAS now available, replacing Gluster, and allowing Conductor to scale well beyond 100k cores simultaneously
SUMMER
Support for Windows DCCs, here. User's on Windows can now submit scenes to Conductor's Linux backend without any modifications
FALL
300M core-hours on Conductor

2019

SIGGRAPH 2019, LOS ANGELES
Conductor and AWS partner up - Conductor now available on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud AWS EC, forging tighter links with AWS Thinkbox, including Deadline
SUMMER
Conductor Companion App released, incorporating submitter tool kit, downloader and command center making it even easier for artists to use. Lowering the barrier to entry for smaller studios and freelancers to use Conductor platform
FALL
Pixar’s Tractor now available on Conductor

2020

SPRING
Deadline integration available on Conductor
Isotropix’s Clarisse available on Conductor
SUMMER
GPU support available on Conductor
Maxon Cinema 4D and Redshift available on Conductor
Blender available on Conductor
FALL
Autodesk Shotgrid integration fully available on Conductor
Autodesk 3ds Max supported for rendering on Linux with Arnold as renderer

2021

SPRING
Smart rendering with the placement API now available
Conductor available on Google Cloud’s Marketplace and available for GCP’s customers to access
Rendering agent compiled for Windows, render nodes running on Windows in test environment
Support for Python 3
Conductor available on AWS Marketplace and available for AWS’s customers to access
FALL

2022

SPRING
Conductor gaining ground in broadcast pipelines and production
NAB 2022, LAS VEGAS
Conductor and Google Cloud Platform announce partnership, forgoing even stronger links with Google’s media and entertainment, and content creators' ecosystem
SIGGRAPH 2022, VANCOUVER
Conductor Enterprise announced, with a private Beta coming in early 2023
SUMMER
Support for Windows render nodes available (in beta) on Conductor
3ds Max becomes first class DCC rendering on Windows render nodes (in private beta)
FALL
Conductor announces 3-year partnership with Netflix, giving VFX and animation studios working on Netflix original productions streamlined access to Conductor for scalable, on-demand compute

2023

1 JANUARY
Conductor Technologies is acquired by CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider built for large-scale GPU-accelerated workloads for AI/ML and VFX
SIGGRAPH 2023, LOS ANGELES
Conductor now available on CoreWeave.
With CoreWeave compute now supported, Conductor users gain more flexibility and compute resources to render large-scale visual effects (VFX), animation, motion graphics, and design project workloads requiring GPU acceleration.

CONDUCTOR IN THE PRESS

Conductor to Revolutionize Cloud-Based Rendering with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine

Conductor® now available on CoreWeave

CoreWeave Acquires Conductor® Technologies, Enhancing Its Offerings to VFX Studios