VFX artists are modern-day magicians in the film & television industry. Crafting worlds that take audiences beyond the confines of reality, blending technical expertise with a creative touch, every VFX professional walks a tightrope between expression and precision.For the team atBaked Studios, a boutique VFX shop based in New York City and Los Angeles, efforts are focused on invisible effects, meticulous edits like blue-screen replacements and set extensions that blend seamlessly into the final cut. Despite their covert artistry, the creatives at Baked have become renowned for their ability to layer nuanced details and bring artistic visions to life, providing a range of VFX post production for some of the biggest film companies and streaming platforms.Supporting this intricate, data-heavy work, however, takes a different skillseta keen sense of workflows and media management. Without a fast, secure, and reliable way to share assets between collaborators, creating high-quality VFX becomes a cumbersome task.Choosing a hybrid workflow, which includes a mix of on-premise and remote collaboration, Bakeds creative output is rooted in the talent of its team, but also the effectiveness of its processes. With main offices in New York City and Los Angeles, and annex locations in Montana and soon Atlanta, the workflow supervisors at Baked chose to recently revamp their approach.Now, lets put Baked Studios current workflow under the microscope and uncover how a cloud storage solution, powered by Suite, has simplified operations, made it possible to collaborate across vast distances, and deliver fine-tuned visuals with superior efficiency.Managing complex, distributed VFX workflows, Bakeds existing on-prem infrastructure provided instant connectivity to mediabut that stopped at the front door. With many artists working remotely, coordinating projects between Bakeds various on-prem and remote locations complicated operations, as did ensuring consistent access to critical configuration files. So, the initial challenge was to take a well-oiled on-prem workflow and connect it to the cloud for real-time remote collaboration between key players.Cameron Target, VFX pipeline manager at Baked, spearheaded the process and tapped Ricardo Musch, a London-based VFX pipeline consultant at Nodes & Layers, to hatch a clever plan. To use Suites cloud storage as a mounted drive location integrated directly with Bakeds Flow Production Tracking database (formerly ShotGrid), on-prem servers, and render farms.Flow just needs a central storage location; it asks you to point to a mounted drive, any disk location, Target explains. We can point it directly at Suite, and Flow doesnt distinguish Suite as different from any other mounted drive.The team then simply relies on shared file-pathing guidelines to ensure everyone on a project organizes media correctly. Not surprisingly, the process is simple, so when Target brought the idea to the rest of the team, eyes widened. Bakeds leadership understood how it workedand the benefitsimmediately.We built the tool so that you can either share media directly to Suite, or to Bakeds local storage in New York, says Musch. VFX studios generate a lot of dataprojects can grow to 40-50 terabytes. We split up hot assets that we need readily available, and we store those all on Suite. Everything else stays local.For George Loucas, Founder & VFX Supervisor at Baked, greenlighting the use of Suites cloud storage became a no-brainer once the team tested the integrated workflow and experienced the advantages.Suite has been widely embraced, and that says a lot, Loucas says. For our team to see the benefits and the efficiency thats music to a business owners ears. George Loucas, Founder & VFX Supervisor, Baked StudiosTaking it a step further, Target explains how the system works by using templates within Flow Production Tracking, allowing media to be easily distributed between the two storage locations.Flow uses tokens linked to existing information in the database, Target says. We just added an extra token called Storage Location into our template; now there are two options for our editors to pick[store files] in Suite or on-prem. Every file in our system has a corresponding file path that dictates where it is kept. Its exciting to use Suite as mounted storage that fits into this industry-standard platform; Suite allows us to have a central link, so we can continue using our familiar workflow, but through a cloud platform that operates just the same.Storing all active media on Suites cloud storage not only simplifies but unifies the teams efforts. On-premise employees can utilize the companys powerful infrastructure in tandem with Suite while remote artists get real-time connectivity to assets as if they were working in-office.At any given time, 25+ VFX artists, coordinators, and producers work directly off of Suite, where the team stores configuration templates and all active media. In turn, everyone remains connected to the most updated versions of every layer, node, and asset.For Matt Hartle, partner & executive creative editor at Baked, stationed at his office in Montana, that connectivity is a vital benefit of the cloud-based VFX workflow on Suite.When were reviewing files and notice simple things that need a quick adjustment, Im able to hop into the project directly from Suite to make those changes, Hartle says. It makes our studio feel small, like were all sitting in the same room on the project. It just flows seamlessly on Suite.Even with a dispersed workforce, Bakeds supervisors act with confidence as they choose which projects stay entirely in-house and which get placed on the Suite drive. Even when adding new team members with just a few clicks, admins can apply user-specific permissions that limit remote access to certain files and folders, with the ability to revoke access instantly, if needed.You can set up a really professional shop with loads of flexibility really quickly, Target remarks. Suite is the backbone for that. CG artists and compositors also frequently work with specific plugins, often having certain tools & preferences saved locally on their editing machine of choice. On Suite, every one of those creative tools is compatible right out of the box, enabling artists to work the same way they would off of a hard drive, but remain connected to the team from anywhere in the world.Our teams can collaborate with all the plugins they already use, Musch explains. This is an important noteyou can simply point Nuke or any other software to Suite and it just works.Moreover, additional features like Suites CLI compatibility with Linux; a convenient built-in Time Machine feature that can recall files down to the millisecond; and direct-to-cloud external file sharing with Suite Connect also help Bakeds supervisors and creatives shine.Ive tested it on Rocky, the industrys Linux distribution of choice, and it works great. The CLI-compatibility makes it really easy to deploy changes and throttle actions across our network, Target says. You can also edit a Nuke script, save it to Suite, and maintain version control through Time Machine, meaning you can easily roll back to an earlier version of that script if you need to reference it. Having a shared space for configurations taps into one of Suites cool central source of truth ideas. Anyone in New York or Los Angeles can pull the updated files. Having that flexibility and access from everywhere its insane. Theres no easier way to do it.From everyday, granular efficiencies to overarching benefits that affect top execs and project managers, Bakeds revamped cloud-based VFX workflow on Suite highlights how streamlined collaboration can lead to accelerated creative results. Better yet, success often pairs with growth, and Suite makes it effortless to scale without the usual unnerving overhead.Were currently building out our operation in Atlanta and Suite makes that less daunting, says George Loucas, founder & VFX supervisor at Baked. We can dip our toes in, without a large commitment to on-prem costs upfront. It lets us build out a small team and provide access to data quickly, instead of having to commit to racks of storage, servers, and everything else that comes with a fully configured on-prem setup. Were excited about these new opportunitiesthese technological advances are allowing everything to run better, upping the game.As a full service, mid-size VFX agency, Baked Studios represents a large swath of the visual effects industry, a sector of independent shops using the latest technology to produce the best content possible. Lastly, VFX projects arent getting any simpler, and its the teams finding efficiencies on the cutting-edge that will continue to thrive, take on bigger projects, and help define the next chapter of visual effects in film and television.Suite has enabled us to do things we didnt think we could, Target says. We can work with our on-premise servers at the core, but easily expand. Theres no easier way to do it.Brought to you by Suite Studios:This article is part of the befores & afters VFX Insight series. If youd like to promote your VFX/animation/CG tech or service, you can find out more about the VFX Insight series here.The post VFX without limits: How Baked Studios revamped its hybrid workflow with file streaming on Suite appeared first on befores & afters.