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Leading Visual Effects Studio Transforms Global Media Production with High-Performance Virtual Workstations on AWS
Infrastructure & DevOps Modernization
Cloud Native App Dev
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Halon Entertainment migrates to AWS, doubling rendering speeds and cutting workstation resourcing time from days to minutes with a custom Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution.
"Moving to AWS with Caylent’s custom VDI solution completely changed how we operate. The solution allows us to meet the strict security requirements demanded by the VFX industry as a whole as well as individual requirements which are studio-based that we can now adhere to much more quickly. It’s not just a performance gain—it’s a fundamental shift in how we scale, support artists, and deliver projects globally. Our IT team now focuses on enabling creativity rather than fighting hardware limitations, and our artists can work from anywhere with the speed and power they expect. It’s night and day from where we started."
Scott Sinnott
Director of IT
→ AWS-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) built on high-performance G6e & G6 GPU instances, enabling remote artists to work seamlessly from anywhere.
→ Custom-built self-service provisioning system with a React frontend and Python Lambda-based API, reducing IT dependency.
→ Self-service roaming EBS volume system, enabling artists to independently manage persistent storage volumes across instances directly from the UI
→ Automated instance migration between AWS availability zones, ensuring workstations remain accessible even when capacity constraints arise.
→ Multi-user access and Okta integration, allowing real-time IT support and enforcing security compliance with Trusted Partner Network (TPN) standards.
→ Workstation provisioning time reduced from a full day to just 5-6 minutes, allowing faster onboarding and team scaling.
→ Render speeds improved 2x, enabling artists to complete projects more efficiently.
→ Cloud deployment eliminates costly hardware procurement delays, avoiding CAPEX and ensuring rapid scaling.
→ Business agility increased, allowing Halon to spin up new project teams in hours instead of weeks, supporting global expansion to Glasgow, Scotland and beyond.
The visual effects (VFX) industry has always been at the forefront of technological innovation, constantly evolving to meet the growing demands of the film and gaming industries that continually improve the complexity of their visual compositions. Artists and designers often rely on high-end GPUs and specialized software, but in recent years, scaling high-performance workstations has become increasingly difficult.
Limited supply and rocketing demand for use cases such as AI training, have made GPUs and high performance computing hardware difficult and exceedingly expensive to procure and have placed immense strain on studios that rely on cutting-edge processing power. Traditional on-premise infrastructure also requires careful power planning, cooling, and physical space, all of which further complicate the ability to scale resources quickly for new projects. As the industry moves toward faster production cycles and distributed teams, the need for a flexible, cloud-based approach has never been greater.
Halon Entertainment, a leading visualization and animation studio based in Glendale, California, has played a pivotal role in shaping modern storytelling, contributing to blockbuster movies, TV shows and games like The Mandalorian, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Fortnite. Halon was acquired by NEP four years ago, expanding its capabilities as part of a larger media technology group. Their work demands advanced rendering capabilities, and seamless collaboration across artists, supervisors, and directors worldwide.
Historically, Halon operated out of a small Santa Monica office that posed infrastructure challenges. The facility struggled with heat management, power failures, and limited network bandwidth, all of which made supporting their fleet of on-premise Windows workstations increasingly difficult. Artists relied on VPN access to physical machines over a shared 1-gigabit connection, which frequently resulted in bottlenecks, slow rendering, and connection timeouts. IT staff had to manually manage these connections, further increasing operational strain. With the studio’s expanding global footprint, provisioning new workstations quickly for projects in the United Kingdom, North America, and beyond became paramount.
Partnering with Caylent, Halon transitioned to a custom AWS virtual desktop infrastructure that has significantly improved Halon’s efficiency, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. Previously, onboarding a new artist took days due to hardware procurement and setup delays and resourcing projects could take weeks of lead time. Now, workstations are provisioned in minutes, accelerating project ramp-up times. Render speeds have doubled, accelerating production timelines, while automated scaling ensures resources are only active when needed, cutting unnecessary costs. Halon now benefits from a pay-as-you-go approach, optimizing spending based on actual usage.
Collaboration has also improved with multi-user access and shared storage, enabling artists, supervisors, and IT administrators to work on the same instance simultaneously. Shared storage also ensures seamless file access across team members. IT operations have streamlined significantly—manual machine reboots are no longer needed, and cross-region deployments provide redundancy that prevents downtime. Additionally, security has been strengthened with Okta integration and TPN compliance, ensuring studio-grade access controls and data protection.
By transitioning to a cloud-based workstation model, Halon has eliminated infrastructure bottlenecks, improved artist efficiency, and gained the flexibility to scale globally. The impact extends beyond just IT—it has changed how projects are staffed, how work is delivered, and how Halon competes in the fast-moving VFX industry.
With 50+ users already onboarded, Halon is targeting a full migration by April. The solution also positions Halon to expand global operations seamlessly. The ability to spin up high-performance workstations on demand gives the studio an unprecedented level of agility, allowing them to take on larger, more complex projects without hardware limitations.
Halon’s work in previsualization, postvisualization, and animation demands high-performance computing for software like Unreal Engine, After Effects, and Photoshop, all requiring GPU acceleration and substantial memory bandwidth. Their 140 on-premise workstations provided this power, but remote access via VPN caused latency, bottlenecks, and performance issues in addition to significant management challenges.
The limitations of traditional hardware procurement and deployment became increasingly evident as resourcing workstations for new projects required weeks of lead time, often requiring multiple vendors and inflated costs due to supply constraints. Even when hardware was available, provisioning new machines required manual setup, IT intervention, and physical transport, leading to delays. Once deployed, these workstations came with significant overhead costs, whether they were in active use or sitting idle between projects. Scaling up meant significant capital expenditures (CapEx), while scaling down left expensive resources sitting idle. Additionally, managing hardware across multiple locations meant higher operational overhead and increased downtime risks due to power failures, physical wear, and manual maintenance.
Halon needed a cloud-native virtual workstation solution that could eliminate these challenges and could:
Halon explored some alternatives but found major limitations. Data center hosting required upfront capital investment and was slow to scale, especially with ongoing GPU shortages. AWS Workspaces, AWS’s pre-existing solution, offered limited hardware options which lacked sufficient GPU power and driver-compatibility for their workflows. Third-Party VDI Providers required a minimum commitment of licenses, making the move financially inflexible.
These limitations underscored the need for a custom AWS cloud-native solution—one that could replicate their high-end workstation performance while eliminating hardware constraints and reducing operational overhead.
To address Halon’s scalability, performance, and operational challenges, a custom cloud-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution was developed. This solution combined AWS’s most powerful GPU-backed instances, automation for provisioning and scaling, and advanced security integrations, ensuring that Halon’s artists could work seamlessly from anywhere.
Since Halon’s artists rely on GPU-intensive applications like Unreal Engine, Photoshop, and After Effects, the solution was built on AWS EC2 G6 & G6e instances, which provide top-tier NVIDIA GPUs. These instances were chosen specifically because they support the chipset architecture and drivers required for Halon’s rendering pipelines.
Additionally, compared to on-prem workstations, these instances delivered twice the rendering speed while eliminating costly GPU procurement delays. Previously, securing high-end GPUs like NVIDIA 4090s required weeks of lead time and cost up to $3,000 per unit. With AWS, Halon can provision high-performance GPUs instantly, ensuring that artists always have access to the computing power they need.
To eliminate IT bottlenecks in workstation provisioning, a custom-built web-based frontend was developed using React, integrated with a Python Lambda-based API. Through this interface, users can:
This self-service approach significantly accelerated onboarding for new projects, cutting workstation setup time from a full day to just 5-6 minutes.
One of Halon’s biggest challenges with traditional hardware was fixed capacity and underutilization. The cloud solution automatically scales up and down based on demand, ensuring that Halon only pays for resources in use.
Halon’s artists needed a persistent storage solution to ensure that work wasn’t lost when instances were spun down. A self-service roaming EBS volume system was implemented using FSx file storage and Lambda-driven automation. This allows artists to be more autonomous while ensuring Trusted Partner Network-level security.
Additionally, a shared file storage system ensures that collaborative files remain consistently accessible across different instances, significantly reducing the risk of data loss and minimizing disruptions to artist workflows.
To meet Trusted Partner Network (TPN) security standards, the infrastructure was fully integrated with Okta and AWS SSO, ensuring secure user authentication across all workstations,strict access controls, and audit logging and monitoring, ensuring full visibility over system usage.
Working within AWS’s availability zone capacity constraints, the solution included a cross-region deployment model to mitigate downtime risks. If an availability zone runs out of capacity, users can instantly migrate their instances to another zone. A multi-region setup ensures business continuity, even in case of AWS disruptions. Additionally, automatic data replication across regions minimizes downtime, ensuring that no more than one hour of work is ever lost.
This redundancy and failover capability is a significant improvement over on-prem infrastructure, where power failures or hardware breakdowns could result in days of lost productivity.
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Company
Founded in 2003, Halon Entertainment is a visual effects studio and pioneer in real-time Visualization and Virtual Production for feature film, episodic, and commercial content. Halon provides the full suite of visualization services and has collaborated with world-class directors and new filmmakers alike to help bring their cinematic visions to the screen dynamically, efficiently, and safely.
Location
Glendale, CA
Industry
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