Billed as a previs and VFX "studio on wheels," Silverdraft Mobileviz is betting on proprietary, superfast render power on the go

Mobile production trucks for sports and other live events are common enough. But as tapeless workflows bring more VFX and post services on set or nearby, a newer breed of semi-permanent mobile lab is emerging. Typically these on- or near-set outposts are built-to-order satellites of a post facility or editorial house hired for the project. The latest version, pumped up on unheard-of mobile compute power, 18 wheels and five axles, is ready for hire and a drive to a film or television location near you. The Silverdraft Mobileviz VFX truck has arrived.

So what’s inside this digital lab on wheels? The pictures below tell you a lot about how this ergonomically designed mobile studio is laid out. But the biggest news here is just how much render power is behind all those stacks of Micron storage: 1,536 computing cores, processing 30 teraflops, connect to a full 20 TBs of solid-state storage.

Also inside are editing, animation, color and finishing stations running Autodesk MotionBuilder, Maya and 3ds Max, Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer. V-Ray and mental ray, as well as PipelineFX’s Qube! tend to the render farms. The company says all you need for 2D and 3D stereo capture on 2K, 4K or HD shoots is here, including in-camera pre-visualization, mo-cap recording and realtime, high-res visualization of VFX shots. The idea behind the extra compute and render power is to give a boost to the facility crunching the rest of those pixels when its already running at peak load.

Processing at 30 teraflops may seem like a lot, but as many VFX-filled Hollywood projects will need much more power, the company can scale that 30 to process at up to 350 teraflops of processing power. That’s 350 trillion floating point operations per second, if you’re counting. It helps to have a super-computer genius on your side, as Silverdraft Mobileviz does.

The Mobileviz team includes post industry veterans Steve Hendricks, president, and Silverdraft CEO Amy Gile, who both saw a need first-hand to support the growing demand fro VFX and 3D stereo previs and rendering on location. But the brain behind the proprietary render power is system architect Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, a director of Virginia Tech University’s Center of High-End Computing Systems and an associate professor at the school. He’s also a co-founder of Silverdraft’s Mobileviz division. An early researcher in parallel processing and network scalability, he developed the university’s System X, widely regarded as one of the top three supercomputers in the world.

Silverdraft’s first Mobileviz truck out of the gate is 53-feet long but the company says it plans to release other sizes to fit demand in the near future.