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Next blockbuster you watch could be rendered on Google: Star Trek fx biz Zync gobbled

Sergey, beam us up!

Google has confirmed its gobble of Zync, a cloud-based special effects rendering service.

"Creating amazing special effects requires a skilled team of visual artists and designers, backed by a highly powerful infrastructure to render scenes. Many studios, however, don’t have the resources or desire to create an in-house rendering farm, or they need to burst past their existing capacity," said Belwadi Srikanth, product manager for Google Cloud Platform, which will absorb Zync.

"Together Zync + Cloud Platform will offer studios the rendering performance and capacity they need, while helping them manage costs. For example, with per-minute billing studios aren’t trapped into paying for unused capacity when their rendering needs don’t fit in perfect hour increments."

Zync, formerly Zero VFX, started out in 2009 as a small rendering studio that farmed out computer processing power to film studios. The company has worked on such blockbusters as Star Trek: Into Darkness, Flight, and Transformers: Dark side of the Moon, and claims to have more than 6.5 million hours of rendering under its belt.

"Pairing this history with the scale and reliability of Google Cloud Platform will help us offer an even better service to our customers - including more scalability, more host packages and better pricing (including per-minute billing)," Zync said in a statement.

"With a friction-free, affordable, and elastic rendering solution, visual designers and artists in the industry can continue to do their best work. Yes, we are excited, and yes, great things are coming. But we most especially want to thank our customers, our partners in the VFX software industry, and our phenomenal team for getting us to where we are today."

Terms of the deal and the purchase price have not been disclosed. ®

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