Google Acquires Cloud-Based Visual Effect Maker Zync

Mountain-View based Google announced Tuesday that it has acquired Boston-based Zync Inc., a startup that built cloud-based rendering technologies for visual effects companies. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The search giant announced that it acquired Boston-based Zync Inc., the maker of Zync Render software, a cloud-based rendering software. It's a piece of technology that helps movie studios take simple, computer-generated pictures of things like a giant robot or animals bashing through a wall and make it look real in movies like the "Transformers" and "Flight." Zync’s technology are known to Hollywood, movie studios and visual effect companies, they been using its software to create special effects for a number of movies like “Star Trek Into Darkness”, "Flight" and “Looper.”

Zync was founded in 2011, originally under the name of Zero VFX, a cloud-based rendering service. The Boston-based startup develops technology that was used on several high profile films, including “Star Trek: Into Darkness”," Flight" and “American Hustle.” Zync's technology provides clients more flexibility when generating 2D and 3D special effects, it also offers storage and data transfer services. Zync’ technology has been used to render hundreds of commercials and over a dozen of feature movies.

The move bolsters Google's cloud offerings, enable the company to compete more effectively with another cloud giant Amazon. Google’s cloud rival Amazon also has a service that could be used for large scale rendering; they called it G2 Elastic Cloud Compute and feature a configuration that includes Nvidia GPUs. Startup Zync has been a customer of Amazon's cloud-hosting service Elastic Compute Cloud.

Google said on a statement posted on its Cloud Platform Blog: 

“Together Zync + Cloud Platform will offer studios the rendering performance and capacity they need, while helping them manages 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.”

Image credit: The New York Times Bits