However you get here.
Wrangle sets a small studio up on AWS Deadline Cloud — fresh, or bridged from Deadline 10 — using OpenJD, the open job format AWS itself builds on. Then your artists submit renders from a browser tab: no plugins, no installs, nothing to maintain on any workstation. The setup work is ours, not yours.
No farm yet? We build it.
A working Deadline Cloud farm has real setup cost: a farm, a queue, a fleet, a storage profile, IAM roles wired correctly, quota increases filed before anything can actually render. Done by hand, that’s 2–5 days of a pipeline TD’s time — or a $5,000–30,000 consultancy engagement. Wrangle does it as a product: one-time $999, on your own AWS account, with defaults chosen for a small studio, not a blank console. Then your artists render from a browser tab.
- Farm, queue, and a service-managed fleet are provisioned with sane defaults — sized for a small studio, not a guess.
- Storage profile and path mapping are configured so submitting from an artist’s workstation just works, whatever OS they’re on.
- OpenJD job templates for the renderers you actually use — Maya, Houdini, Blender, Nuke — are wired in from day one, not left for you to write.
- Artists submit from the browser the moment the farm exists — browse to the scene file, and Wrangle figures out everything it references. Nothing installed on any workstation, ever.
Still on Deadline 10? We bridge it.
Deadline 10 entered maintenance mode in November 2025 — security fixes only, no new features, no new DCC-version support going forward. It still works today, and there’s no need to panic-migrate. But the road forward runs through Deadline Cloud, and the two use genuinely different job models: Deadline 10 plugins versus Deadline Cloud’s OpenJD templates. That conversion is the actual work, and it’s the part Wrangle does for you.
- Assessment of your current Deadline 10 setup — which plugins, which job types, what’s actually in use versus legacy cruft nobody touches anymore.
- Job-template conversion: your Deadline 10 plugin-info files become OpenJD job bundles, one renderer at a time, checked against real jobs before anything cuts over.
- Submitter cutover: artists get the Deadline Cloud submitters for the same DCCs they already use, with the same settings they’re used to.
- Cutover, farm by farm or show by show — your call, not an all-or-nothing weekend.
Nothing you’ve built on Deadline 10 gets thrown away in the process — the templates convert, they don’t get rewritten from scratch.
Already running? Just connect it.
If you’ve already got a working Deadline Cloud farm, there is nothing to set up. Connect it with a read-only IAM role (external ID, scoped to exactly what Wrangle needs to read) and you’re watching your farm in the monitor the same afternoon — no changes to how you render, no re-platforming, nothing to migrate.
- One CloudFormation template creates the read-only role in your AWS account. You run it, you can read exactly what it grants before you do.
- Wrangle verifies access and shows you what it can see — farms, queues, quotas — before anything else happens.
- You’re watching your farm. Write access (for Nightshift’s requeues) is a separate, later, explicit opt-in — never bundled into the first connection.
What’s OpenJD?
OpenJD is an open specification for describing a render job — what to run, what it needs, how it depends on other steps — in a way that isn’t tied to any one scheduler. AWS built it, and Deadline Cloud is native to it: a job template written in OpenJD is just YAML, readable and editable without a proprietary tool.
That matters for one practical reason: it means your setup isn’t locked to Wrangle. The job templates, the submitters, the queue definitions — all of it is OpenJD underneath, which is the same format Deadline Cloud itself speaks natively. If you ever wanted to manage a farm without us, the format doesn’t stop you.
Questions worth asking
- Is this another thing my team has to set up?
- If you already have a Deadline Cloud farm: no. Connect with a read-only role and you’re live the same afternoon. If you don’t have a farm yet, that’s exactly what this page is — Wrangle does the setup work, not you.
- Does Wrangle get write access to my farm?
- Not unless you turn it on. The initial connection — and provisioning a fresh farm — use separate, explicitly scoped roles. Nightshift’s ability to act (requeue, resubmit) is a later, separate opt-in you control per queue.
- How long does a fresh setup actually take?
- The AWS-side provisioning — farm, fleet, queue, storage profile — is fast once quota increases are approved (AWS’s own approval lag, typically a few days, is the long pole, not our work). Once quotas land, you’re rendering.
- What happens to our existing Deadline 10 templates?
- They convert — plugin-info files become OpenJD job bundles, checked against real jobs before anything cuts over. Nothing gets rewritten from scratch, and you can migrate farm by farm rather than all at once.
- What does setup cost?
- $999, one time, charged before provisioning runs — against the $5,000–30,000 a consultancy bills for the same outcome. If you already run a Deadline Cloud farm there’s nothing to pay: connecting is part of the subscription ($149/farm/month, 14-day trial).
- Why not just use AWS’s own setup docs?
- You can — they’re thorough. They’re also written for someone comfortable in the AWS console, filing their own quota increases, debugging their own IAM policies. If that’s not your pipeline TD’s day job, that gap is what this is for.
Wherever you’re starting from, start this week.
Fourteen days of Submit free on your own farm — and a live demo farm to look at before you sign up for anything.
