If you’ve looked at cloud workstations lately, you’ve probably landed on Paperspace. You pick a GPU, rent a machine by the hour, and get to work.
That’s a computer. It is not, on day one, a workstation. You still have to install Premiere, find the plugins, get a tablet talking to a desktop in a data centre, and figure out where the footage lives and how anyone else on the show gets to it.
Spark ProStation is a virtual workstation. Same idea on paper — a cloud PC you rent — but you sit down and the machine is already set up for the work. Windows, Mac, or Linux. NVIDIA. You can connect from a laptop, Mac, or iPad, with the workstation behaving like the computer sitting in front of you. Extra screens and a Wacom, the usual stuff. Adobe can be on the box when it starts. Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Unreal. Under a dollar an hour. It stops billing when you shut it down.
That’s the difference. One is a GPU you assemble. The other is the workstation.
Why that matters on a show
If you just need a heavier box for a week, or you’re training a model, a bare instance can be enough. A lot of people use Paperspace that way, and it makes sense for that.
A show is usually messier. Someone is cutting, someone is lighting, someone is rendering overnight, and the camera mags can’t live in a download folder. The farm has to see the same files the workstation sees. If every new machine takes two days to become usable, you don’t really have a workstation. You’ve got another setup job.
We’ve been honest about this before. Cloud has failed creatives when it handed artists an instance and called it a studio.
The farm and the files are already there
Because it’s a workstation and not just a VM, it already sits next to ShareSync and SmartCompute. Same login. Same bill. You can burst a farm without opening another account, and shut the whole thing down when the crew rolls off.
You don’t have to use any of that. A lot of people will just take a ProStation and work. You don’t have to move the company into the cloud. You also don’t have to spend the first week turning a rented GPU into something you can actually cut on.
We wrote the farm half of this here: cloud render farm vs buying a farm.
What we’d do
If you need a GPU to log into and build from scratch, Paperspace is built for that.
If you need to open the project and work, take the virtual workstation. Bring your own footage. See if it feels like the machine on your desk.
Try a ProStation and let a real job decide.