How STURDY. Delivered 10 Days of Rendering in Less Than 24 Hours for the Latin Grammys

Can a creative team deliver a broadcast-ready visual experience for one of today’s most high profile musical performers in under two weeks? The answer is, yes, yes they can.

Project at a Glance

Bringing a Cinematic Performance to One of Music’s Biggest Stages

STURDY. is a multidisciplinary creative house that has built a reputation for creating visuals that audiences remember long after the performance ends. They deliver creative direction, stage design, visual content, and immersive experiences for some of the world’s biggest artists and brands, including Bad Bunny, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Travis Scott, Linkin Park, Peso Pluma, Adobe, and Formula 1.

When Puerto Rican singer, songwriter, and dancer Rauw Alejandro was invited to perform at the 2025 Latin Grammys following the release of his album Cosa Nuestra, STURDY. was tasked with directing and designing the performance as well as producing the visual content that would accompany it.

Watch the performance here:

The challenge wasn’t simply creating compelling visuals. It was creating them against a deadline that left almost no room for error. To put it into perspective: Production began on November 1. Show day was November 13. That is less than 2 full weeks.

In that compressed timeframe, the team needed to concept, design, animate, render, composite, review, revise, and deliver a broadcast-ready visual experience for one of the most watched events in Latin music.

The full, 5 minute design set:

Why Live Production Leaves No Room for Rendering Delays

Unlike film or episodic content, live entertainment rarely follows a predictable production schedule.

Creative ideas evolve constantly and technical requirements change. Simultaneously, new opportunities emerge constantly while last-minute adjustments are often unavoidable.

For studios working in live production, rendering can quickly become the biggest constraint on creativity.

“Balancing high fidelity with render times is a persistent pressure,” said

Jasper Heenan, Head of Content at STURDY. team. “Without a fast rendering solution, timelines become much more rigid, which often doesn’t suit the nature of live productions.”

Historically, rendering workflows relied on local workstations or private cloud render farms. What many creative studios have found is that local rendering limits scale. The alternative is traditional cloud render farms. However this option often introduces significant costs, particularly when projects require multiple rounds of revisions.

For a project as complex as designing both the performance and the visual content accompanying it for the artist that Rolling Stone has declared “Latin music’s greatest showman,” either option would have forced difficult compromises.

Creating a Four-Song Visual Narrative for the Latin Grammys

STURDY.’s primary production pipeline combines Cinema 4D, Houdini, and Octane Render, with Adobe After Effects serving as a key tool for compositing, editing, and animation.

The studio’s creative process always starts with collaboration. The team works closely with artists to understand not only what they want audiences to see, but what they want them to feel. From there, creative development expands across stage design, lighting design, camera direction, animation, and visual storytelling.

Once concepts are approved, production begins with animatics and blockouts before moving into lighting, shading, simulation work, rendering, compositing, and final delivery.

For the Latin Grammys performance, the final content was built around a four-song medley that would ultimately be assembled from four to five major visual sequences. Those sequences were anything but lightweight.

The fully rendered sequence turned out like this:

Scenes featured hundreds of individually keyframed pieces of geometry designed to create the appearance of theatrical stage flats. The project generated scene files ranging from 150 MB to 1.2 GB before textures and simulation caches were included. The working project folder on a single artist’s workstation reached approximately 60 GB, while total storage requirements for the project are estimated at between 3 and 5 TB.

Five artists contributed across digital painting, 3D modeling, animation, and CG production.

The final media package delivered to the venue exceeded 100 GB.

When a Ten-Day Render Timeline Meets a Twelve-Day Production Schedule

Rauw Alejandro’s performance for the Latin Grammys lasted just under five minutes. Rendering it, however, was another story.

Including preview renders, revisions, fixes, and final outputs, the project generated approximately 22,096 frames at roughly 6000 × 2000 resolution.

Render times varied significantly depending on scene complexity, ranging from approximately 30 seconds to three minutes per frame on STURDY.’s local hardware, which included systems ranging from single NVIDIA 3090 workstations to dual 5090 machines.

Based on those averages, rendering the final content locally would have required between 150 and 225 hours of rendering time. That’s nearly ten full days.

The problem was obvious.The entire production schedule was only slightly longer than ten days. Without access to additional compute resources, rendering alone would have consumed nearly the entire project timeline.

From Ten Days to Less Than Twenty-Four Hours

To overcome those constraints, STURDY. leveraged Render Network’s decentralized GPU rendering network.

Rather than relying solely on local hardware, the team distributed rendering workloads across Render Network’s global network of GPU providers. The impact was dramatic. While final-resolution rendering would have taken approximately ten days locally, the entire final render workload was completed on Render Network in less than 24 hours.

One sequence from the project provides a useful illustration: A render submission consisting of 1,471 frames would have required roughly 12 hours to complete on a local workstation under ideal conditions. Using Render Network, the same sequence finished in approximately 40 to 50 minutes.

For STURDY., the difference wasn’t incremental. It fundamentally changed what was possible within the project’s timeline. To achieve similar throughput internally, the studio estimates it would have required between 50 and 100 additional workstations.

Keeping Long Cinematic Sequences Instead of Compromising for Speed

The greatest benefit wasn’t simply speed. It was creative freedom. One of the team’s original goals was to maintain long, cinematic one-shot sequences throughout the performance. In live production, those types of sequences are often shortened or broken apart because rendering requirements become too demanding.

Studios frequently rely on looping elements and segmented visuals to reduce rendering workloads and minimize risk. For this project, STURDY. didn’t have to make those compromises.

“Frequently we have to carefully plan how we execute longer sequences because we simply don’t have the time or power to render them,” explains Heenan. “We didn’t have to do that with this project, which gave us a lot more freedom in storytelling.”

Because rendering capacity was no longer the primary constraint, the team was able to focus on delivering the strongest creative experience rather than designing around technical limitations.

What Are the Biggest Challenges of Complex Creative Projects?

The biggest challenges creative studios face aren’t creative revisions. What often threatens delivery schedules is the smallest mistakes. Throughout production, STURDY.’s scenes were built from hundreds of animated geometry elements. During review, occasional issues would appear such as an object that failed to leave frame correctly during a transition, a misplaced element, or a rendering artifact that wasn’t visible until final output.

The fixes themselves were often straightforward. The challenge was rerendering. On a local workstation, correcting even a small issue could mean waiting hours for updated renders at final resolution. Those delays compound quickly when deadlines are measured in days or hours.

With Render Network, the team could make adjustments, resend the render job, and receive updated frames fast enough to keep production moving.

That flexibility proved especially valuable as the deadline approached. The final deliverable was uploaded to the venue approximately one hour before Rauw Alejandro was scheduled to begin rehearsal. In live entertainment, that kind of timeline is not unusual.

Having access to scalable rendering capacity can be the difference between scrambling to make compromises and delivering exactly what was envisioned.

The Need for Scalable Compute as Visual Ambition Grows

As audiences expect increasingly immersive live experiences, STURDY. believes rendering infrastructure will play an even larger role in creative production.

The studio sees a future where live visuals feel more integrated with physical environments, creating experiences that blur the line between digital content and reality.

While real-time technologies continue to evolve, offline rendering remains essential for achieving the level of fidelity, polish, and compositing control required by many large-scale productions.

Distributed rendering helps bridge the gap. Instead of waiting days to see the next iteration, artists can receive feedback in hours while maintaining the visual quality that audiences have come to expect.

At the same time, growing demand for GPU resources across AI, content creation, and other industries is making hardware increasingly expensive and difficult to access. For creative teams, that makes scalable rendering networks even more valuable.

How Decentralized Rendering Becomes a Competitive Advantage for Creative Teams

For STURDY., Render Network delivered more than faster renders. It reduced production risk and preserved creative flexibility. It also transformed what would have been nearly ten days of rendering into less than twenty-four hours.

On a project that moved from kickoff to live performance in less than two weeks, that difference mattered. Most importantly, it allowed the team to focus on what they do best: creating memorable experiences for artists and audiences.

As creative expectations continue to rise and production timelines continue to shrink, access to scalable GPU rendering is becoming more than a technical convenience. It’s becoming a competitive advantage.