Hollywood adopting Linux

The Inquirer ^ | July 24, 2002 | Egan Orion

[JameRetief]

Hollywood adopting Linux

Rendering, cheap and fast

By Egan Orion: Wednesday 24 July 2002, 06:09

BIG MEDIA COMPANIES have a well-deserved reputation for being deeply clueless about information technology. Studio executives view it as a necessary evil, albeit useful for padding byzantine accounting in order to pay their actors and investors as little as possible. But the smaller studios producing the computer animation wizardry driving many popular movies are more sophisticated. They are moving to Linux on x86 platforms, and are realizing both lower costs and higher performance.

Thus Cnet is reporting that Industrial Light and Magic

(ILM), the operation responsible for special effects in the Star Wars series and other major films, has replaced a bunch of SGI RISC boxes running Irix with less expensive Intel machines running Linux.

According to their CTO, Cliff Plummer, ILM has deployed 600 Pentium 4 workstations: "The Intel workstations... were probably 20 percent of the price of SGI workstations we bought a few years ago.... Performancewise, they are about three times as fast." A bar napkin calculation reckons this bang-per-buck improvement at about 1,500%.

In addition to its Intel Linux animation workstations, ILM has a huge render farm built with 1,000 AMD Athlon systems, also running Linux.

Other animation studios are also using Linux, including Dream Works, Digital Revelations, and Weta Digital, the New Zealand based big-screen graphics house for The Lord of the Rings films.

Animation studios are still using quite a few RISC-based platforms for precise animation work needing high-end graphics capabilities, as well as in some large servers and massive storage subsystems. It's a matter of choosing the right platform for each particular application, at the time of procurement.

However, as Linux scales up and acquires more vendor support, and when near-commodity x86 and IA-86 64-bit hardware running Linux comes out, look for Linux competition against proprietary systems to grow.µ

External Links
Cnet: "Star Wars" effects studio shifts to Intel
SGI Technology Powers Weta Digital's The Lord of the Rings Film Trilogy

IBM touts Linux tech in 'Rings' films

See Also
SGI shares drop to 53¢

[DB]

WHAT!!!

I thought Hollywood was exclusively APPLE?!

Why everyone knows that Apple is the king of graphics right?

Poor Apple… Not even an honorable mention…

[Caipirabob]

In response, in order to ensure profit is protected for new releases of Windows, Microsoft will be releasing a new mandatory version of Windows code named "Guido". It will include a 6'4" 340 pound "Collector" who will be present every time you install new software/hardware to ensure that you abide by the software license agreement and product warantee renewal guidelines. This will serve as a cautionary measure to gaurantee profits until the next version, code named "Cochran" can be released, which will include it's own lawyer.

[Utopia]

k Maya is available on Linux. Maya is considered The animation tool. It really is pretty cool. I have played with it. Lucas and Co use it (as well of some of their own proprietary stuff). Lord of the rings had many, many scenes using Maya. Info here

Of course, it all depends what you're movie is. I don't doubt it for one minute that some studios are switching platforms. Maya perfers Mac OS X. If you want a job in the industry, you'll need to be Maya/ Mac OS X savvy. It also never hurts to know other OSs as well. (Shows versatility)

[Utopia]

Sorry -- my posts get munged-- I don't know why ... Start again ...

I don't think Maya is available on Linux. Maya is considered The animation tool. It really is pretty cool. I have played with it. Lucas and Co use it (as well of some of their own proprietary stuff). Lord of the rings had many, many scenes using Maya. Info here

Of course, it all depends what you're movie is. I don't doubt it for one minute that some studios are switching platforms. Maya perfers Mac OS X. If you want a job in the industry, you'll need to be Maya/ Mac OS X savvy. It also never hurts to know other OSs as well. (Shows versatility)

[pyx]

-=]PING[=-
BTTT

[DB]

Thanks for the info.

[Digital Chaos]

Actually, Maya has been on Linux since March '01.

http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/companyinfo/history/20012002.shtml

2001 - Maya For Linux Ships In March, Alias|Wavefront ships entire suite of Maya® 3D software products to the Red Hat™ Linux® operating system. With this new addition, Linux users will experience the power of the world’s leading effects and animation software. “We’re very excited to be able to run Maya on Linux," said Michael Babcock, Software Engineer, Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.™ "The core of our puppeteering control system technology runs on Linux and we love the stability and flexibility it provides. Now that Maya’s superb character tools are available on Linux, the Henson Digital Performance Studio is a complete, smooth production pipeline that combines powerful and elegant tools to provide the best in character performance animation."

[pyx]

Maya 4.5 IS available for Linux. The personal edition allows users to fully test drive the software for free as long as its not used for commercial purposes.
There are MANY graphics tool suites available for Linux. Broadcast 2000 is another example of a high end package. ALSA is an example of a driver set for Linux for very high end sound studio production software. There are other packages such as POVRAY and many rendering and animation programs available for Linux as well.

[Utopia]

Actually, Maya has been on Linux since March '01.

I stand corrected. Thanks. I've never heard of any Maya/Linux productions, though.

[ShadowAce]

Ping

[Cable225]

I do realize this is your attempt at sarcasm.

In response, in order to ensure profit is protected for new releases of Windows,

Since the article clearly states that the Linux platform is replacing SGI workstations running Irix, Microsoft has neither gained nor lost here. They were never in the game. With this in mind, there is little likelihood MS would feel the need to take any action to protect a licensing investment they never had.

Are you just one of those anti-MS guys that thinks they're out to rule the world and needs to chirp in even when it's not relevant?

[dwollmann]

Alias|Wavefront Ships Maya 3 for Linux

The news here is the platform used to build the render farms, the workstations are secondary. I've seen several stories on Hollywood's move to Linux and it seems that when it comes to workstations none of Linux, Windows or Mac does everything so they're using all three.

[DrDavid]

So, what will Hollywood do when the RIAA and MPAA succeed in making illegal software and hardware that can be used to make illegal copies of music and movies?

It is impossible to make Linux so that it can be prevented from making copies since that code can always be editted out by clever progammers. Will Hollywood studios be the first people busted for using illegal software?

These attempts to limit functionality of multimedia hardware is going to hurt everybody!

[HAL9000]

Breaking - Pixar and Exluna settle lawsuit, NVidia acquires Exluna, drops BMRT and keeps Entropy.

The plot thickens.

[rdb3]

The Penguin Ping. Want on or off? Just holla!

Got root?

[rdb3]

Not bad for a "college dorm room" operating system, eh?