Growth in the Digital Special Effects and computer animation industry, a sub-segment of the media and entertainment industry, is exploding world wide. A number of reasons have caused this growth and they involve the merging of technology and imagination.This article illustrates the dynamics and business model and processes of the animation effects industry and introduce the existing infrastructure.
thanks!
WTF? Premier(sic) Virtual Dub and Photoshop are for shot layout?
The range of highend to crap is amazing, as is the choice of applications for the task.
Bring along a big grain of salt. IBM usually has great articles, but this is far from the quality I expect from them. Or, maybe the other articles were bad and I didn’t know enough about the field of interest to know any better.
The person/people who wrote this haven’t worked in the space. IBM owned part of a VFX company 10 years ago ( http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.03/digital.deal_pr.html ) — this article helps show they didn’t learn much out of that.
Case in point: the article asks, “Should we use Intel, Opteron, or PowerPC for our render nodes?” Their answer is that Opteron can give you a 60% speedup.
Real answer: whatever chip provided in the best deal you get from a dinosaur like IBM, HP or Sun hoping to be in Hollywood. It almost never has anything to do with technology or speed. Speed in the farm is a red herring. Why pay for more speed, have renders finish at 4am and then sit idle from 4am-9am?