Slashdot Mirror
Linux goes to Hollywood
j2brown writes: " Yahoo! News has this little article about IBM taking Linux to Hollywood. " It's not a very in-depth article, but it is interesting that Big Blue is saying that Hollywood will be moving their rendering stuffs to Linux in the next 12 to 18 months. Wonder how SGI feels about that.
At this point studios want CPU cycles cheap, and they are already comfortable writing toolchains on Unix.
Linux combines the best of both worlds, cheap fast PC hardware and Unix. One studio said they could afford to replace their Linux cluster twice as often as the SGI renderfarm (since it cost half as much) so they could keep themselves closer to the state of the art in processing power.
SGI used to offer awesome custom graphics acceleration hardware but custom hardware limits choice, and costs more than general purpose stuff. And the general purpose stuff is nearly as fast.
Pixar's Renderman runs on Linux, and due to the wonderfully low cost of Linux and the cheap method of build your own machine, renderfarms in racks tend to run linux at many post houses.
Also, Square has entered the arena with one amazing ray tracer. For the white paper inclined, this is pretty sweet. It explains Maya and how it works with their custom app on Linux using Parallel proessing via the Pthread library.
http://www.squareusa.com/kilauea/
// john athayde
# x@boboroshi.com
# http://www.boboroshi.com/
As the article says, and we should all remember, SGI's also selling Linux boxes now.
It's easier to go with something that's being worked on by the Open Source community, since you can be pretty sure that any Open project with sufficient momentum will get the major kinks out over time. Besides, it's easier for SGI than to keep on supporting IRIX, which has had its own fair share of disaster stories.
It's going to go back to a hardware battle, and this is where IBM may not be ready to compete. Using Linux is nice, but what about render times? What about the overall architecture? Are these IBM boxes going to beat out SGI in price and performance?
If so, then SGI should worry. Linux has nothing to do with it.
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
AFAIK, both Titanic and Shrek were rendered on Linux. (They were using Alphas in Digital Domain and Intels at PDI to do it.)
Furthermore, PDI is using Linux *on the desktop* since early 2001.
-jfedor
Don't get me wrong. I'm not in favour of copyright infringement, but the notion that it should be illegal to watch Dr Strangelove on a Linux box because movie makers are obsessed that someone might use knowledge gained from the movie playing software to make a copy of the film, is absurd in the extreme.
I don't want to see Linux helping an industry that is so negative about open source and ideologically committed to its destruction. I don't want to see Linux helping an industry that lobbied for laws that effectively put the major art form of the 20th Century behind an electronic curtain leading to a situation where we may even lose much of what's important by the end of the 21st. An industry that has consistantly lied, even in court, about the motives of those wanting to break the encryption, and whose products appear to be increasingly designed to prevent consumers having any control or rights whatsoever of things they've paid money for.
I can't prevent it from happening, that's what a free operating system is all about after all, but I can say that those who help Hollywood in this fight and provide open source solutions to them, are a bunch of slimeballs, and insofar as we have a community, they should be blackballed from it.
Sorry, strongly expressed I know, but it's something I feel particularly angry about.
KMSMA (WWBD?)