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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.
SGI effectively gives away their OS and you have to pay incredible prices for their hardware. For certain applications where real-time 3D performance or high-bandwidth memory applications is required, SGI and Sun still has the tools to beat the x86 platform any day. Real workstations still have many advantages over the best PC motherboards. But all of additional cost for SGI hardware is a waste if you are just number crunching.
However, the news that IBM and Alias are developing content-creation software for Linux is a very good sign. These are the tools that every artist would be using to push pixels, and that's the way to get a huge foothold in the Hollywood. That moves Linux for the room in the back to the desktop of each artist.
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.
Um, changing to Linux for rendering in 12-18 months?? What rock has IBM been under? Visual Effects house have been using Linux rendering already for the past 12-18 months. Final Fantasy was rendered on a 1200 CPU Linux render farm (see the recent Ars Technica article can't be bothered to find a link).
7 4 ), sure other hollywood houses have them as well.
Lord of the Rings has at least several hundred CPU linux render farm of SGI 1200 boxes(see here: http://www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/8/9889828
SGI doesn't care because they sell a lot of rack mount linux intel render servers. The real next wave of adoption of Linux in visual effects is as 3d and compositing workstations. Maya, Shake, Rayz, Houdini all run fine on Linux with the right 3d card. The only reason Linux boxes don't dominate in Visual Effects is that high bandwidth playback eg playing 2k images in realtime of a disk array is not really possible under Linux. That's why they still have a ton of SGI octanes kicking around.
This is a pretty big issue so I feel I should run down some of the more important points.
First, yes, SGI offered Linux systems a long time ago and to my knowledge they have done very poorly. They were however for workstations and not rendering, as IBM's newest offerings seem to be. IBM is probably going into workstations too, but that isn't what the article is about. Many big companies with Big Money (TM) have invested a whole ass ton in SGI clusters over the years, from Onyx computers for compositing and play back, to Octanes for creation, to Origin's for processing job queues.
Everyone is switching to Linux. PC's are so cheap and close to what SGI has to offer that it stands out as a clear solution. Pentium 4's and Athalon 4's are including more features suitable to rendering. SIMD instructions are great stuff for all the vector math that goes on behind the scenes. Linux costs nothing so when you have 1000 computers in your render farm you aren't paying $200,000 in licenses every few years. It is stable so that also helps everything, especially rendering. When a frame takes 8 hours to render, you don't want to worry about the OS crashing 6 hours through. You have 1000 computers and if they don't all work smoothly you are fucked. Lastly, Linux is unix, and that's important for an industry coming off of other unix platforms, mainly Irix.
Software for Linux is Good Stuff (TM) in the graphics world. As far as rendering goes, you have the mighty PRman, Mental Ray, Blue Moon Rendering Tools, Jig, Entropy, and many other renderers. That's good enough for just about any studio. On the software front, you have the magic four (or five, depending on how you look at it) of Maya 4 , Softimage XSI 2.0, 3D Studio 4, Lightwave 6.5, and Houdini. Maya and Houdini run on Linux right now and can be purchased for a small (huge) fee. Lightwave is the most ported 3D application that I know of and runs on Amiga (earlier versions), Windows NT, Sun OS, Solaris, Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Irix. It shouldn't be a huge deal to port to Linux. 3D Studio is another story. It has a deep history of being rooted in WinNT, and didn't even run on NT for Alpha when Alphas were all the rage so only time will tell. Also compositing software like Shake is making its way as well.
Last on the list is custom software. Pacific Data Images (Antz, Shrek) has written lots of software for Linux and ported lots from Irix as well. Linux is unix of course and that means that all the custom software that no one wanted to port from Irix to NT is now being ported to Linux with ease, and that's a huge deal.
There aren't too many Free solutions in there, I realize, but Linux can't be everything to everyone and remain completely Free. I am sure there is a lot of GIMP action going on there but not many programs in the Free world are powerful enough to help out the big studios.
I hope that clears some stuff up!
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Hmm.. Somehow I always knew that this title would appear on /., it was just a matter of time.
Next one to wait for: "Linux does Dallas".
http://dtum.livejournal.com
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/
Hopefully it won't end up like 90% of the people who go down that road, drugged-out, bimbo starlet doing softcore porn (and the director) to support it's escalating Coke addiction :)
Who wants to bet they'll still manage to put out multi-billion dollar "master pieces"....generally with nice fancy roman numerals next to the title to exploit the success of a previous successful movie (Jurassic Park II or III), or based on a video game that never really had much of a plot (Streetfighter).
"
If the hollywood studios use the dvd's in their linux rendering boxes to view their latest CG work, will they have start writing themselves threatening e-mails?
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
You have an interesting point, but you know, I think Theo De Raadt said it best regarding the licensing of OpenBSD: if you want to use it in a baby mulcher, we can't stop you anyway. Linux is not an organization; it's an operating system. The organizations involved with it are entitled to make money (if they can; they shouldn't be running to the government for help), and they're as free to do with it as they please as we are.
The fact is that you can't say, "No, you can't use it for that" when you're dealing with a GPL product. Moreover, Linux is being used in the industry by techies, many of whom probably roughly the same attitude we do towards industry lawyers. We (who is this we, kemo sabe?) can object all we want, but the truth is that there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it, and, like it or not, that's probably the way it should be.
And all the handwringing in the world won't change that.
/Brian
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?)