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Report From The Land of SFX
prostoalex writes "MIT's Technology Review takes a look at the world of digital special effects, the industry worth half a billion dollars per year, according to the authors. It talks about the role of SFX in movie production nowadays and comes to the connclusion that while might not 100% computer-created in the future, we'll see more of realistic-looking special effects in future titles."
It talks about the role of SFX in movie production nowadays and comes to the connclusion that while might not 100% computer-created in the future, we'll see more of realistic-looking special effects in future titles.
More realistic effects in the future, huh? Boy, they're really going out on a limb this time.
GMD
watch this
I totally agree on "Out of this World" -- one of the very few games I was upset to see end. Extremely compelling, no dialog other than "ow!"
I can see a movie being made with no dialog, all action and only implicit script. Look at Aeon Flux. That is essencially what Alea is talking about, right?
--Peter
"We call them 'invisible effects,'"
And that is exactly where they should stay (barring of course the Pixar style total 3d animation stuff).
Why is this? Look at Star Wars EP2 for the obvious answer. Even with Lucas Arts churning out some of the best 3d in the movie business, there are still some amazingly obvious 3d effects (Anakin getting on and riding the creature... where Anakin becomes a 3d model getting tossed like a rag doll). And this obviousness seriously hinders the overall movie experience. Anything that pushes the viewer from the imaginary world back to realising he/she is in the theater is a bad thing, and in this case, I found myself thinking, "That doesn't look real," and bang i'm back in the theater.
So what am I say? Well, 3d should stay in the background. Until they can make it look exactly like the actor and have it move exactly like the actor, they shouldn't put it in the center of the action in a film made with real people. It is far too obvious. Though sometimes this is done pretty well.. such as Spiderman, the costumed one. The part with him in his hooded sweatshirt is also pretty obviously 3d.
But all these amazing secondary effects are just incredible, such as the backgrounds in Cast Away. Sometimes you have no idea, and that is the point of the game. Not that you can look and say, damn Lucas Arts has just made some cool 3d stuff, but to do a double take 2 months down the road when someone tells you it actually was 3d in the first place.
So basically, in the world of realistic 3d... the less recognition they get, the better they did their job.
It's not just a matter of quality. Digital projection improves the distribution process dramatically. Film is a serial medium; reproducing the film platters has a time footprint that will not shrink very much by throwing more technology at it. Furthermore, they're *heavy*... which makes shipping both more expensive and more difficult to do quickly. At the same time, the movie industry is not a whole lot different from the software industry in being constrained by release dates that have more to do with marketing concerns than how long it takes to generate the finished product. Films are often being cut right up until the last possible moment to send them for reprinting and distribution (i.e. maybe 48 hours before they premiere at "a theatre near you.")
The number of hard drives it takes to save "Attack of the Clones" is not "small," I'd wager, but compared to the size of the film platters, it's tiny. Furthermore, writing data can be done relatively rapidly compared to running prints of a film. With the right RAID setup, you can read and write different sectors to the same disk simultaneously. There's an issue of diminishing returns, but it does respond to throwing more money at it. Furthermore, you can be making multiple copies at one time; a copy of a copy of a copy isn't any different from the master. Most importantly, though, eventually the movie studios won't have to create the media *at all*... they can send the movies via secured broadband feed directly to the theatres.
Unfortunately, you and I probably will never really notice the results of this, so your point is still valid. It does give the theatres greater motivation to upgrade, though.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Any one of half a dozen rezes.
/. nerd, figure those 2^something's out!
Most Avid work is cutting video, i.e. you're cutting a low-res video copy of the film. You then take that video and go back to rematch the original film work to the cuts made with the video. This process is called negative cutting.
I'm assuming what you're referering to is special effects work and whatnot. This is generally done at 2k res, or 4k if it's appropriate (read: the producers are loaded).
2k = 2048 * something, depending on the format.
4k = you're a
-asparagui
Digital effects are like markup tags. When you first find out how to use them they're really neat but over use can detract from the real content.
On the other hand, Rosen doubts that artists or audiences will soon want to give up the unique sensory qualities of film. "If we look decades ahead, people will come to realize that digital [photography] is another way of doing things, but film will give you a different organic look," he says. "It's like oil paint and acrylic. Digital has a different texture."
I disagree with this argument. If digital videocameras and especially the projectors continue to improve it is only a matter of time before audiences prefer digital to film. The current bottleneck is the Texas Instuments projectors which are limited to 1024 or 1280 lines. Lucas filmed Episode 2 at a higher res than that but is limited by the projectors.
While film could 'fight back' by going to 70mm or using the excellent Maxivision 48 system, I think it is a loosing battle because projectors will still have jitter, and prints will continue to wear and fade.
Larger film requires more storage space as does digital. Luckily for digital, storage capabilities continue to improve as hard drives cram ever more data into their platters.
In the long view costs will come down for digital, which is another current drawback. This is assuming digital becomes popular enough for economies of scale and competition to kick in. A complicated chicken and the egg situation indeed.
I would take with a grain of salt that assumption. Real time CG has really taken off and some of the stuff shown at places like SIGGRAPH. But CG for VFX have other requirements and difficulties. Don't you think that the smart people inside these houses are always looking for the edge for every bit of performance and power? Even now a days we can't create in computers real time graphics that match the complexity of the work in Jurasic Park or Toy Stiry. Just look for Tom Duff's comments about the hype machine from graphic card makers. We might one day get it but I won't hold my breath. If it ever gets to that point don't you think SFX studios won't be the first to jump in?
Besides even though VFX studios charge a lot they are operating on razor thin profit margins. Many barely survive and many have gone belly up vecause of that, like Boss Films or when Warner killed Warner Digital. Second lets make a comparision. I mean in some of these movies you pay a star up to 20 million U$ plus what the director and maybe other actors might get and half the movie nbudget is spent on just a few persons above the line. Compare these to say paying U$ 30 million for a big FX show (say like Pearl Harbor or Mummy 2) on which you have to pay for maybe a couple of hundred people's salaries between 6 to 12 months. If anything studios are getting their FX work dirt cheap. Most of the VFX studios expenditures is salaries not hardware or software. You need to pay for the best artistc and technical talent.
"Well how do you know they were rushed."
Because I'm an animator. I can tell the difference between a rushed animation and a completed animation. Watch the Dex alien in the diner and then watch C3PO's adventures in the battle droid factory. There's a huge difference in refinement. Heck, I don't think you even need to be an animator to spot that.
"They had about 18 months of production of VFX which is longer than the average."
They also had an absurd amount of FX to do for nearly every shot in the whole movie. They had more to do than Toy Story. If memory serves, Toy Story had somewhere between 2.5 to 3 years to complete. And they didn't even have to match it up to real people and places!
"An artists are not overloaded and forced to say, too bad tat's it."
Yes. They are. A badly completed effect is more valuable than no effect at all.
"But in general it's up to supervisors to make sure VFX shots are to a level where they aer OK."
That's really no different from what I said. The choice is the same. Whether it's the animator or the manager that makes the call doesn't affect my point one bit. If I thought anybody was going to be zealously literal about what I said, I would have said 'animation team' instead of 'animator'. The truth is that the manager/supervisor is not going to have any idea if the schedule's going to be blown unless the animator says "Sorry, I just don't have the time to finish this without eating into the time I need to do the next shot."
"There is a cliche in VFX where people say that VFX are never finished you just stop working on them."
That's not a cliche, it's a myth. The point of an effect is to describe an event. "phaser shot must make slug like creature burn up and vaporize." Once all the requirements are fulfilled "phaser shoots, slug like creature burns, vaporized", the effect it's finished. You can add more elements if you want, but you don't make the point any clearer. As a matter of fact, overworking an effect can ruin the elements that fulfilled the requirement. Anybody remember Return of the Jedi Special Edition? There was a huge party at the end of it on Coruscant. Lotsa people were cheering. After leaving the theaters, one of my friends said "Did you see the statue of the Emperor knocked down?" There was so much crap on the screen that I missed that detail. Whoever did the effect of the falling statue had their work ruined because somebody didn't finish when they should have.
Ohh I did read it, and actually I re-read your link in case I didn't remember something right. I'm not saying that it will never happen. I just have an issue with those saying that it'll happen in a few years. Besides Carmack was pretty bold, saying they are all wrong. Do you think someone like Tom Duff or Larry Gritz are plain worng and don't know their stuff. These are also pretty smart guys who work in CG for movies, with PhDs and actual practical knowledge of what it takes. The parent post implied that a graphics card would be able to do the work of a dedicated 1000 CPU render farm. Not in a couple of years. And besides CG and VFX studios will be doing even more complex stuff also, it's not like it's a stagnant industry, a quick look around SIGGRAPH would convince anyone.
But you had quotes here are some in response, which I put in the previous Slashdot article about real time graphics, plus someone elses:
Wjat does the GSCube do
Playstation 2 and Toy Story
Real-Time RenderMan?
Toy Story Graphics
So yes one day it'll probably be true but I don't think my next computer/video card would be able to do it. The hardware papers at SIGGRAOPH doesn't seem to imply that it's almost upon us that hardware will match VFX quality graphics, which is another field in CG.
Also he brings some points but there are a little bit off. The waves for the Perfetc Storm were simulated first, Origin 2000 I think. After the data was generated, then it was rendered. Still it took hours just to render one frame each. Carmack seemed to only concentrate on the simulation step, when actually you can think of it as a 2 step process. Then again at AWGUA, Bill Buxton showed the fluid effcts from inside Maya 4.5 and in a video about Jos Stam he had a fluid simulator running in a PDA. Granted it was coarse and simple but it was really impressive.
I'm all for more realistic games but I'll just wait for it.
"He's a mulatto at best! Isn't it ironic that he's the one pushing the "skin color means nothing" propoganda in his music. Guess he doesn't buy that bullshit either."
If memory serves, he suffers from a fairly common skin disorder called 'vitiligo'. Basically, it's a light splotchiness in the skin that gets bigger and bigger... He probably lightened his skin so you couldn't see the splotches.
Nose jobs and plastic surgery are all about vanity, but making fun of a guy for his skin disorder is not cool. Celebrity or not, he is a human being and can suffer from the same ailments that you or I could. He chose a unique way of dealing with his problem, but people still trivialize it. I'll tell you something: Whether he has the illness or not (there's debate about that), he certainly didn't have the technique done in order to contradict himself.