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Big Blue to take on Pixar?
spareacct1 writes "USAToday is reporting that IBM is set to announce a strategic partnership with Threshold Digital Research Labs of Santa Monica, CA. TDRL now hopes it has the deep pockets and computing power to take on Pixar as the undisputed leader in CG animated films. TDRL's spartan website is showing off digital stills. Interesting sidebar at the end of the story, both Pixar and TDRL recently dumped Sun and MS, respectively, in favor of Linux."
Pixar's movies are good because of their people, not their computers. They've got good artists, good directors, and amazing writers. Without those, you end up with movies like Final Fantasy: technically adept, but ultimately empty and pointless.
You don't just need big computing power, you need design & drawing skills, besides lots of creativity and imagination.
I could have all the computing power and still not be able to do something worth watching.
It doesn't matter if IBM is providing your Linux tech support, and it doesn't matter how pretty the pixels are.. What's important is that the movie is good, and I've never even heard of this company before.
well, believe it or not, but PIXARs success isn't really because of their rendering power -- true enough, the realism and rendering techniques used in their latest productions has contributed to making images better, but they've always had the edge when it comes down to the thing that matters: storytelling and keeping the audience interested. Look at their older shorts and their more recent feature films, the story is the main driving force.
While Final Fantasy looked quite amazing, the story and the movie just didn't fit in like most of the PIXAR movies. PIXAR makes movies for the whole family which people enjoy on different levels (best example, toy story 2) -- Shrek was a very welcome break from the PIXAR dominance, but not because it wasn't made by pixar, more because of a great story supported by a nice screenplay and good animation (it's more about how you use the tools, not that the end result has been raytraced with molecular precision)..
If they're able to produce films that would be entertaining even if they were hand drawn by a five year old, then the rendering power comes to good use; not the other way around.
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
So IBM's supplying hardware as a showcase of their new initiative. It's hardly 'taking on Pixar'. I bet IBM would love to do business with Pixar, too. Do people say that IBM's "taking on the XBox" by supplying the processor in the Gamecube?
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
Who is the grandstanding IBM spokesman that will be at every hollywood premiere and grandstand like Steve Jobs ? God does that guy have an ego or what.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Hire some talented writers and storytellers. Contrary to popular opinion, Pixar's success had much less to do with the CGI than with traditional old storytelling skill. Pumping money into the technology side at the expense of people will result in a big financial loss.
Just ask Sony.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Sure, processing power is a crucial part of it, but it's only necessary for advancing the state-of-the-art in computer graphics.
In each movie that Pixar takes, it takes about 8 hours to render each frame (or so I've read in numerous locations) and you can see that with the increasingly "less-computery" look of their movies as processing power has increased for each one.
This brings me to the point that I'm intending on making: the realism of the graphics is not what makes a great movie, it's the quality of the story and all that. I saw Toy Story again the other week and it looks so dated now compared to say Monsters Inc. It was still a thoroughly entertaining movie though because it was a good story.
I love CG films, but I admit that the main reason I love seeing them is to see what new effects and advancements have been made, which is why Pixar films are so great to me.. they're always advancing the state-of-the-art.
Damnit, now I've just contradicted the original point I was trying to make! Hrmm... BRING ON THE CG FILMS!
Regardless of whether the G5 is the fastest CPU for RenderMan, it is not per-CPU performance that matters. If you're setting up a rendering farm, you're buying n computers to render m frames per hour. At the end of the day, what matters is minimising $$$$$$ per m, not n, and I'll bet dollars to doughtnuts that commondity Intel/AMD whips a G5 mac in terms of rendered frames per dollar. Remember, Apple's CEO == Pixar's CEO.
Finally, for what it's worth, I'm a Mac user and a big OSX fan. But I know what my dollars are paying for and it ain't CPU cycles.
Will you people stop saying "It's the story, not the graphics"? Yes, we know. We knew before you told us. Even if we hadn't known, reading it 3 million times on the posts here would have clued us in. Your 3 million and 1st wasn't necessary.
That said, if IBM hires good writers then they can make good movies too. Pixar's stories are good. They're very good. They're not, however, the greatest stories ever written, and people don't collapse to their knees at the end of the film, weeping copiously in gratitude for being permitted to see such movies.
Regardless of whether the G5 is the fastest CPU for RenderMan, it is not per-CPU performance that matters. If you're setting up a rendering farm, you're buying n computers to render m frames per hour. At the end of the day, what matters is minimising $$$$$$ per m, not n, and I'll bet dollars to doughtnuts that commondity Intel/AMD whips a G5 mac in terms of rendered frames per dollar. Remember, Apple's CEO == Pixar's CEO.
Not if apple gives them to you below cost as a 'marketing expense'
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Pixar is migrating to OS X, primarily because of the G5. Pixar's OS/machine of choice seems to vary with the wind, whatever is the most powerful at the time. It seems that they believe the G5 is where it's at in the near future.
They're posting jobs for techs to assist in a migration to OS X.
Pixar hasn't used Macs every for primary work to my knowledge and Steve Jobs has been CEO there for YEARS. He's smart enough to let them pick the best horsepower to do the job.
Steve's been back at Apple since 1997 (nearly 6 years), and hasn't mandated a switch to Macs. If he did, you'd have heard an anonymous outpouring of complaints. But what you hear is, the G5 smokes and that they're migrating to Macs. This looks like the people doing the work made the decision.
Now, that isn't to say that in a year or 2 they don't switch to Itanium 2s or Opterons. I'm sure Pixar will continue to choose the most powerful machines for their type of work as they have done so in the past (SGI, Sun, Linux, Apple, etc)...
Its funny, they talk about how they want to be the leader in CG animated films, but most of the stills that they show on their website are taken from movies with CG/film composites. I think there are only three frames from animated movies. As far as I am concerned, ILM seems to be the leader in this field. Just look at Star Wars Ep. II or even more recent is the Pirates of the Caribbean. I would imagine that if ILM was to ever make a totally CGI movie, it would blow most others out of the water as far as effects are concerned. Also, they have years and years of experience in making movies, which is often more important than who has the fastest servers and the best pixel shaders.
SIGFAULT
First, Pixar and Apple do share Steve Jobs' time, and without a doubt Jobs knew about the G5 when he built Pixar's render farm a year ago out of Dual Pentium4 1U rackmounts. So Intel is almost surely cheaper than a G5 render farm would be. Second, the XServes would be far easier to maintain. Apple doesn't excel at only pretty translucent cases and lickable interfaces, they really excel at ease of use. And this applies to the render farm as well. Alot of apps, like XCode, use Rendezvous for distributed computing. Just plug a punch of XServes running an app together and you got yourself a render farm. Far easier than anything linux can do. Third, Final Cut Pro and Photoshop are serious professional apps. Other Apple apps, like Shake and Logic are THE apps in their respective markets. Fourth, Linux isn't dominating left and right. It is dominating the render farm because it is cheap and runs on cheap hardware. The workstation market is still anyone's market. Apple is in the perfect position to take over all those SGI and Sun boxes with OS X.
I will try to be original. Everyone here repeats the same argument that story is important, talent is important, technology will get you nowhere. I respectfully disagree.
.Bakshi's film). BTW, regarding Bakshi. Notice how everyone critisized the rotoscopy, which didn't work too well. The story there was on par with PJ's lame effort, but the technology wasn't there and Bakshi lost. Point proven - technology is the king.
Look at the story of Two Johns. Romero tried the "Design is King" technology and look where it got him. And look what we got - a terrible mess called Daikatana. His friend Carmack, on the other hand, is probably unable to comprehend that there might be things more important than the rendering pipeline or pixel shaders, but all id games still sell like crazy.
Why do you think the animated movies should be different? Good technology is essential, it empowers the artists, it enables the directors. The story is the cheapest and easiest thing in the whole business. For 1 million you can have the script written by the greatest scriptwriter (whoever he is). And still 1 million is just a small fraction of total costs. Even easier, everyone can use any public domain story like Disney always does. It is even possible to clone other successful films, like the Hollywood industry is often doing.
Yet, to render the underwater world beautifully you need the technology. To do it cheaply you need extensive technological expertise, you need programmers, you need hardware specialists, network engineers, etc. Consider The Two Towers. Where would that movie be without Gollum (we survived because of ME!), glorified CGI fest called Helm's Deep battle, storming of Isengard and other digital goodies? It would be just another crappy flick (no, it won't be good just because it is based on LOTR, look how they butchered the story and, anyway, remember
P.S. And don't say anything about Final Fantasy. It was a first attempt, some argue it was too complex for unsofisticated American public and, anyway, it failed to a large extent because the technology failed (as everyone agrees, animation was stiff and unnatural blah-blah-blah).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
While Pixar's rendering techniques are *good*, they aren't necessarily cutting edge when it comes to technology. Blue Sky uses raytracing for their images.
Yeah and Ice Age looked like crap, proving, once again, that's it's not about the technology.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
to use a cliche, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. an accurate rendition of something done by something other than a photograph is an impressive feat. the way they accurately (re)produced scenery, vehicles, and people the way they did was amazing to me. i find things that amaze me beautiful.
Look at the IMDB top 50 animation features. Pixar and Studio Ghibli combined share most of the top ten popular user votes. Disney is further down the ladder, their new stuff fails to captivate the audiences the way the other two studios mentioned do. This is no coincidence -- these studios wins out against their competition because of creative talents and skillful directors, the technology employed is not the answer.
Studio Ghibli and Pixar are masters at production design and storytelling, and their works have appeal to children and adults alike. You could argue that Pixar has put out a few 'buddy' pictures following a very safe and mainstream formula, but generally both Ghibli and Pixar pursues original works that aren't derivative.
Disney on the other hand, is content with stealing from other sources and perpetually rehashing their own tired 'success' formulas, often compromising style, pace and adult interest with jarring diversions and noisy, needless extra characters crammed in by accountants and suits in order to sell a few more McDonald's toy tie-ins.
Ghibli and Pixar's stuff is immensely marketable, but that seems like an emergent property, something coincidental rather than the very reason for the production to exist. Compared to Disney, Ghibli and Pixar's studio structures seem to have much thinner strata of lawyers, accountants and other suits for ideas to percolate through, which means more direct creative control from directors and production designers.
This produces richer and much more satisfying features than the bland and safe works that always result from too many suits in a creative design process.
The secret weapon of Studio Ghibli is Hayao Miyazaki. The secret weapon of Pixar is John Lasseter. Tech doesn't have anything to do with it.