New Lucas Headquarters To Open in San Francisco

Afroloop writes "This article (with pics) in the SFGate covers the opening of the new Lucas Headquarters in San Francisco's famous Presidio. It will house up to 1,500 employees by next fall. From the article: 'The Presidio will feature 600 miles of fiber-optic cable. 4,000 processors and 150 terabytes of storage -- massive computing power and speed, with the ability to work 10 times faster than they can today.'"

Comments

Re:Faster or Better?

[DrEldarion]

If you wanted to be optimistic, you could say that more power doesn't translate into more CG, but rather higher-quality CG.

(Plus, it's near-impossible to put more CG in his films anyway...)

Isn't it funny how . . .

[dgrgich]

. . . a terabyte just isn't as impressive as it used to be? After all, it is possible for a relatively green computer tech to go down to Best Buy and slap three 400MB drives into her rig (ahem...) and have a terabyte ready for whatever goodness she chooses to place there.

I know, I know, in three months, this will be quaint but it used to be - not so long ago - that a terabyte was this massive hill on the horizon. Now - well, not so much.

Huh?

[K8Fan]

I thought the Presidio was supposed to be for non-profit organizations, like the Internet Archive.

Re:Faster or Better?

[Trogre]

Perhaps one day they'll come up with a way to fix one thing that's always bugged me about the Tattooine sequences in old and new SW movies:

Shadows.

On a planet with two suns, all shadows cast would look deicdedly different from what we're used to. Going by the two shots that show the suns, they appear to be (impossibly of course) in the area of 10 sun radii apart. This would produce two sharp, light shadows for each object, with a darker patch where both shadows intersect.

Because they were filmed in mono-sunned Tunisia, it would have been impossible to give the correct effect when filming the OT, and very difficult with the last 3 films. Even with current state-of-the art CG post-processing such a task would be very time-consuming, and would probably involve creating a 3D model of the objects and environment to get the shadow casting looking anywhere near realistic.

Of course some shots would need to remain unaltered for artistic reasons (for example the shadowed Padme/Anakin hug on the igloo wall in AOTC), but you could use the justification that this was late evening and one of the suns may have already set.

If done well, this would be one CG revision that I would welcome.

I can't believe I just typed this.