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Lucas's New HQ
pin_gween writes "The KS City Star reports George Lucas (of the "It's not about the money" fame) has opened a new headquarters for digital film works. The campus has, among several movie theaters, "data network with more than 300 10-gigabyte ports. Fiber-optics cables are connected to every artist desktop, allowing high-resolution images on each computer. In all, there are 600 miles of cable throughout the campus's four buildings." Not too shabby, or cheap."
The Presidio facility has been open for a bit. Yes, it's sweet and one thing that can't be said about George is that he does thing half-assed.
Of course, the expectation is that you work INSANE hours. I only wish I could get this set up at home so I can balance my life a little better.
This is all fine and good, but it would sure be nice to spend some of that money on writing classes, or directing semminars.
Yes, all that technology is nice, but ultimately worthless, if the movies coming out of it have no substance.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
data network with more than 300 10-gigabyte ports.
I think that means gigabits. Unless they started rating cards in bytes overnight.
Trolling is a art,
The paragraph submitted above for this article makes it seem like Lucas is hoarding all his money and somehow going against a cardinal rule of not making money. For one thing, non profit artists may seem romantic and all, but in truth we all want to get paid...and if what we do is make movies that cost millions of dollars, you better believe we want to get paid millions of dollars or more. Secondly, it's not like he's spending all his money on Bugatti's and trips to Bali...he's invested a large chunk into a creative complex where artists and movie-goers can benefit from his fortune. I'd say that's pretty damn cool.
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
And just watch the modders hit me on the head
You ought to get modded down just for pulling this reverse psychology bullshit. It's kinda insulting to us. Here's a radical notion: why don't you post your feelings and let the moderators decide whether to mod you up or down and you refrain from making predictions/comments about the process?
What most do is get the ILM badge under their belt then move on to better places to work, like Pixar or Weta. Which is why ILM can't keep ahold of the good animators anymore cause they treat them like shit. But as I said, this may have changed.
But I hate this mentality of "well, you can work somewhere else". It's like the idiocy of "be thankful you have a job" nonsense. Why can't it be a nice place to work AND make a profit? Why does it have to be a sweatshop?
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Sure it will - you're looking up gigabytes of textures at any moment.
The point is that is easy to get a new computer every 3 years but it's quite difficult to wire a hole building every 3 years.
There's all the live footage elements to consider - potentially dozens of layers for every final frame - each of which must be stored, converted, colour-graded, maybe stabilised, grain-matched, composited and edited.
What's more, any CG in the movie would be rendered as multiple separate 3D layers, not just a single frame, and all those layers also have to be colour- and grain-matched, unstabilised and composited with the live elements.
I've worked on a scene that required over 40 live and 450 CG layers for each frame of the shot - and each of those layers ranged from 40-80 MB (the shot was around 300 frames). That's around 20 GB per frame of pixels alone, not counting textures, CG geometry etc. And this data was used and re-used repeatedly as the shot evolved over the course of months.
A 10 gbps pipe to each workstation would really have helped, believe me :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?