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South Park Turns to Xserve for Storage Upgrade
Lam1969 writes "Computerworld reports that South Park producers are turning away from digital linear tape and direct-attached disk storage to a linear tape open setup complimented by Xserve RAID disk arrays. The show's creators never thought South Park would last nine seasons, so a storage hardware upgrade was necessary. J.J. Franzen, technology supervisor at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, says he chose Apple hardware based on a "gut" feeling. From the article: 'While South Park may appear technologically amateurish with its character cutouts, over the past nine seasons the cartoon series has added a great deal of storage-consuming detail, including backgrounds and crowd shots that can take up to 100MB of memory each.'"
http://www.southparkstudios.com/behind/interviews. php?tab=20#3
Interesting stuff - has some background technical info on how an episode is put together and what systems they use to do it all.
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
The Simpsons is now an all digital production, according to the DVD commentary. It may involve "hand drawing", but that either means hand drawing immediately scanned into a computer (for cleanup and coloring), or drawing on a tablet, etc. that goes directly into a computer. I don't know what software is used, but I haven't searched either.
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