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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.'"
Isn't South Park done in flash? I know a lot of Adult Swim is done in flash...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
So, why are you bothering to comment? You're just cluttering things up.
It's like those kids on "Ain't It Cool News" constantly bitching about how lame the articles are, how much of a sellout Harry Knowles is, and how everyone there should get out of their basements. Without the slightest sense of irony.
Why not just post on an article you do care about?
Why do that? You'd lose all the things that makes South Park look the way it does - paper textures, realistic shadows, and so on...
It's much better that they do the show in Maya. Not only do you get the photorealistic rendering that gives it that low-tech "animation stand" look, you get Maya's great animation and scripting tools, which make the animators and tech directors happy.
Why is 15TB of storage news? (And they don't even the full 15TB yet!)
;-)
What about the 200TB of Xserve RAID storage for a single project at the University of Wisconsin, which has been up and running for over half a year?
And no, this isn't a project serving a whole campus or an entire university student body. This is one single research project operated by one entity. Oh well, I guess supporting the Large Hadron Collider isn't as cool as South Park.
You know what's worse than an interesting Slashdot article that isn't actually news?
When 50-60% of the comments are Slashdotters bitching that not everything on Slashdot is news.
Shut the hell up and go read another article.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Must be nice to have money to burn, but "gut feeling" is a very, very poor way to select hardware.
;-)
Well, we purchased 35 Xserve RAID arrays for a single installation, for a total of 200TB of storage, after real research and comparisons as opposed to a gut feeling.
The installation is described here, with pictures. It is NOT a University-wide service; this was installed for one research project. We have much more storage around campus from EMC (in our two primary datacenters), Apple, Sun, and Storagetek, among others.
It has been up and running for almost a year now, and the only problem, across all 35 Xserve RAID units running 24x7, has been one failed disk. One alternative looked at was building whitebox PCs in huge tower cases and packing them with disk. Ultimately, it was decided that a major commercial vendor, from which 24x7 support and 4-hour on-site response is available for 3 years, was a good choice. And it was much cheaper than competitive commercial solutions. And at a cost of around $1.60/GB for enterprise storage, you can't really go wrong. And for the Mac OS X-haters out there, there is no Mac OS X as part of this solution. We are using commodity 1U servers running Fedora Core. The Linux boxes see it as generic fibre channel disk, because that's all it is. The servers are monitored with Apple's excellent Java-based, platform independent RAID Admin tools, and some command-line tools we wrote ourselves.
It's proven itself to be rock-solid. And that matches with my experience with the 20 Xserve servers we have installed, starting since around mid-2002: zero hardware failures, of any kind. Franzen had a good gut feeling. And, of course, given Apple's track record with reliability and lack of need for repairs (generally number one) when compared with other vendors from organizations such as Consumer Reports, guessing that the reliability of another Apple product will be good is probably a reasonable guess.
Because it's most likely not 800x600, but rather 4096x4096 just in case they would want to zoom in on something having the texture. Also, bear in mind that many of the backgrounds are probably still there from "Bigger, Longer, Uncut" movie and many others are probably made for possible future use in a new feature film. Rendering for the silver screen takes a bit higher res than 800x600...
which is kind of hard to do with a multi-terabyte NAS. For quick backups, nothing beats disk, but for archival storage, I'll stick with tape. Kind of hard to restore your environment when the building holding the NAS has been destroyed by some natural disaster.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
They aren't doing Southpark in 3D for the realistic shadows or paper textures, they're using Maya since it allows them much more freedom in the long run with the characters and animation, the very reason they would not use flash or any other 2D program. Character animation in Maya is great & intuitive, especially with animation as simple as Southparks, so they have all their characters in 3D which can be place in any position, any perspective, etc within their scenes. When a character turns around in the show, the animators have keyframed the characters poses, and instead of having to have an artist draw a cell of animation for each perspective of the character (front, rear, side, etc etc etc), they just turn them around in 3D, flatten the animation curves to give it that instant-motion look and they gotta working scene. A majority of their work is very likely the character animations, scene creation, lip-sync and post-render touch up to remove anything that might not have rendered the way they like.
If they used a 2D program, they would be spending more time dealing with the technical aspect of animation rather than just moving the characters around and putting them where they want them. This is not because 3D is better but simply because it is far more efficient and allows them more flexibility. As far as the paper-look, thats simply a matter of the render engine & post-render effects, nothing that couldn't be done with a 2D program either, but does take a decent amount of time to get looking good, atleast to the degree that post-render touchup will not take much time.
I would not be surprised if most cartoons in the future moved to 3D since the time-savings can really add up if you get a good setup going, and most cartoons animation movement quality is low to begin with so they can save themselves money on all aspects of it from time saved in the character animation phase.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
What, exactly takes 100mb about a background shown at 72ppi and 800x600?
Surely you jest, it takes a lot more than 100 millibits to make a background.
ppi has nothing to do with the final file size if you've already set the raster size.
Seriously, the article says "up to". If you have a crowd of a lot of people, with several layers being buildings, trees, mountains, sky and clouds, that can add up to a lot.
When a character turns around in the show, the animators have keyframed the characters poses, so they have all their characters in 3D which can be place in any position, any perspective, etc within their scenes.
You know absolutely nothing about how South Park is set up. It is done in a 3D package, but the characters are by no means "3D" in the traditional sense -- they are simply flat parts assembled in 3D space, much like the Oxberry camera stand used for the original shorts.
Characters are built "flat" using NURBS curves and surfaced using the "make planar" function, which trims a plane to the outline of the curve. The characters are simply an assemblage flat bits of geometry - the digital equivalent of a cutout bit of paper. These flat bits are textured using scans of actual construction paper.
Animation is done using set driven keys on the visibility tracks of these parts. These keys are tied to the action of a software slider. Running the head turn slider, for example, would turn off visibility on the "right" head and turn it on for the "front" head (I'm simplifying here, but you get the point)
The original decision in 1997 to go with Alias Power Animator 7 was because of the ability to render accurate textures and shadows, as well as the ability to tie sliders to visibility. Back then the sliders were driven by expressions, but Maya allowed the switch to set driven keys, which are more eficient. Flash really wasn't an option back then but 2D software such as After Effects actually were considered - AE could do the textures, but shadows were difficult as were sliders. Thus the decision to go with a 3D package to essentially do a 2D show.
(If you haven't figured it out - I used to work there)
Wow, have you actually ever used Maya? Or any digital video software?
Actually, I just wrote a book on Maya (which isn't video software, btw...) and I own several seats of it.
The biggest issue that results in needing more space than your calculations would imply is the fact that you just picked numbers out of your ass with no basis in reality. First off, the 72ppi is non-sensical in this context, has no meaning, and doesn't effect the file size. Second, they have the backgrounds done in a much higher resolution than 800x600.
You see, they do the backgrounds as large pieces that they can zoom in on. This allows them to do things like a shot where they are walking along the road, with the road scrolling past. Background plates are also often many layers. This allows a simulated parallax effect while the scrolling is taking place. So, while an actual NTSC frame is only 720x486 maximum, there is no reason that the size of the background plates would be restricted to this resolution.
From a Storage Admin's perspective, they've got a pretty old infrastructure and they are moving to a newer, faster more flexible setup... smart move.
They started out with DLT7000, which I don't think you can buy anymore, but those drives could only backup about 32MB/s with compression. Compare that with a modern day LTO-3 drive which can backup 80MB/s WITHOUT compression. Even if they just installed 3year old 1Gb/s FibreChannel HBAs, and upgraded the tape drives, they would have had a better set up. Hopefully they upgraded their backup servers otherwise they'll hit bottlenecks just trying to drive faster tape and disk.
Even though they went with a Xserve based upon a 'gut feeling', the Xserve, while not the greatest array out there (even in the midrange/low end segment), I've seen worse.
I think the bigger news in the article is that they kicked out Legato. For a small shop like this, Legato might be over kill.
Good to see they are upgrading with the times.
South Park, for whatever bashing it takes as infantile potty humor mixed in with occasional Left wing / Right wing issues, has set a new standard for cable TV shows. An average episode costs less than $100,000 USD (not counting whatever deals Creators Parker and Stone have with Comedy Central) and can go from concept to final print in two weeks. Throw in it's high ratings with the 18-35 crowd, and in one 30 second commercial spot, you the parent company have just recouped your initial investment.
Adult swim has taken this sort of guerilla approach, picking up cheap, quick turn around projects. There's no huge capital outlay (unless you're buying an old fox show that was a failure and will probably never see the light of day again.....) and even if it fails, you can drop something fresh into it's slot in no time.
I wonder if the business plan ripoff has contributed to the Viacom / AS fued? Or if viacom just can't remove their heads from thier asses...
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Though I am missing the last few seasons from my DVD collection, what I've heard from the commentary thus far is that they are the only remaining, currently airing, hand-painted cell animation series out there (or something to that extent). I would assume that any digital intervention in the production process would be scanning each cell into a digital format for easier and faster clean-up and editing.
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Here is an explanation of the "brown noise" that makes you crap your pants when you hear it.
Such subtle, arcane humor. I love it!
Judging by the rest of your response, the default "sub-par" you speak of also includes flames. I mean, come on, at least put some gusto into it.
The animation company I work for, Animation Collective, uses a similar setup. We have Apple Xserve G5s and XRaids. It is ridiculous the amount of data that we deal with. The raids constantly fill up. We just upgraded to the 7 TB XRaid, which I hope holds out for a while.
We are coming close to releasing a new production called Kappa Mikey. It is Nickelodeon's first ever global program acquisition.
One of our animators just posted an entry on the company blog. Check it out www.kappamikey.com/blog