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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.'"
Well, his method of choosing one vendor's product line over another certainly is efficient. Just go with your "gut feeling" and buy whatever your feelings tell you.
Whether you end up with the best tool for the job is another story.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
...Cartman roshamboed someone for it.
I'm pretty sure that their providers of DL Tape are probably saying "They took mah job!"
"Franzen said he chose Apple hardware based on a "gut" feeling that its technology would be good, and so far, he has not been disappointed."
Bad, bad Franzen. Must be nice to have money to burn, but "gut feeling" is a very, very poor way to select hardware... although this is a good example of brand awareness and marketing in action.
OTOH, it must be nice to have a job where you can make purchasing decisions based on a gut feeling, I normally have to justify every purchase three times in three different ways to three different execs... just like they send out procedural memos.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Seeing as though The Simpsons are still drawn by hand, I would imagine "storage needs" involves warehouse space in addition to digital storage.
Just don't name your machine "kenny." It's not good to have it crash every episode - even if you can reboot it.
First time I saw the show, I figured it was PowerPoint.
If you think about it, maybe there are a few missing pieces to the rationale for choosing Apple hardware. But doesn't it feel like the right thing...right here in the gut? Because that's where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen...the gut.
Did you know that you have more nerve endings in your stomach than in your head? Look it up. Now, somebody's gonna say `I did look that up and its wrong'. Well, Mister, that's because you looked it up in a book. Next time, try looking it up in your gut. I did. And my gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.
Now I know some of you may not trust your gut...yet. But with my help you will. The "truthiness" is, anyone can make IT decisions. I promise to feel IT decisions!
"It's Dot Com!"
it kills kenny faster and more efficiently.
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.
Only Apple servers will do the job when the South Park guys decide it's time to play "kick the server."
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
For those of us who are ignorant and don't see why someone would use Apple hardware over good commodity stuff, what's the advantage in going with Xserve stuff?
You plug it in and it works.
It's sort of like the underpants gnomes, except there is no step 3.
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
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.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
It's news because South Park is pushing certain limits much farther than anyone else, and so it is useful to know what technology they use. Think back to shortly after The Simpsons became a hit, and then every other network tried to jump in with animated prime-time shows, and pretty much all failed. This is discussed on one of The Simpsons DVD commentaries, and Matt Groening and the others explain what these other shows did wrong. The big thing was trying to use too few people. These other shows would hire one or two big name writers, and expect them to write a whole season. On The Simpsons, on the other hand, they had a dozen writers, with most writers only working on one episode for a season. They had many directors, with each directory only responsible for an episode or two. So, it is not surprising that these other shows sucked...how can one or two writers and one or two directors produce year after year (or even one year) of quality on a weekly TV series?
But look at South Park. They do all the things that for those other shows were fatal mistakes. Most episodes are written by Trey Parker, or Trey Parker and Matt Stone, or by those two and Pam Brady. And besides writing, Parker and Stone direct. They write original music, and perform it. And they do a large number of the voices.
And on top of that, they do it on an insane schedule, sometimes not finishing a script until days before the episode must air.
Yet, it works. They produce a great show.
To do this requires very good technology. They aren't sending stuff off to Korea, to come back weeks or months later. They've got deadlines much tighter than any other animated series, and so they need technology that is very fast and very reliable, much more so than any other series needs.
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)
This is Slashdot, where people think Linux on a Xbox is a solution for something.
Many here will never understand why people buy stuff from actual companies, and things they just pull out of a box and turn on and go on with their life at that.