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Cloud Computing Democratizes Digital Animation
kenekaplan writes "John McNeil is the chief creative officer and founder of a digital arts and communication company based in Berkeley, CA. After turning to Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing service for the first time to finish animation under tight deadline, he was impressed by how it would let him compete with bigger studios. He said, 'Cloud computing is the first truly democratic, accessible technology that potentially gives everyone a supercomputer...it's a game changer. I could never compete or be able to deliver something at the level of a Pixar or a Disney, given what I have at my disposal inside the walls of the studio,' McNeil said. 'But if I factor in the cloud, all of a sudden I can go there. And then the limitations of whether or not I can deliver something great will be on my own talent and the talent of the people that are part of the studio.'"
Does the CEO realizes that he's trading CPU's limitation against bandwidth's limitation ?
Generating a picture in full HD requires 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels.
But for a movie, the resolution is 4096 x 3112 = 12,746,752 pixels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution
This gives 36 megabytes per picture.
Now, you have to create 25 pictures for one second.
You get 5400 megabytes for every minute of movie.
It may be faster to compute digital animation, but you still have a large IO problem, both in storage and in preserving the data (you may lose pixels when downloading the files) !
It's similar to outsourcing tasks: it's a short-term solution for larger problems.
I think the SOPA blackout is useful because it helps inform the general public who is unaware of the problems and ramifications of SOPA and it's three vile siblings.
I doubt there is anyone on slashdot who is unaware of the ramifications, even those of use who support some copyright stuff, and who are against piracy, are aware that SOPA is a dangerous piece of legislation that will only harm society, and not help any artist.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Your point 2 is exactly what the guy in the article said, quoted by GP. Except he said it more succintly.
Let me re-quote: "And then the limitations of whether or not I can deliver something great will be on my own talent and the talent of the people that are part of the studio."
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