I love RadioU, have a friend that works there and support them fully.
I know there is some good stuff out there, but the industry as a whole is extremely broken. It seems to be a self perpetuated mass of 10 year old ideas and praise and worship albums. Every now and then somebody comes in and stirs them up.
Over half my music collection is Christian artists, I jsut feel they have lost a lot of ground that they were gaining back in the 90's. Some songs I listened to back then could probably be getting airplay on secular stations today.
I have been active the last couple of years trying to help with the Christian dance music industry as well as having worked at the largest and most famous Christian childrens video series.
Not to defend myself, just to give more clarity where I come from.
Actually there is a large problem in the Christian market to produce crap, slap a Christian label on it and try to sell it because its Christian.
Too many places try to blur the lines between business and religion and use the sentiments of the buyer to out way the quality of the product. It is something I get frustrated with in all forms of Christian media.
What the real kicker is is when something starts getting popular and is being produced so that it can compete in the secular market, it is often looked at as selling out... and may get shunned until it gets picked up by the secular market as the next best thing, then, it gets pulled back in and its shown as a great example of Christians producing popular stuff.
I have never seen a group so backwards and in a bubble as Christian entertainment.
I really, really don't like rebooting my computer. It bugs me that FFXI takes up my full screen. I want to be able to multi-task.
If I want to reduce the usefullness of my desktop to a console system, I will just get a console and games. Its cheaper and I know they will work together.
Now if only these systems that booted into games plugged into normal household entertainment systems. I would love to be able to put this system in my living room, maybe get a few controllers, hook it up to my stereo and tv...
Having been at a company that went from SGI to linux and now being at a company that uses Linux pretty heavily, I can say that SGI has pretty much lost its share in the animation world. They still make nice high-high end stations. But few people need such a system.
Linux on the desktop works well in the animation industry. I imagine it works almost as well on OSX (the Maya port is still hanging that up).
If you look at the price of most desktop systems used in large studios, they aren't too far off of the price of a G5. This industry always wants and needs the latest and greatest.
I don't know what Pixar's data center looks like, but I can assume that they are tight on space and power like any other good sized, render intensive company. You have to dump the old and replace with the new or you have tons of old systems eating power, heating the air, and taking sys admin time (because they are more likely to break).
All of Pixar's releseases, Nemo included, have been better than what Disney has released in the past decade.
Disney is falling apart at the seams, forgetting that story is king. Make a good story, make great characters, have clean animation. Thats what people like.
Disney needs to pull out of its slump. They make the whole industry look bad right now.
Pixar will go on to bigger and better things, which will help the industry.
They are big enough now, they could probably handle self distribution, although they probably don't want to get into that role yet.
Best of luck to the both of them. The better they become, the better we all become, the more secure my job is;) (assuming they don't squash all competition).
I imagine the Pixar boys are out celebrating tonight... (if deadlines aren't killing them...) maybe I should head over across the bay and buy them a round.
I think that if Bob is going to have all these problems, he should just stay home. Maybe sending somebody smarter would make sense, one that doesn't get lost or freak out with a broken computer.
Look at Iron Giant. That should have done much much more in the box office but nobody seemed to notice the movie existed.
Also, having worked on a *decent* film that was barely noticed (and barely distributed) I can say that it takes a little more than just a quality product. Money and headlines still oil the machine of the box office.
-Tim
Re:No, it's not quite how they got their starts.
on
Despairing of Pixar
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· Score: 1
I am glad somebody beat me too it...
People seem to think that animation studios sprang up over night.
The big ones have been around a long time, just not always making feature animations (or shorts for that matter).
If you are asking does it do well on many processors, the answer is yes. Maya's renderer was written with the large SGI boxes in mind, working many many procs. It renders in regions, where each proc gets a region, and the regions are sized based on a guess at the complexity, so each region should take the same amount of time.
A few years ago, the linux port was a little unstable with threaded rendering, but since 3.x it has been good.
In my experience, memory and file server will be a bottleneck.
Any decent sized rendering job (usually from people who do not know how to optimize scenes or are creating really complex shot) will use over 1gb memory. All the work is done in the memory, it is memory intensive.
Gigabit is almost free, but the gigabit swtiches are not. If you have a rack of systems, a few odd desk tops and two servers, you want to have a 10/100 rack switch with 1 or 2 gb to the backbone switch. Have the same setup for the desktops and plug the servers straight into the backbone with gb. 40 rack mount boxes all requesting data at 1gb will tax your network and your fileserver.
As for netboot, I found that reading scenefiles and writing images over NFS can really, really slow you down. It was always faster and safer to copy local, render local, copy image back up to the server.
If somebody is trying to render a hand full of frames, LSF would be overkill, I agree. But if one needs to render 5+ min of cg footage, they will be glad they have a smart queueing system. I replaced a cronjob/web based rendering system with a perl/LSF one. It gave much more control and allowed a studio to go from working on one relatively simple video to multiple projects with departments working in parallel, all while allowing priorty and smart resource allocation.
Slashdot Mirror
I love RadioU, have a friend that works there and support them fully.
I know there is some good stuff out there, but the industry as a whole is extremely broken. It seems to be a self perpetuated mass of 10 year old ideas and praise and worship albums. Every now and then somebody comes in and stirs them up.
Over half my music collection is Christian artists, I jsut feel they have lost a lot of ground that they were gaining back in the 90's. Some songs I listened to back then could probably be getting airplay on secular stations today.
-Tim
I love how I got modded a troll on this.
I have been active the last couple of years trying to help with the Christian dance music industry as well as having worked at the largest and most famous Christian childrens video series.
Not to defend myself, just to give more clarity where I come from.
-Tim
Actually there is a large problem in the Christian market to produce crap, slap a Christian label on it and try to sell it because its Christian.
Too many places try to blur the lines between business and religion and use the sentiments of the buyer to out way the quality of the product. It is something I get frustrated with in all forms of Christian media.
What the real kicker is is when something starts getting popular and is being produced so that it can compete in the secular market, it is often looked at as selling out... and may get shunned until it gets picked up by the secular market as the next best thing, then, it gets pulled back in and its shown as a great example of Christians producing popular stuff.
I have never seen a group so backwards and in a bubble as Christian entertainment.
-Tim
My friend has one.
Its called an xbox.
I really, really don't like rebooting my computer.
It bugs me that FFXI takes up my full screen.
I want to be able to multi-task.
If I want to reduce the usefullness of my desktop to a console system, I will just get a console and games. Its cheaper and I know they will work together.
Now if only these systems that booted into games plugged into normal household entertainment systems. I would love to be able to put this system in my living room, maybe get a few controllers, hook it up to my stereo and tv...
-Tim
Now that made sense. And I didn't have to read the article. Win/Win I say!
-Tim
I see a picture or two of it sitting around our office. Did not know that was you...
I had always been impressed by that morph, even before I knew I wanted to get into computer graphics.
-Tim
Took down the user home space server in college doing that. Remotely.
Had to run across campus and bring the system back up... oops.
When I came in people were like, my computer isn't responding! I was like, er... yeah... it should be back in a second.
-Tim
Having been at a company that went from SGI to linux and now being at a company that uses Linux pretty heavily, I can say that SGI has pretty much lost its share in the animation world. They still make nice high-high end stations. But few people need such a system.
Linux on the desktop works well in the animation industry. I imagine it works almost as well on OSX (the Maya port is still hanging that up).
If you look at the price of most desktop systems used in large studios, they aren't too far off of the price of a G5. This industry always wants and needs the latest and greatest.
Space is a big deal.
I don't know what Pixar's data center looks like, but I can assume that they are tight on space and power like any other good sized, render intensive company. You have to dump the old and replace with the new or you have tons of old systems eating power, heating the air, and taking sys admin time (because they are more likely to break).
Covers are completely legal, which is what this would be.
You just have to notify the copyright holder and pay less than 10 cents per download (not sure what it is for commercial useage.)
Now, INAL but I have been looking into music copyright recently.
-Tim
Argh. Must look into that.
Page was way out of date anyways.
Thanks for the heads up.
As far as all of those curious questions...
Work in the entertainment industry at *not Pixar*, other side of the Bay.
-Tim
All of Pixar's releseases, Nemo included, have been better than what Disney has released in the past decade.
Disney is falling apart at the seams, forgetting that story is king. Make a good story, make great characters, have clean animation. Thats what people like.
-Tim
I see this as being both good and bad...
;) (assuming they don't squash all competition).
Disney needs to pull out of its slump. They make the whole industry look bad right now.
Pixar will go on to bigger and better things, which will help the industry.
They are big enough now, they could probably handle self distribution, although they probably don't want to get into that role yet.
Best of luck to the both of them. The better they become, the better we all become, the more secure my job is
I imagine the Pixar boys are out celebrating tonight... (if deadlines aren't killing them...) maybe I should head over across the bay and buy them a round.
-Tim
*raises hand*
Ooo me too?
-Tim
I think that if Bob is going to have all these problems, he should just stay home. Maybe sending somebody smarter would make sense, one that doesn't get lost or freak out with a broken computer.
-Tim
If so, can I get her phone #?
-Tim
That will never happen.
Disney will never get control of Pixar, the old Disney animators would probably never go back if they have any success at all...
I see Apple and Pixar being much more likely than Disney and Pixar.
I think at this point Disney is only slowing Pixar down.
-Tim
Isn't this just a batch queueing system, much like Sun's Grid computing, Platform's LSF and the like.
If it is, it is different in nature than the often joked about beowulf clusters and the mosix systems.
I think its great that Apple has one too, the more ideas thrown into the pot, the better all of them become.
-Tim
If you have the money, I would look at getting Maya.
There are plugins to output to renderman (mtor) and it also has its own renderer. If you want to do procedural animation, you can do it all in mel.
-Tim
Not entirely true.
Marketing needs to be behind you.
Look at Iron Giant. That should have done much much more in the box office but nobody seemed to notice the movie existed.
Also, having worked on a *decent* film that was barely noticed (and barely distributed) I can say that it takes a little more than just a quality product. Money and headlines still oil the machine of the box office.
-Tim
I am glad somebody beat me too it...
People seem to think that animation studios sprang up over night.
The big ones have been around a long time, just not always making feature animations (or shorts for that matter).
-Tim
Or... Some people could be talking about the P4 version of the Xeon chips instead of the PIII Xeons.
If somebody is doing hardware specs they should be aware of the P4 vs Xeon and what is SMP capable.
Its like calling a G5 a ppc970. In context people know what you mean.
-Tim
If you are asking does it do well on many processors, the answer is yes. Maya's renderer was written with the large SGI boxes in mind, working many many procs. It renders in regions, where each proc gets a region, and the regions are sized based on a guess at the complexity, so each region should take the same amount of time.
A few years ago, the linux port was a little unstable with threaded rendering, but since 3.x it has been good.
-Tim
I agree. Everybody renders in layers or passes.
The thing is, most shots don't need a compositing package, they can get by with simple A over B composites, which is fairly simple to write.
Now people like to use compositing for fx work as well, but that should be the exception, not the rule.
-Tim
In my experience, memory and file server will be a bottleneck.
Any decent sized rendering job (usually from people who do not know how to optimize scenes or are creating really complex shot) will use over 1gb memory. All the work is done in the memory, it is memory intensive.
Gigabit is almost free, but the gigabit swtiches are not. If you have a rack of systems, a few odd desk tops and two servers, you want to have a 10/100 rack switch with 1 or 2 gb to the backbone switch. Have the same setup for the desktops and plug the servers straight into the backbone with gb. 40 rack mount boxes all requesting data at 1gb will tax your network and your fileserver.
As for netboot, I found that reading scenefiles and writing images over NFS can really, really slow you down. It was always faster and safer to copy local, render local, copy image back up to the server.
If somebody is trying to render a hand full of frames, LSF would be overkill, I agree. But if one needs to render 5+ min of cg footage, they will be glad they have a smart queueing system. I replaced a cronjob/web based rendering system with a perl/LSF one. It gave much more control and allowed a studio to go from working on one relatively simple video to multiple projects with departments working in parallel, all while allowing priorty and smart resource allocation.
-Tim