Gouging is the dealer charging $500 to code and install a new battery, or $1000/axle to have the brakes done. The people complaining about this don't have BMWs.
Ok, here's the skinny. 1080i is 1920x1080 @ 59.94 fields / second, meaning at any one instant in time, you're looking at a 1920x540 image made up of every other line of the picture (the odd fields, if you will.) Then, ~1/60th of a second later, you see the even fields. 720p is 1280x720 @ 60 FRAMES per second, meaning at any given instant you're looking at EVERY field of the image...not just the odd or even fields. If you were to try and take all 1080 lines from the original signal, they wouldn't really map properly to 720 at any given second because half of data would be from that same ~1/60th of a second later. Scaling the fields up is really the best way to go, at least for stuff that's been shot interlaced.
I'm sorry, but you're just plain wrong. There's an Altivec acceleration plugin for After Effects. It came out right after Altivec did, and sped things up by about 8% or so iirc. Dunno whether that's Apple's fault, Motorola's, or Adobe's. AE is also slightly multithreaded. Certain parts of it (effects like Fast Blur) are multithreaded, and others aren't. In my experience (in dual P3 w2k land), AE will use about 70% of my available CPU power when it's running flat out. So while the Mac probably wasn't running flat out, the extra CPU definitely wasn't just sitting there slowing things down.
Where on the site did you see which codecs were used? I don't have Christiansen's book, though I imagine that as he's ex-ILM (and probably ex-Rebel Unit if he's an AE user as well, but I'm not 100% on that so don't quote me) that his tutorials probably work equally well on either platform. If I had to guess, I'd say that the output was to either the Animation, Sorensen, or maybe Cinepak codecs, all of which came from Apple. So if they're "not optimized," then that's no one's fault but Apple's. He could have skipped codecs altogether and rendered to uncompressed.SGI sequences or something, but then OOPS! The Mac's Finder would've choked on having more than a few hundred files in one directory.
So to sum up: there's little, if any bias in the tests used. As someone who's made his living using After Effects on both platforms for a number of years (though primarily on a rock-solid Gateway dual p3 w2k machine), I was very happy to see real-world benchmarks, rather than SPECINTFPUMARK2002 BS.
Like another poster has already pointed out, it really is more of a CD vs vinyl thing. From what I've heard about Trumbull's Showscan format, the 60fps motion freaked everyone who watched it out.
If 24fps makes people feel like they're watching a movie at the theater as opposed to watching the local news, then that's what everyone (aside from the news, probably) will use. It's all about perceived quality - just because we can create a 200fps playback system doesn't mean we should, especially if everyone is already happy with 24fps! (see also: how most people don't care about the difference between standard- and high-def.)
The only high-def stuff that's being done in 720p these days is sports. Everything else is moving towards 24p, which means 1920x1080 @ 24 frames/second (the "p" means progressive scan.) Even live stuff is starting to get shot at 24p - the recent MTV video music awards were a good example of this.
They mainly used Avid Media Illusion and Nothing Real's Shake. I think they had a few discreet boxen (flint, flame, inferno) too. I'd guess everything was comped on the octanes, except for the stuff comped on inferno, which only runs on onyx(1|2|3000) machines.
-Phred
Good point. If you wanna do hard-core 3d on linux now and have $$$ to burn, check out a combo of Houdini and PRman. Of course, you'd be dropping ~$30K just for the software, but you'd have a damn good setup!
Ummm...what planet are you from? You have *no* room to talk trash about slipping release dates if you're a Soft user. A|W has been doing a major rev of Maya about every 6-8 months since it's come out. When was Sumatra supposed to ship originally? 1997? 1998? I don't remember exactly, but it was supposed to come out before Maya 1.0. Everyone held off switching from Soft to Maya at first, but now they've done it, and IMO Sumatra will be too little, too late.
-Brian (who has been on the Maya bandwagon since 1.0 in case you can't tell!:P)
Hrmm...well i don't work at square so I can't argue definitively, but just because I said Pixar don't infer Toy story. Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman is afaik the Hollywood renderer of choice...it's good stuff(tm) if you can figure out how to write shaders for it. Look here for more info on it. They may well have written a custom renderer to do things that PRman doesn't do well (like raytracing), but AFAIK they're using PRman for most of the work. I'd love to read that interview with the producer...got a URL?
At least that's what the scuttlebutt on the various CG mailing lists I'm on is. Not that the guys at Squaresoft aren't total badasses anyway, but motion captured animation is a pretty good way of getting all the subtle nuances of things like human movement. AFAIK, it's being modeled, setup, and animated in Maya and rendered by Pixar's PRman.
I'm waiting for the same thing. There are IRIX ports of Quake and Quake2...now that I'm working at a company with an Onyx^2 and a couple of Octanes, I'm hoping that there will be a port of Quake 3. *crosses fingers*
The various incarnations of Christianity have a rather violent history. Nothing like a crusade or hot oil for whipping those pesky non-believers into line! What I'm curious about is what happens if you win the game as a demon. Do you get to rule over the heavens and Earth with an iron fist and cloven hoof? Or is there some sort of Deus Ex Machina (forgive the pun) at the end where the forces of Right(tm) swoop in and rob you of your just desserts?
Re:What makes SGI great graphics machines...
on
NVIDIA and SGI Align
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· Score: 1
All that memory bandwidth is also good for video editing/compositing. It's my understanding that apps like Adobe After Effects really scream on the SGI NT boxen. So NT is also good for throwing big, hi-res images/movies around (tho not as good as some of the bigger SGI iron.) More than just 3d modeling.:)
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Gouging is the dealer charging $500 to code and install a new battery, or $1000/axle to have the brakes done. The people complaining about this don't have BMWs.
Ok, here's the skinny. 1080i is 1920x1080 @ 59.94 fields / second, meaning at any one instant in time, you're looking at a 1920x540 image made up of every other line of the picture (the odd fields, if you will.) Then, ~1/60th of a second later, you see the even fields. 720p is 1280x720 @ 60 FRAMES per second, meaning at any given instant you're looking at EVERY field of the image...not just the odd or even fields. If you were to try and take all 1080 lines from the original signal, they wouldn't really map properly to 720 at any given second because half of data would be from that same ~1/60th of a second later. Scaling the fields up is really the best way to go, at least for stuff that's been shot interlaced.
Where on the site did you see which codecs were used? I don't have Christiansen's book, though I imagine that as he's ex-ILM (and probably ex-Rebel Unit if he's an AE user as well, but I'm not 100% on that so don't quote me) that his tutorials probably work equally well on either platform. If I had to guess, I'd say that the output was to either the Animation, Sorensen, or maybe Cinepak codecs, all of which came from Apple. So if they're "not optimized," then that's no one's fault but Apple's. He could have skipped codecs altogether and rendered to uncompressed
So to sum up: there's little, if any bias in the tests used. As someone who's made his living using After Effects on both platforms for a number of years (though primarily on a rock-solid Gateway dual p3 w2k machine), I was very happy to see real-world benchmarks, rather than SPECINTFPUMARK2002 BS.
Like another poster has already pointed out, it really is more of a CD vs vinyl thing. From what I've heard about Trumbull's Showscan format, the 60fps motion freaked everyone who watched it out.
If 24fps makes people feel like they're watching a movie at the theater as opposed to watching the local news, then that's what everyone (aside from the news, probably) will use. It's all about perceived quality - just because we can create a 200fps playback system doesn't mean we should, especially if everyone is already happy with 24fps! (see also: how most people don't care about the difference between standard- and high-def.)
The only high-def stuff that's being done in 720p these days is sports. Everything else is moving towards 24p, which means 1920x1080 @ 24 frames/second (the "p" means progressive scan.) Even live stuff is starting to get shot at 24p - the recent MTV video music awards were a good example of this.
They mainly used Avid Media Illusion and Nothing Real's Shake. I think they had a few discreet boxen (flint, flame, inferno) too. I'd guess everything was comped on the octanes, except for the stuff comped on inferno, which only runs on onyx(1|2|3000) machines. -Phred
VAX? El Charro?!? I love the smell of cat food and dead skunk in the morning! :) phred@akazaphod @who.misses.bb.chatter.and.jmu.general.misc
Good point. If you wanna do hard-core 3d on linux now and have $$$ to burn, check out a combo of Houdini and PRman. Of course, you'd be dropping ~$30K just for the software, but you'd have a damn good setup!
$.02,
Brian
Ummm...what planet are you from? You have *no* room to talk trash about slipping release dates if you're a Soft user. A|W has been doing a major rev of Maya about every 6-8 months since it's come out. When was Sumatra supposed to ship originally? 1997? 1998? I don't remember exactly, but it was supposed to come out before Maya 1.0. Everyone held off switching from Soft to Maya at first, but now they've done it, and IMO Sumatra will be too little, too late.
:P)
-Brian (who has been on the Maya bandwagon since 1.0 in case you can't tell!
Hrmm...well i don't work at square so I can't argue definitively, but just because I said Pixar don't infer Toy story. Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman is afaik the Hollywood renderer of choice...it's good stuff(tm) if you can figure out how to write shaders for it. Look here for more info on it. They may well have written a custom renderer to do things that PRman doesn't do well (like raytracing), but AFAIK they're using PRman for most of the work. I'd love to read that interview with the producer...got a URL?
-Brian
At least that's what the scuttlebutt on the various CG mailing lists I'm on is. Not that the guys at Squaresoft aren't total badasses anyway, but motion captured animation is a pretty good way of getting all the subtle nuances of things like human movement. AFAIK, it's being modeled, setup, and animated in Maya and rendered by Pixar's PRman.
$.02,
Brian
They also cut the English Horn solo out of the last movement in Pines of Rome.
$.02,
Phred
I'm waiting for the same thing. There are IRIX ports of Quake and Quake2...now that I'm working at a company with an Onyx^2 and a couple of Octanes, I'm hoping that there will be a port of Quake 3. *crosses fingers*
The various incarnations of Christianity have a rather violent history. Nothing like a crusade or hot oil for whipping those pesky non-believers into line! What I'm curious about is what happens if you win the game as a demon. Do you get to rule over the heavens and Earth with an iron fist and cloven hoof? Or is there some sort of Deus Ex Machina (forgive the pun) at the end where the forces of Right(tm) swoop in and rob you of your just desserts?
All that memory bandwidth is also good for video editing/compositing. It's my understanding that apps like Adobe After Effects really scream on the SGI NT boxen. So NT is also good for throwing big, hi-res images/movies around (tho not as good as some of the bigger SGI iron.) More than just 3d modeling. :)