imagine what'll happen when these same developers start working on an X server. Aaargh. i guess you don't know who some of the gnome hackers that are working on the X implementation are? some of them are actually good programmers, they even might know something about X. If you do not recognize any of those names, and why they are *very* relevant to X and it's development then i suggest you do some research before claiming that the sky is falling.
>Is this on the whole farm? If so, that's 76 years. If that's on a single processor, then the farm should be able to render the whole movie in 160 hours -- and you hardly need such a big farm. Must be rendering a frame uses several processors?
what usually happens is that certian groups are allocated resources based on the scene, or part of scene, they are working on. let's say i'm working on one shot, i will most likely need to render several passes before my final render. so you can't think of this render farm as just doing one render to make the movie. each animator will need to do tons of renders before they even get close the final output.
>> STORAGE Near online: 72 terabytes
>What would this be? Robot DVD archive or something?
nah not DVD. 1 DVD=4.7 gigs. more likely a SAN of somesort. Online storage is data storage attached directly to the workstation (editing machine/compositing station/cgi workstation). so near line would most likely be storage that every workstation has access to, but does not work off of daily.
> IT staff: 35 & Visual f/x staff: 420
>Are these people temps or do they have full-time jobs? Must be a real challenge to find that many people with experience in this sort of thing. I imagine they do alot of training? Anyone know?
i don't work for WETA, or any film post house for that matter, but i do work for a smaller visual effects house. most of the engineers i work with were trained on SGI's back in the day. now most work is done on Linux so alot of that training is transferable. you would be supprised by the amount of people with experience in CGI/Compositing/IT hacking out there that would kill to get a chance to work on LOTR
while this is a pretty interesting article, the benchmarks are dubious at best. most, if not all of these apps, are 32bit apps. the OS seems to be win2k, which last time i checked is not a 64bit OS. altho i'd have to admit they are comparing the notebooks themselves and not the chips. in any event they both look like monster "laptops".
sorry this is crazy. in the Unix world this you have been able to do this for years. i see no reason why it would be a bad idea to have a full system image backup of any computer. hard drives *do* crash, and having a backup sometimes is really a matter of life or death.
IIRC, XFS is more about guaranteed performance under various stressful conditions than about getting the absolute peak speed in calm conditions.
and also manipulating large chunks of data quickly and efficiently. Remeber SGI is a company that is built around visualization. When working with huge image data sets I've found that XFS is really the best optioin.
i would not be so hasty and say the InDesign is "better" than quark. Working with serveral print designers, and living with one as well has had me discussing this topic at least a year.. While InDesign does have it's benefits of being closely coupled with Photoshop etc., the UI is still not as polished as Quarks. (one common complaint with Adobe products I hear is that the menus are just too crowded in comparison to Quarks). As always it is up to the artits to deside which tool they prefer, and from what I have seen here in NYC Quark is still doing pretty well.
"[...]I can chose between Illustrator, Freehand and Corel Draw for vector graphics. Combustion, Avid, Premiere, After Effects, etc. It's all good and fine that I can write a letter, do my taxes and the like on a *nix machine, but I need to actually work now and then and the applications *still* aren't there."
just from my perspective working in a viusalFX studio...all the real technical apps. are moving over to Linux. Check out CinePaint, it is a much better "paint" type program photoshop supporting high bit depths etc. Shake, Maya, XSI they all run on Linux (better on linux infact). While I do agree with you somewhat i think alot of the more common desktop design apps are going to be taken care of ala WINE. it seems that Linux is really starting to creep into the design/FX community pretty quickly.
well this is great news. i work for a visual fx company and we pretty much use Penguin gear for our render farms and IT infrastructure. These guys have great gear and great prices...so this sounds great.
I thought Scyld was based in Anapolis Md. will they be moving out to Cali?
I totally agree with you, and have run into the same issues with workstations were I work. One thing that I think people should start looking at in the area is Ximian RedCarpet. From what I've seen and read about it, is that you can still use the "consume" RH distro, install Ximian and use that as a tool to remotely manage your desktops. I've never used it my self, but it is something well worth looking into i think.
yea i agree with you totally here. i'm one of those *nix consultants in the states that does the freelance-to-fulltime route. for me, it's basicly benefits. in the states it's just too expensive to be self-employed as a freelancer while also trying to pay medical and other bills. i wonder if that may help explain why "yanks" are always looking for the full time job..benefits.
i work for a video effects company in new york. IMHO it's not that the SGI's are that much behind in processing speed it's the cost of one of there systems. a complete Octane2 can run you around $50K to even $100K+ for our highend systems. when you are doing 3D animation with Maya or XSI or something most people have to make the decision between getting a balls out intel system versus a SGI Octane2. now the Octane2 is most likely superior than the intel machine in a design sense(those things are built like a tank!), but you have to ask do you need all of the features that the Octane2 offers to do 3D animation? in our case, most rendeing is done on the farm anyway so no not really.
we use the intel machines, and soon OSX machines, for the artists to work and model on. we use the Octane2 to do the heavy real-time compositing stuff using flame, inferno etc.
check out the openoffice front end. there was a posting a little while ago about that. basicly it's a DB frontend built into openoffice. i've already started using that to convert ASP/Access junkies;-)
All i can say is as a ex-resident of worcester and ex-con i mean student of clark university is yes he launched the rocket in Arburn Mass, not worcester, but he did teach at at Clark University which is in worcester. to commemerate Goddard they built this god-awfull statue named after him in the main square of the school. it's unofficially been named the goddard phalace, i'll leave it to your all's imigination to guess what the statue looks like (hint: it's tall, shiny and silver). they prbably got a picture of it on the clark home page, sorry can't be bothered to try to navigate their site.
other notable embarrassments in clark u. history - it's the first place that freud spoke in the US. but that's another story....
woah buddy chill...are you even a sys. op.? ever tried to run apache w/o the source?? perl?? sure if you are lazy having the binary's may be great....but if you want to have a stable system the source is the only way to go.
what country are you from!? no more questions...you can't be serious. the key here is to understand that by giving an inch you set a president, and that president has been set really what's going to stop the courts in this case or in the future.
since when was having our picture taken without our knowing not an invasion of our privacy. last time i checked it is still legal in most countries to remain anonymous.
i agree that the govt. should not moderate the 'net....but that does not mean we should have the allmighty 'market forces' controll it either. come on, we all know who _really_ controlls the market...it's an illusion fed to us by multinationals and FTC to think that a 'free' market is really free. what we really need is a truly free medium to communicate, free from the monetary restraits that bind it down now and free from the governmental/scholoactic restraints that apperantly limited it's growth in the past (although i have to admit that i have seen _no_ real evidence of this: hello NCSA/NASA etc????).
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imagine what'll happen when these same developers start working on an X server. Aaargh.
i guess you don't know who some of the gnome hackers that are working on the X implementation are? some of them are actually good programmers, they even might know something about X. If you do not recognize any of those names, and why they are *very* relevant to X and it's development then i suggest you do some research before claiming that the sky is falling.
>In all, very confusing...! :-) ;)
not really
>Is this on the whole farm? If so, that's 76 years. If that's on a single processor, then the farm should be able to render the whole movie in 160 hours -- and you hardly need such a big farm. Must be rendering a frame uses several processors?
what usually happens is that certian groups are allocated resources based on the scene, or part of scene, they are working on. let's say i'm working on one shot, i will most likely need to render several passes before my final render. so you can't think of this render farm as just doing one render to make the movie. each animator will need to do tons of renders before they even get close the final output.
>> STORAGE Near online: 72 terabytes
>What would this be? Robot DVD archive or something?
nah not DVD. 1 DVD=4.7 gigs. more likely a SAN of somesort. Online storage is data storage attached directly to the workstation (editing machine/compositing station/cgi workstation). so near line would most likely be storage that every workstation has access to, but does not work off of daily.
> IT staff: 35 & Visual f/x staff: 420
>Are these people temps or do they have full-time jobs? Must be a real challenge to find that many people with experience in this sort of thing. I imagine they do alot of training? Anyone know?
i don't work for WETA, or any film post house for that matter, but i do work for a smaller visual effects house. most of the engineers i work with were trained on SGI's back in the day. now most work is done on Linux so alot of that training is transferable. you would be supprised by the amount of people with experience in CGI/Compositing/IT hacking out there that would kill to get a chance to work on LOTR
while this is a pretty interesting article, the benchmarks are dubious at best. most, if not all of these apps, are 32bit apps. the OS seems to be win2k, which last time i checked is not a 64bit OS. altho i'd have to admit they are comparing the notebooks themselves and not the chips. in any event they both look like monster "laptops".
the real selling point (at least for the spooks amoung us )is the magnesium case....
sorry this is crazy. in the Unix world this you have been able to do this for years. i see no reason why it would be a bad idea to have a full system image backup of any computer. hard drives *do* crash, and having a backup sometimes is really a matter of life or death.
IIRC, XFS is more about guaranteed performance under various stressful conditions than about getting the absolute peak speed in calm conditions.
and also manipulating large chunks of data quickly and efficiently. Remeber SGI is a company that is built around visualization. When working with huge image data sets I've found that XFS is really the best optioin.
i would not be so hasty and say the InDesign is "better" than quark. Working with serveral print designers, and living with one as well has had me discussing this topic at least a year.. While InDesign does have it's benefits of being closely coupled with Photoshop etc., the UI is still not as polished as Quarks. (one common complaint with Adobe products I hear is that the menus are just too crowded in comparison to Quarks). As always it is up to the artits to deside which tool they prefer, and from what I have seen here in NYC Quark is still doing pretty well.
"[...]I can chose between Illustrator, Freehand and Corel Draw for vector graphics. Combustion, Avid, Premiere, After Effects, etc. It's all good and fine that I can write a letter, do my taxes and the like on a *nix machine, but I need to actually work now and then and the applications *still* aren't there."
just from my perspective working in a viusalFX studio...all the real technical apps. are moving over to Linux. Check out CinePaint, it is a much better "paint" type program photoshop supporting high bit depths etc. Shake, Maya, XSI they all run on Linux (better on linux infact). While I do agree with you somewhat i think alot of the more common desktop design apps are going to be taken care of ala WINE. it seems that Linux is really starting to creep into the design/FX community pretty quickly.
well this is great news. i work for a visual fx company and we pretty much use Penguin gear for our render farms and IT infrastructure. These guys have great gear and great prices...so this sounds great.
I thought Scyld was based in Anapolis Md. will they be moving out to Cali?
I totally agree with you, and have run into the same issues with workstations were I work. One thing that I think people should start looking at in the area is Ximian RedCarpet. From what I've seen and read about it, is that you can still use the "consume" RH distro, install Ximian and use that as a tool to remotely manage your desktops. I've never used it my self, but it is something well worth looking into i think.
yea i agree with you totally here. i'm one of those *nix consultants in the states that does the freelance-to-fulltime route. for me, it's basicly benefits. in the states it's just too expensive to be self-employed as a freelancer while also trying to pay medical and other bills. i wonder if that may help explain why "yanks" are always looking for the full time job..benefits.
lol and i just used up my mod points too damn! exactly what i was gonna say too...
i work for a video effects company in new york. IMHO it's not that the SGI's are that much behind in processing speed it's the cost of one of there systems. a complete Octane2 can run you around $50K to even $100K+ for our highend systems. when you are doing 3D animation with Maya or XSI or something most people have to make the decision between getting a balls out intel system versus a SGI Octane2. now the Octane2 is most likely superior than the intel machine in a design sense(those things are built like a tank!), but you have to ask do you need all of the features that the Octane2 offers to do 3D animation? in our case, most rendeing is done on the farm anyway so no not really.
we use the intel machines, and soon OSX machines, for the artists to work and model on. we use the Octane2 to do the heavy real-time compositing stuff using flame, inferno etc.
heh. wish i had mod. points right now...that's a funny link.
+1 funny
check out the openoffice front end. there was a posting a little while ago about that. basicly it's a DB frontend built into openoffice. i've already started using that to convert ASP/Access junkies ;-)
hey folks...remeber D.A.R.Y.L. the Data Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform? common he hacks the ATM machine and gets all the money for his foster dad....
All i can say is as a ex-resident of worcester and ex-con i mean student of clark university is yes he launched the rocket in Arburn Mass, not worcester, but he did teach at at Clark University which is in worcester. to commemerate Goddard they built this god-awfull statue named after him in the main square of the school. it's unofficially been named the goddard phalace, i'll leave it to your all's imigination to guess what the statue looks like (hint: it's tall, shiny and silver). they prbably got a picture of it on the clark home page, sorry can't be bothered to try to navigate their site.
other notable embarrassments in clark u. history - it's the first place that freud spoke in the US. but that's another story....
woah buddy chill...are you even a sys. op.? ever tried to run apache w/o the source?? perl?? sure if you are lazy having the binary's may be great....but if you want to have a stable system the source is the only way to go.
sorry most nike werkers would be excited if they were making US $2 an hour...it's closer to 30-50 cents an hour (US)
what country are you from!? no more questions...you can't be serious. the key here is to understand that by giving an inch you set a president, and that president has been set really what's going to stop the courts in this case or in the future.
since when was having our picture taken without our knowing not an invasion of our privacy. last time i checked it is still legal in most countries to remain anonymous.
amen! ;)
i agree that the govt. should not moderate the 'net....but that does not mean we should have the allmighty 'market forces' controll it either. come on, we all know who _really_ controlls the market...it's an illusion fed to us by multinationals and FTC to think that a 'free' market is really free. what we really need is a truly free medium to communicate, free from the monetary restraits that bind it down now and free from the governmental/scholoactic restraints that apperantly limited it's growth in the past (although i have to admit that i have seen _no_ real evidence of this: hello NCSA/NASA etc????).
>>KDE is not a distro, but one of the two desktop architectures (GNOME being the other) you mean gnome is ANOTHER not _the_other_...
you know something your right. if micro$oft was open source people wouldn't be freaking out. but micro$oft isn't open source is it?