Hollywood's Cloud
Phil Lelyveld
Entertainment Technology Center
[Technology Review]
Remote rendering lets big-budget animators add more effects and opens doors to smaller studios.
…
One such firm is Afterglow Studios, based in Minneapolis. Its owner, Luke Ployhar, is currently finishing Space Junk 3D, a 40-minute stereoscopic film about the 6,000 tons of garbage circling the planet (teaser here); it is scheduled be released in February. It’s a big project for a small firm, which has required more than 16,000 hours of computing time to animate, or render, the scenes of orbiting debris. Ployhar estimates that if he’d bought computers to do the job, he would have spent at least $50,000 on equipment.
“It wouldn’t have been economical for me to buy all these machines,” says Ployhar. “I knew off the bat that rendering would be the biggest problem.”
Instead, Ployhar leased time on a cloud service run by a New Mexico company called Cerelink. …
Services like Cerelink’s are also helping established players like Sony and DreamWorks Animation juggle their big-budget productions, which are becoming ever more computationally intensive as audiences come to expect more realistic-looking imagery and 3-D effects. …
Read the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/business/38718/?nlid=nldly&nld=2011-10-11
