[Tig] 8k IMAX scans... 16k next

[Kevin Wheatley]

Rob Lingelbach wrote:
> On Jul 24, 2008, at 6:50 PM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>> By treating each production as a "one of" event and not supporting the
>> development of open source applications, the cost of production does
>> not fall like it would if free portable tools were developed which
>> could be used (for free) in future productions.

Bob, I don't believe anybody that works on VFX heavy films on the VFX
side treat tools developed like that as 'one offs' well I certainly
don't think Double Negative do as the tools they used on the first
film were used on this film (and several other films in between no
doubt). I know this is what we do, in Cinesite

> Bob, something that also hasn't ceased to surprise me, in addition to
> your comments, is that instead of developing parallel processing to its
> fullest, still the basic layout of compositing workflow involves a
> render farm, where the machines are mainly single-processor, and instead
> of doing multi-threaded multiprocessor rendering, you're basically just
> putting a bunch of commodity machines connected via ethernet and letting
> the tasks be allotted by some scheduling daemon.   It was like, 30 years
> ago, that parallel processing was starting to be applied, with Sun, the
> Transputer, The Connection Machine,  and others using spare CPU cycles
> on machines that were otherwise sitting idle.  There is a very good
> article in American Scientist (my favorite magazine) back 9 months ago
> or so at

Rob, I think your not quite understanding what a render farm in VFX is
then... our *farms* are multi core, multi CPU, muti machine, mutiple
most things actually, in a very NUMA like architecture, they used to
be based upon SGI's own NUMA designs until the pricing models
available pushed themselves out of the rendering side of the market,
(comedy aside: prior to running on SGIs, Cineon for instance, ran on
Transputers!)

All of the tools used are multi threaded to some degree or other, the
rendering tools are especially so.

The reason we don't use the 'big iron' style boxes anymore is that you
can reasonably get enough memory and enough CPUs to work on our frame
based renders in a small enough footprint using 'off the shelf' solutions.

Its also quite a small pay off to render in parallel multiple frames
especially in 2D compositing where there is very little work overlap
between adjacent frames, especially if there is enough spare RAM for
file system caching effects to be utilised.

There are of course cases where massively parallel computation can be
used, though we tend to direct that at GPUs due to bandwidth benefits.

Kevin

-- 
| Kevin Wheatley, Cinesite (Europe) Ltd | Nobody thinks this      |
| Senior Technology                     | My employer for certain |
| And Network Systems Architect         | Not even myself         |
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