Computer Graphics World April 2005 PDF eBook-iNTENSiTY

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The Magazine
for Digital Content
Professionals
ComputerGraphics
®
Stranger in a
Strange Land
World
Oddworld builds a bizarre

version of the wild West
FX in the City
CG creates a stark
setting for Sin City
Top Spots
Super Bowl ads
that scored
Storage in
the Studio
Moving to
all-digital
pipelines
www.cgw.com
April 2005
Forward
COMPUTER
GRAPHICS WORLD ®
to a friend!
$4.95 USA $6.50 Canada
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It’s one thing for the machines to

rise up and take over the earth. It’s quite another
to award them for it.
It’s nice to be recognized. We know because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences® was nice enough to recognize our Maya® software with an Oscar® for Scientific
and Technical Achievement. So we would like to recognize a milestone in the CGI movie
industry – Doug Chiang’s incredible vision Robota – and the awards it has received thus far.
We are proud that Robota was Made in Maya and to be involved with Sparx* in helping to
bring such inspiring imagination and creativity to life. Visit www.alias.com/awards to view
and learn more about Robota and other examples of award winning creativity Made in Maya.
Attending NAB 2005? Visit www.alias.com/events for the latest news on our participation at the show.
© Copyright 2004-2005 Alias Systems Corp. All rights reserved. Alias, the swirl logo, Can You Imagine and Maya are registered trademarks and the Maya logo is a trademark of Alias Systems Corp., in the United States and/or other countries.
Alias was awarded an Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Scientific and Technical Achievement) for the development of Maya software on March 1, 2003 for the awards year of 2002. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, the Oscar statuette and Oscar are registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. All other trademarks, service marks, or product names mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners. Robota ©
AAAAAAAAAAA 2004 Doug Chiang, all rights reserved. CG image created by Sparx*
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Computer
April 2005 • Volume 28 • Number 4
Also see www.cgw.com for computer graphics

news, special surveys and reports,
and the online gallery.
10
Feat ures
Cover story
The Good, the Bad,
De p art men ts & the Oddly 10
GAMING | Oddworld’s Old West-styled
Editor’s Note 2 Stranger’s Wrath adds a novel twist to
18 Pursuing Pirates the first-person shooter genre.
Spotlight 4 By Martin McEachern
Products
The Devil’s in the Details 18
1 Beyond’s HD Laptop
FILM | Director Robert Rodriguez relied
SensAble’s ClayTools 1.0 on CG to turn Frank Miller’s dark graphic
Havok’s Complete Middleware novels into the feature film, Sin City.
Combustion 4
By Barbara Robertson
Boxx Technologies’ New Workstations
Market Outlook, Industry News Super Spots 28

DV Market Gains Momentum VIDEO | Postproduction studios use dig-
ital effects to score in this year’s Super
Video Viewpoint 8 Bowl’s commercial showdown.
If You Build It...
By Karen Moltenbrey
Portfolio 44
CGW’s Student Art Contest Special Section
Storage in the Studio 33
Reviews 46 Storage systems help content-creation
Apple’s Production Suite and production facilities make the move
Digital Voodoo’s SD|Flex toward all-digital pipelines.
28
Products 50 By Michele Hope
On the cover:
The Stranger, a grizzled 3D bounty hunter,
headlines a bizarre cast of misfits in the new
title from Oddworld Inhabitants, Stranger’s
Wrath. For more information, see pg. 10.
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editor’snote
Phil
LoPiccolo
Editor-in-Chief
PHIL LOPICCOLO : Editor-in-Chief
Pursuing Pirates phill@pennwell.com
COURTNEY HOWARD: Senior Technical Editor

courtney@pennwell.com
Everyone knows that piracy of digital content is a serious issue. But it has been KAREN MOLTENBREY: Senior Technical Editor
karenm@pennwell.com
notoriously difficult to get a handle on just how widespread the practice has be-
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS:
come. Now a new report from the International Intellectual Property Alliance—a Jenny Donelan, Audrey Doyle,
Evan Marc Hirsch, Doug King,
coalition of film studios, video game publishers, and other copyright-based in- George Maestri, Martin McEachern,
Stephen Porter, Barbara Robertson
dustries—gives us a clearer picture of just how enormous the problem really is and what
steps can be taken to get the situation under control. SUZANNE HEISER: Art Director
suzanneh@pennwell.com
The IIPA’s analysis is contained in a Special 301 filing prepared for the US Trade Repre-
DAN RODD: Senior Illustrator
sentative’s annual report to President Bush. It finds that many forms of content theft—in- danro@pennwell.com
cluding factory copying of disks, cartridge counterfeiting, and Internet downloading—con- BARBARA ANN BURGESS: Production Manager
barbarab@pennwell.com
tribute to piracy levels exceeding 90 percent in many parts of the world.
Moreover, the new report estimates that in all countries, including the US, revenues MACHELE GALLOWAY: Ad Traffic Manager
MacheleG@pennwell.com
lost from piracy last year reached more than $25 billion. What’s more, these figures un-
SUSAN HUGHES: Marketing Communications Manager
derestimate true totals because they do not account for Internet piracy, which could not shughes@pennwell.com
be tracked accurately enough even to hazard an estimate, and because they are based on MICHELLE BLAKE: Circulation Manager
pirate prices as opposed to those at which legitimate sales might occur. michellb@pennwell
Despite such staggering losses, some contend that no one is really harmed by piracy. MARK FINKELSTEIN: Group Publisher
mark@pennwell.com
But the reality is that everyone loses, except the pirates, according to Stevan Mitchell, vice
COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD
president for intellectual property policy at the Entertainment Software Association, which Executive and Editorial Offices:
represents the video game industry. When pirated copies are sold, the revenue does not 98 Spit Brook Rd.
Nashua, NH 03062-5737
go to the digital artists, developers, and producers, says Mitchell. Nor is it funneled into (603)891-0123; FAX:(603)891-0539
R&D to improve the next generation of content for end users. CGW ONLINE: www.cgw.com
For customer service and subscription inquiries only:
What should content developers do to attack this problem? One answer would simply
cgw@omeda.com TEL: (847) 559-7500 FAX: (847) 291-4816
be to develop better pirate-fighting technologies. In fact, the gaming industry, which has POSTMASTER: Send change of address form to Computer
Graphics World, P.O. Box 3296, Northbrook, IL 60065
been among the most proactive on this front, builds copy-protection measures into video
game consoles and embeds corresponding access codes into the software. We make portions of our subscriber list available to
carefully screened companies that offer products and
Of course, technologies designed to circumvent such protections—mod chips, game services that may be important for your work. If you do
not want to receive those offers and/or information,
enhancers, game copiers, and similar devices—inevitably find
When pirated their way into the mainstream. Thus, legal reform and anti-
please let us know by contacting us at List Services,
Computer Graphics World, 98 Spit Brook Road,
Nashua, NH 03062.
copies are sold, piracy enforcement measures are also essential deterrents. But
revenues do not go the effectiveness of any such methods depends on input from
those at the front lines.
toward improving Therefore, the most straightforward way to join the effort,
ROBERT F. BIOLCHINI
President and Chief Executive Officer
the art of digital says Mitchell, is to contact your industry trade association—
ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY DIVISION
content creation. the Entertainment Software Association, the Motion Picture ADAM JAPKO
President & COO
Association of America, the Independent Film & Television
GLORIA S. ADAMS
Alliance, and so forth. These organizations maintain enforcement programs, and hear- Director, ATD Audience Development
ing from industry members helps them target programs more effectively. They can also ATD PUBLISHING DEPARTMENTS
put you in touch with lawmakers so you can weigh in on important legal reforms. And MEG FUSCHETTI
ATD Art Director
they can take action through the US government and multilateral organizations or
MARI RODRIGUEZ
directly with the offending countries’ governments. ATD Production Director
Conventional wisdom says that the best way to expand any market is to be ever more
innovative. And so far, the computer graphics industry, one of the most innovative in PRINTED IN THE USA GST No. 126813153
Publications Mail Agreement No. 40052420
history, has thrived on that principle. But now its members need to get more involved
to help stop pirates from stealing their work. Otherwise, they may end up spinning their
creative wheels ever faster only to fall further behind.
2 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2005 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

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Work without boundaries.

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the United States and/or other countries. ©2005 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
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spotlight Your resource for products, user applications, news, and market research
VIDEO
PRODUCTS
1 Beyond Launches NLE Laptop

1 Beyond, a provider of digital video editing and composit- HD video with-
ing systems, has unveiled a laptop computer designed for out lag, delay, or
editing and graphics applications. skipped frames.
For high-definition (HD) editing and delivery, the 1 Beyond The 1 Beyond 3817
3817 HD laptop system features a Pentium 4 processor with up HD NLE laptop also
to 3.8GHZ and Hyperthreading technology, a dual-bus architec- offers support for the
ture, a maximum 4GB of memory and 200GB of internal storage, latest editing software, including Avid Xpress Pro HD and
and support for the PCI Express video bus. Because it simulta- Adobe Premiere Pro, and such popular HD hardware as the
neously supports Avid Mojo and external storage, users are able Panasonic DVC Pro HD or HDV cameras from JVC and Sony.
not only to access more footage than typically possible, but also Rounding out the 3817 HD are its 17-inch, high-resolution,
to combine HD, HDV, uncompressed SD, and DV footage. An wide-format screen and professional DVI video output.
800MHZ front-side bus and 2GB bridge enable the 3817 HD device Now available for purchase, 1 Beyond 3817 HD’s pricing
to edit HDV and full-resolution HD content in real time, as well starts at $2695; fully configured, it carries a $5995 price tag.
as to process multiple streams of real-time audio and SD and —Courtney E. Howard
MODELING
PRODUCTS
SensAble Technologies Unveils ClayTools 1.0

SensAble Technologies has presented its ClayTool, designed for digital content compasses the ClayTools virtual model-
ClayTools touch-enabled system for use creators serving the game and entertain- ing program, HapticExtender/MX plug-
with Autodesk Media Entertainment Di- ment industries, provides unconstrained in, and Phantom Omni device. ClayTool
vision’s 3ds max software. modeling for highly detailed, organic software assists users in creating 3D con-
models. That is, the system cept models or high-resolution models, in
employs a virtual clay met- addition to capturing and normal-map-
aphor and a true 3D inter- ping detail onto low-resolution models.
face with force feedback, en- The HapticExtender/MX plug-in enables
abling users to model virtual users to navigate 3ds max and physically
clay as though it were real interact with its tools in 3D. A user’s 3D
clay. Creative professionals gestures, for example, can be used to de-
can smudge, smooth, carve, fine motion-capture paths.
or tug models to create game Now available, ClayTools 1.0 is com-
content that is organic in patible with 3ds max Versions 6 and 7,
nature, such as characters, and is priced at $2795. Customers who
props, and scenery. already own the Phantom Omni can pur-
The ClayTools system en- chase ClayTools for $1995. —CEH

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MIDDLEWARE VIDEO
PRODUCTS
PRODUCTS
Havok Complete 3 Combustion Upgraded
Debuts During GDC to Version 4
At the recent 2005 Game Developers Conference Discreet, recently re-branded as Autodesk Media and En-
(GDC) in San Francisco, Havok introduced its Havok tertainment Division, has upgraded its Combustion digital
Complete 3 integrated middleware for the video game visual effects and compositing software to Version 4.
industry. For desktop motion
Havok Complete 3 incorporates the company’s flag- graphics and visual ef-
ship Havok Physics 3 and its recently released Havok fects artists, Combus-
Animation 3. It aids game developers in the creation tion 4 boasts enhanced
of dynamic character performances and next-genera- interoperability with 3D
tion gameplay through a combination of physical, key- animation programs, as
frame, and procedural animations. Able to work within well as with the compa-
various game architectures and pipelines, Havok Com- ny’s Cleaner, Flint, Flame,
plete 3 meets the needs of current and next-generation Inferno, Fire, and Smoke.
game platforms. The upgrade employs Discreet’s second-generation Dia-
Havok Physics 3 has been updated with Continuous mond Keyer advanced keying technology, in addition to
Physics, which eliminates challenges, such as “bullet- Time-Warp, a keyframable, time-remapping operator for
through-paper” problems, created by high-speed game the creation of slow-motion and speed-up effects. Version
objects. Havok Animation 3 features such run-time an- 4 also offers expanded file import and export options, an
imation functionality as compression and decompres- optimized “Fast Gaussian Blur,” an improved user inter-
sion, blending, inverse kinematics, and an export, fil- face, and enhanced paint tools, including new customized
tering, and preview tool set that works with today’s brushes. Combustion 4 is scheduled to ship for the Win-
modeling and animation software packages. —CEH dows platform this month for $995. —CEH
WORKSTATIONS
PRODUCTS
Boxx Technologies Releases New Workstations

Boxx Technologies has introduced three iting tasks—takes advantage of the Intel resolution GlassView Active Matrix dis-
workstations targeted at digital content Pentium 4 Processor Extreme Edition with play, and dual-channel DDR2 memory.
creation applications, such as 2D/3D HT technology and EM64T. The system The company also announced Combus-
graphics, simulation, and digital video. also boasts PCI Express x16 graphics, a tion 4 from Autodesk Media and Entertain-
The Boxx 7300 family of workstations 1066MHZ front-side bus, onboard FireWire, ment as a purchase option with its high-
combines dual AMD Opteron series 252 and six internal drive bays. performance workstations. Additionally, it
processors with Nvidia’s nForce Profes- Boxx Technologies’ latest mobile work- is offering the 64-bit Intel Xeon 3.6 proces-
sional 2050 and 2200 media and commu- station for graphics, animation, DV, sor with a 2MB cache for its
nications processors (MCPs) and Nvidia and HDV, the GoBoxx 2200 is Boxx 8200 series. —CEH
SLI technology. The 64-bit-ready work- powered by the Nvidia Quadro
stations provide support for the upcom- FX Go 1400 OpenGL graphics
ing Microsoft Word x64 operating system, board, complete with PCI Ex-
which will enable users to run 32-bit and press and 256MB of 256-bit
64-bit applications simultaneously. Addi- framebuffer memory. The lap-
tional features include dual PCI Express top system features an Intel
x16 slots, multi-GPU dual monitor sup- Pentium 4 processor (up to
port, and the AMD Hypertransport bus. 3.8GHZ) with HT technology
The Boxx 4300 workstation—well suit- and an 800MHZ system bus, a
ed to graphics, animation, and video ed- 17-inch WSCGA+ (1680x1050)
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spotlight
MARKET OUTLOOK
Digital Video Market Gains Momentum

The video market as a whole has been struggling with the digital technology for certain aspects of film such as spe-
upgrade to digital video. Five years ago, companies were pre- cial effects and other post work, but in the last two years
dicting enormous growth as content creators in the film and the concept of digital intermediates (DI) has caught on,
video industry moved to digital technology and updated their and whole productions are being transferred to digital
production facilities. As so often happens, formats for postproduction and then trans-
the analysis was not wrong—the ferred back to film for distribution.
timing was. In fact, it was not Digital Video Market Share In general, there is great inter-
until 2003 and 2004 that est in lengthening the digi-
companies began to see tal pipeline to incorporate
Other
the growth they hoped digital capture and digi-
21% Pinnacle Systems
for in digital video 31% tal distribution.
and film produc- Discreet 5% And finally, new
tion. The result was Apple
advances in consumer
a 12 percent growth 8% technology, new digital
in 2004 compared to Adobe cameras, the prolifera-
11% Avid 24%
2003, and a promising tion of DVD drives, and
future as new technolo- easy-to-use DVD produc-
gies drive upgrades. Source: Jon
Source: Jon Peddie
Peddie Research
Research tion tools have driven the in-
In 2004, several trends came crease of sales in digital video for
The total digital video software market
together all to the benefit of the com- grew 12 percent in 2004. consumers.
panies in digital video content creation. First, the The train is just picking up speed for digital
transition to digital TV has gained momentum as consumers video. There is a large untapped market of consumers who
understand that digital means better—better images and new are video enthusiasts but who are still using older analog
services. As a result, broadcast companies are transitioning cameras. In addition to transferring old videos to digital,
to digital technology to take advantage of the efficiencies in low-cost digital video cameras will spark a new wave of in-
the production pipeline—better asset management, access to terest and attract a new generation of customers. In the pro-
archived content, on-site editing, and a more efficient pipe- fessional sphere, the transition to digital is also just getting
line that empowers frontline creative people rather than back- started and will be boosted with the introduction of a 64-
shop technicians. bit version of Windows and Longhorn. —Kathleen Maher,
Second, the film/video industry has long embraced senior analyst, Jon Peddie Research
IN BRIEF
NEWS
Avid Technology (Tewksbury, MA) has entered into an agreement tember 9 of last year, Eisner submitted a letter to the Board of Directors
to acquire Pinnacle Systems (Mountain View, CA). Discreet (San announcing his intention to retire; he steps down as CEO on Septem-
Francisco), a division of Autodesk, is transitioning its name and brand ber 30. Midway Games (Chicago) has acquired Paradox Develop-
to Autodesk Media and Entertainment Division. The Autodesk ment (Moorpark, CA), which will be creating the next Mortal Kombat
branding, the first public viewing of which will take place during the game. Mobile games publisher Sorrent (San Mateo, CA) has acquired
National Association of Broadcasters Conference (NAB 2005) in Las European rival Macrospace, a large player in the mobile games mar-
Vegas this month, will be applied to the division’s products, technolo- ket. The Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (Orlando;
gies, and consulting services. The Walt Disney Company (Burbank, http://fiea.ucf.edu) has launched a video game development program
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CA) Board of Directors has announced that Robert A. Iger has been to begin this fall. For its visual effects work on Farscape: The Peacekeep-
unanimously elected chief executive officer effective September 30. er Wars, a mini-series for the SciFi Channel, Animal Logic (Sydney)
Iger will succeed Michael D. Eisner, the company’s current CEO. On Sep- received an Australian Effects & Animation Festival (AEAF) award.
6 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2005 w w w.c gw. c om

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Image courtesy of Softimage and UVPHACTORY
Don't lose your head keeping up with

production demands.
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Visit www.newworkstation.com/cgw to learn more and buy.
Come see us at NAB 2005:

• AMD | Booth SL2543
• HP | Booth SL1961
• NVIDIA | Booth SL5501
©2005 NVIDIA Corporation. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA Logo, NVIDIA Quadro, nForce, and NVIDIA SLI are trademarks or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. Image courtesy of Softimage and
UVPHACTORY. Other company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of the respective owners with which they are associated.
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viewpoint Video
If You Build It... By Jeff Sauer
The first product review I ever Video professionals

worked on, some 11 years ago, may opt for turnkey
was a roundup comparison of 22 NLE systems, such as
different Windows 3.1 video cap- this one from Boxx
Technologies, rather
ture cards. Only the top two or
than build their
three could capture “multimedia
own solutions from
quality” (320x240 resolution, 30 fps) video
off-the-shelf
without dropping any frames, and if I’m products, because
not mistaken, none of the companies rep- system integrators
resented still exists today. But those that offer support for
have been around digital video for a while the entire system,
would recognize a few of not just the hard-
them as real pioneers— ware or software.
including Miro, Fast, and days were, however, installing and testing all 22 of those Windows-based capture cards
Truevision—whose early took roughly two months. That was back, too, in the very early days of Microsoft’s Video
technologies ultimately for Windows, DLL hell, and pre-Plug-n-Play IRQ and memory conflicts. Installing and us-
changed desktop digital ing every card was an adventure, and to give each one a fair shot, I had to reformat the
video forever. C: drive and re-install Windows before putting each card in the computer.
Jeff Sauer By combining these A lot has changed since then. Windows hardware installation is considerably easier.
is a contributing editor
capture cards with ed- Off-the-shelf hard drives are fast enough for at least a couple simultaneous streams of
of Computer Graphics
World and director of iting software—such as DV without tweaking the mode page settings. And for standard-definition DV, expansion
the Digital Video Group, Adobe Premiere or Ulead hardware often isn’t even needed thanks to Windows native IEEE-1394 drivers, although
an independent research Media Studio—and zoom- there are some very affordable hardware cards for high-definition I/O as well.
and testing organization ing the video to full screen The success of open systems is not just built on affordability, however. They have be-
for digital media. He
on NTSC output, videog- come highly capable creation tools for video professionals doing real work and earning a
can be reached at
jeff@dtvgroup.com. raphers could build rela- living from their craft. And while the hobbyists may take pride in the do-it-yourself chal-
tively affordable non-lin- lenge of building a system, chances are the pros would rather be shooting and editing.
ear editing systems for the
A turnkey first time. Open Systems vs. Turnkeys
It was the birth of the High-end systems have almost always been sold as turnkey systems, in pre-configured,
NLE may be open-system non-linear pre-tested qualified workstations from authorized dealers. The computer, after all, repre-
editing station. The sys- sented just a small fraction of the cost of the whole system. And there was no reason to
tems were modest, of tempt troubleshooting fate by adding unfamiliar system elements to the mix, especially
more cost
course, but it wouldn’t for serious professionals for whom time is the most precious commodity.
be long, only a little more The computer is a larger part of the cost in more affordable open systems, and it’s not
effective
than another year, before surprising that videographers of more modest means would want to find the most afford-
CPUs, hard drives, and able box. Ultimately, in order to compete in the independent film/prosumer/event videog-
than a do- capture cards would get rapher marketplace, even Avid, with a reputation for exclusivity, was forced to give in to
fast and powerful enough the market pressures and unbundle its software. You can now buy Xpress series products
it-yourself to capture full-frame 60 fps off the shelf, just like Adobe Premiere, Canopus Edius, Ulead Media Studio Pro, Pinnacle
video, and the image qual- Edition, and others. But should you?
system. ity gap started to close. Interestingly, amid a robust open-system market, a surprisingly strong business in sell-
Exciting as those early ing turnkey versions of those same open systems exists. Companies such as 1 Beyond, Boxx

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Technologies, Core Microsystems, Laird Tele- configurations. After all, Intel processors, hard drives, and graphics cards are all somewhat
media, and others may all seem somehow standard these days, and many companies even have lists of qualified hardware.
reminiscent of the PC clone makers that once What the turnkey companies offer, however, is video experience and support—and
dotted the PC landscape, but the difference that can often translate directly into more time for you to do your work. These integra-
is that these companies specialize in systems tors have built systems before. They’ve tested the configurations, and if there’s a prob-
for content creation. lem, they’ll fix it. Perhaps more importantly, they typically have staff on hand who know
Like those clone makers, most edit- video (and often 3D, audio editing, and graphics creation) and offer technical support for
ing system integrators don’t make any- the entire system, not just the software or the hardware.
thing themselves (Laird does make pro- Of course, all editing software manufacturers offer tech support of some kind. But the
prietary breakout boxes and a few other line between supporting the editing software, the operating system, and any hardware
video peripherals.) Some don’t even make can come up surprisingly fast, and when you start calling multiple vendors for the same
the clones, instead reselling Hewlett- troubleshooting problem, the otherwise billable hours start adding up very quickly.
Packards or other quality computers. They On the other hand, if you buy a 1 Beyond solution, for example, you can get a real
use off-the-shelf I/O cards—such as those person on the line who knows video and knows your system. If you’re working on a pro-
from Blackmagic Design, Bluefish444, or duction, especially if you’re on a deadline, that insurance policy can be very comforting.
CineForm for High Definition—and install a As good as Dell is at consumer-oriented computer support, they’re going to send you to
software editing application. Yet they do it in Adobe for anything past very basic software support.
configurations with motherboards, graphics I’ve reviewed a lot of video editing products since that capture card roundup, and I’ve
cards, hard drives, RAM, and more that are installed plenty more hardware and software. It’s gotten a lot easier than those first 22. But
sure to work. my experience is that all goes smoothly if the company sends a pre-configured system that’s
For a get-your-hands-dirty, do-it-your- ready to go. Several years ago when this started to be the trend in NLE reviews, even from
selfer (like me), there’s always a temptation open system companies, I worried a little about missing the user experience, but I got over
to buy a Gateway or Dell and the software that quickly. These days, with such capable open-system tools readily available, most of us
directly. Dell even offers Adobe Premiere would rather build edits on a timeline than spend time building a system.
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.... Gaming
O d d w or ld t akes aim a t the
fi r st - per son shoote r genre
wi t h St r anger’s Wrath
By Martin McEachern
The Good,
the Bad, &
the Oddly
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Gaming ....
B eginning with the re-

lease of Abe’s Oddysee
in 1997, the video game
boots of a large, toad-like creature known
only as the Stranger, a cowboy drifter cut
from the same grizzled mold as Clint East-
universe with more spe-
cies and characters. These
new gameplay ideas seemed to
world was introduced to the twisted uni- wood’s characters in the Spaghetti West- coincide nicely with the
verse known as Oddworld, a series of ful- erns of Sergio Leone. Working as a bounty introduction of a new
ly functional ecosystems where grotesque hunter, the Stranger tracks down outlaws hero and story line.”
yet adorable creatures struggle for surviv- for moola, hoping to earn enough to pay for Aside from in-
al against the encroaching industrial forces a mysterious operation whose purpose and jecting the formula-
gathering around them. nature the player unravels slowly over the ic genre with a refresh-
The first in a planned five-part series, course of the game’s 15-hour adventure. ing dose of strategy and
the game told the story of Abe, a hapless “Oddworldly” fun, the
laborer in a meat-packing plant who tries to A Shooter, With a Twist game is one of the first
save his fellow race from becoming the next Concerned by the violence of games such as to combine a first-person
new delicacy. In the sequel, Munch’s Oddy- Halo, the developer wanted to rely more on perspective, used primari-
see, our hero continued his adventures by humor and visual creativity than the ram- ly for shooting, with ele-
teaming up with an escaped laboratory test pant bloodshed that typifies the medium. ments of third-person play,
animal named Munch as each tries to real- Hence, instead of the standard arsenal of which require a view of the
ize his own goal: for Abe, it is to rescue his high-powered assault weapons, the Strang- Stranger and his relation to
captive Mudokon buddies, and for Munch, er is armed only with a crossbow, which the environment so he can
it is to save his species from extinction. And shoots—quite literally—live ammo, includ- execute jumps and other in-
in the third title, Abe’s Exoddus, the char- ing chipmunks, skunks, porcupines, bees, tricate movements.
acter strives to close down a brewery after bats, and various marsupials. But, such motions
discovering that the addictive drink is made According to OWI cofounder Lorne Lan- can’t be performed ef-
from the bones of dead Mudokons. ning, several revelations influenced him to fectively in a first-per-
Focused on world simulation and simple take the series in such an unlikely direction, son view. Therefore, the
action puzzles, these games were set in beau- including what he believes makes a game game allows the play-
tiful environments that served as habitats for great and shooters like Halo undeniably suc- er to switch between
mutant creatures resembling all manner of cessful. He also found a way to make these views at any time
animal crossbreeding. Infused with spunk, factors work within the Oddworld philoso- during play. Interest-
attitude, and endearing charm, Oddworld’s phy set up by himself and his partner, Sherry ingly, unlike the third-
kingdom of evolutionary rejects quickly McKenna: that of responsibility and account- person perspectives seen in
earned legions of dedicated fans around the ability for the effect that these types of games other shooters, in which
Oddworld Inhabitants
world, while defining an aesthetic and ap- have on those who play them. the character merely
conceded to the
peal as unique and distinctive as the char- “I was fascinated by the conceptual dif- becomes a new axis of
popularity of the first-
acters of Looney Tunes or Disney. ferences of a ‘shoot-out,’ like you might find rotation for the camera,
person shooter genre with
For the latest chapter, Oddworld Strang- in an Old Western, versus a ‘shooter,’ which the third-person view in
Stranger’s Wrath, but the
er’s Wrath, series developer Oddworld In- you find all over modern-day Hollywood Stranger’s Wrath func- developer didn’t lose its
© 2005 Oddworld Inhabitants
habitants (OWI) heads to the Old West to and gaming,” Lanning says. “I wanted to tions more like a plat- sense of irony: The main
explore a new frontier for the company: the inject some strategy and mind games into an form game, in which the character shoots live
first-person shooter genre. The game, for otherwise mindless function. Also, we have camera can frame the ac- ammo, albeit critters such
the Xbox, invites players to step into the always wanted to populate the Oddworld tion from any direction. as these pictured above.
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.... Gaming
Oddworld’s Wild West a ‘found-object’ style, as the Clakkerz are poor and have to live off
In Stranger’s Wrath, each time the Stranger apprehends an outlaw, of what they can scavenge.” So, while every town is unique, each
he is directed to a new town, each a bustling hub of activity inhab- has to retain a unifying visual signature, which makes for a notice-
ited by chuckleheaded chicken-men called Clakkerz. After buying able contrast with the more natural regions of the game.
ammo and armor at the general store and collecting information As the artists created content for each level, they stored com-
from the Clakkerz, the Stranger acquires his next mission at the mon items, such as mailboxes, in an instance library, which every-
Bounty Trading Store. These tasks can range from storming a fort
to apprehending an outlaw boss running an illegal mining opera-
tion to taking out a gang of no-good varmints stirring up trouble
and terrorizing the Clakkerz.
From twisted Old Western towns, lush forests, and reed-choked
wetlands, to fertile farm country, snow-mantled Tibetan-inspired
mountainscapes, and large industrial facilities, the player is taken
on a expansive journey through diverse settings that, while evok-
ing a semblance of the familiar, are all skewed through the lens of
the Oddworld aesthetic. Hence, amongst the weathered wood and
In contrast to the game’s dusty, Western look,

some environments are teeming with lush,
green foliage whose look originated from actual
plants and shrubs before being altered to fit
into the unique Oddworld universe.
one could access to furnish a level. Nevertheless,

in their conceptual art, the production designers
tried to give each area a unique atmosphere—
from the plush, executive-style furnishings of the
sleazy tycoon Sekto’s lair to Filthy Hand Floyd’s
rugged wooden fort. This forced the artists to
make as much unique content as possible, even
for smaller sections of the game that the player
may run right through without a second glance.
“I think this [kind of attention to detail] is what
helps our environments stand out from those in
Rather than rely on stock textures, the artists acquired a range of dirty, industrial-like other games,” says Lanning.
surfaces from real-world objects and later tweaked them in Photoshop to give them a
The team modeled most of the diverse foli-
richer, more organic look, as seen in this scene from a Clakkerz village.
age pervading the natural environments in high
rusted copper pipes of towns such as New Yolk City mingle flash- resolution before importing orthographic renders into Photoshop,
ing neon signs and fluorescent lights. where the group used the renders to create transparency maps.
To create the textures for the game, OWI artists painted texture To create some of the more exotic shrubbery, the artists took pho-
maps to conform to the Oddworld style—which Lanning describes tographs of existing plants and painted them until they seemed
as a dirty, industrial, and heavily saturated look—and then finessed unique and indigenous to the Oddworld universe.
them in Adobe’s Photoshop to ensure that they remained organic to While some of the environments appear to stretch for miles into
the story and characters. “For instance, the areas where the Clak- the distance, the team did not use any matte paintings to create the
kerz live look like the Old West, but we painted the textures to re- deep vista views. Instead, the artists modeled and textured all the
flect the tacky culture that characterizes their way of life, which is visible imagery, and then relied on OWI’s programmers to build a
suggested by the neon signs,” says Lanning. “When you head into graphics engine that could “portal” in and out only the necessary
a native village, you’ll see that the architecture changes to more of geometry based on the player’s location.

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A major challenge for the team was to handle the sheer size
of the levels, which expand across miles and miles of terrain and
involve an inordinately large number of intelligent creatures. “In
a typical region, there are Clakkerz walking around town, taking
jobs as the Sims characters do. There are outlaws who fight you,
and thousands of critters in the world that you can hunt for ‘live’
ammo,” says lead programmer Charles Bloom. “But to have all of
these in one level and maintain a smooth frame rate, we had to bal-
ance the intelligence of (non-player characters), so that a group of
The main Stranger
them didn’t perform complex activity all at the same time.”
character was created
in three levels of de-
Settlers of the Odd West
tail, from 70 to 2500
Working in Alias’s Maya, the modelers used the software’s polygon polygons. Because the
tools to surface the game characters with a density ranging from 800 Stranger’s movements
to 3000 polygons. Meanwhile, the group modeled the main charac- can shift from bipedal,
ters, such as the Stranger and the outlaw bosses, in three levels of when he walks and
detail, comprising 1500 to 2500 polygons at the highest levels and stands, to quadrapedal,
70 polygons at the lowest level. For the real-time cut-scenes, the when he takes to all
artists reused the in-game models, though for the five prerendered fours during a chase, a
cinematics, they modeled higher-resolution meshes. secondary model with a
For the characters’ clothes, the team avoided using procedural complex rigging system
was also required.
cloth-simulation tools in favor of traditional modeling and skeletal
deformation. The group also made extensive use of normal map- confronted the team with a wide array of rigging scenarios. For
ping for texturing the mottled animal flesh of the creatures, their instance, the Stranger walks and stands on two legs, but when he
fur and feathers, suits, overalls, and other garments, and the grain starts running, he takes to all fours, using an entirely different char-
of the well-weathered leather of the cowboy attire. While the art- acter model and skeleton rigged for the quadrupedal movement.
ists initially derived the normal maps from high-resolution models, To overcome these challenges, OWI grouped all the characters into
they turned to hand-painted gray-scale normal maps near the end types—including shooters, knife guys, and bombers—and designed
of production to achieve faster turnaround times. scalable rigs to serve each type. The skeletons for these base char-
To individualize homogeneous characters, such as the Clakkerz acter types ranged from 45 to 65 bones, and featured both forward
or an outlaw’s goons, OWI developed a flexible attachment sys- and inverse kinematics for the arms and legs, and Set Driven Key
tem that allowed simple props, such as hats and handheld items, controls for storing predefined foot roll and finger movements.
to be attached automatically to a character. “The designer simply Meanwhile, for the little critters shot from the Stranger’s crossbow,
chose a character and a prop, and then selected a bone on the the animators created simple rigs with low joint counts. And un-
character’s skeleton to attach the props to,” explains modeler Raj less they had hind legs, like the “chippunks,” all the live ammo
Nattam. “Our engine also allowed flexible animation sharing, so was animated with FK, sans constraints.
we could create entirely different character models that shared ex- Compared to previous Oddworld titles, Stranger’s Wrath features
isting animations.” much faster characters (and gameplay), resulting in three main an-
Nevertheless, Stranger’s Wrath’s cast of bizarre animal hybrids imation modes: a walk, a trot, and a full-on four-legged run. For
Oddworld Moviemaking
Aside from the frequent real-time cut-scenes, the Stranger’s trees, snow, and a number of water effects.” 30 frames per second, rendered them at the NTSC reso-
Wrath story unfolds through five polished cinematics. The process required to create these extensive cine- lution of 720x486.
“These prerendered movies span a wide range of en- matics resembled that of a feature film, beginning with a Except for a few in-game characters and environmen-
vironments and end with some large-scale scenes of cha- series of storyboards that were cut together on an Avid tal assets situated in the background of three of the cine-
os and destruction,” says technical director Iain Morton. editing system. Then, the artists re-created the storyboard matics, the team modeled new environments and charac-
“They range from a dried-up wasteland to a number of animatic as a 3D animatic in Maya, which included rough ters exclusively for the prerendered movies.Additionally, the
dark Western town interiors and a massive snowy land- animation for timing and basic choreography, before com- cinematic’s characters sport much denser meshes, higher-
scape. Bringing the natural world to life involved a lot of pleting the animation in Maya. Next, the group assembled resolution textures, and a more complicated skeleton and
dynamically driven scene elements such as grass, leaves, the finished scenes on the Avid system, and, running at animation rig than their in-game counterparts.

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.... Gaming
blending these animation cycles, along with attack animations, For example, the Stranger can talk to the Clakkerz or eavesdrop
damage reactions, and so forth, the animators utilized Granny 3D on their incessant chattering at any time, but if he mistreats them,
from RAD Game Tools, which enabled them to set the amount of they’ll scatter and hide, and even relay the player’s bad behavior
blending between the animations on a per-animation basis. to the next town. “If you annoy the Clakkerz in their town, when
you return, they might be hostile and belligerent toward you,” he
Dynamic Worlds says. “It’s a way to support the notion that the world you are in is
Because strategy was an integral element of the gameplay, this placed one that you have an effect on, while staying on track with, and
increased importance on AI and physics modeling. The player’s inter- perhaps even complementing, the story line.”
actions with the NPCs and their surroundings are more complicated “Story is very important to us, but we didn’t want to restrict the
than in previous games, due in part to the intricacy of the environ- players either,” notes Lanning. “You have to give them choices that
ments and the strategic deployment of live ammo critters, each of have a valid effect on gameplay, without affecting the plot. One
which has it own purpose. For instance, zappflies are chargeable and method of doing this is to get the players to the major plot points
can be used to stun adversaries and set off electrical switches
to open doors, bolamites are web-slinging spiders that can
ensnare victims, fuzzles are personnel-seeking porcupine
mines, skunks lure enemies and incapacitate them with their
stench; and chippunks distract them with their loud demean-
or. In addition, the environments are laden with hidden traps
that the Stranger can use to his advantage, such as activating
giant cranes to drop boulders on unsuspecting goons.
All of these elements required almost universal destruc-
tibility of the environment and characters. The team wrote
the proprietary physics simulation used in Stranger’s Wrath,
through which all the objects in the game are associated with
simple physics bodies approximating their size and shape,
In Stranger’s Wrath, players can transition between first- and third-

person action for different gameplay strategies. The main character’s
weapon of choice is a unique crossbow that shoots ammo creatures,
such as these Thudslugs (below), at the enemy Wolvarks (right).
and then send them back into town a different way, as opposed to
having them double back through an area they just spent an hour
in.” Other methods for maximizing interactivity within the story-
driven game include allowing the player to find and purchase up-
grades, and choose the order in which they bounty outlaws.
A New Sheriff in Town

Though ambitious, the project was worth the effort, judging by
the universal acclaim that greeted the release of Oddworld Strang-
er’s Wrath. Successfully transplanting Oddworld’s award-winning
imagery into the most commercially successful gaming genre not
only has brought newfound innovation, experimentation, and hu-
mor to first-person shooters, but it has also proven OWI’s ability
such as cubes, spheres, and so forth. “When objects move, it’s these to adapt and evolve with the times.
simple physics primitives moving and colliding against the world,” Moreover, OWI’s new take on the first-person shooter is a wel-
says Bloom. “When an object is destroyed, we simply delete it and come change, and if the enthusiasm with which the game has been
spawn new objects for the debris. When a ‘destructible’ is destroyed, embraced thus far is any indication, Stranger’s Wrath will not only
we update the movement caches to reflect the fact that the space is expand the Oddworld universe and fan base, but the first-person
now clear, so enemy NPCs will be able to walk through it.” shooter genre as well.
Lanning was determined to maintain the integrity and con-
sistency of the story world through persistent AI, which is most Martin McEachern, a contributing editor for Computer Graphics
prominently displayed in the player’s interaction with the Clakkerz. World, can be reached at martin@globility.com.

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.... Film
E ffec ts s tudios
create CG
bac k grounds
surrounding
a ctors filme d
a gains t green-
sc re e n for the
mov ie S in City
Shots of actors such By Barbara Robertson

as Bruce Willis were
Images copyright and courtesy of Dimension Films.
captured in Sony
HDCAM SR format and
converted into stylized
black and white to
match the graphic style
of Frank Miller’s novels.
The Devil’s in the

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Film ....
Frank Miller’s stark, black-and-white with amazing movie stars,” says Stu Mas- worked, so we came up with a mix of styl-
graphic novels are about as far removed chwitz, who co-founded The Orphanage (San ized black and white with selective use of
from what many people think of as comic Francisco), which handled shots for That Yel- color and details in the background.”
books as is the movie Spy Kids from the low Bastard. Café FX (Los Angeles) took Big “We wanted the film to look as much like
film Pulp Fiction. But it was Spy Kids direc- Fat Kill; Hybride (Quebec) worked on Sin the books as possible,” adds Boerner. “Some-
tor Robert Rodriguez who cajoled a reluc-
tant Miller into letting him make a movie
based on the novels.
“Robert made a test film, took it to Mill-
er, and told him, ‘This is my gift to you,’”
says Stu Maschwitz, founder of The Or-
phanage, a visual effects studio. “I hope
you will direct a film with me.”
The offer to have Miller co-direct the
film ultimately caused Rodriguez to resign
from the Director’s Guild, which doesn’t
allow co-directors. But the collaboration
resulted in Dimension Films’ Sin City, co-
directed by Miller and Rodriguez and sched-
uled for release April 1.
Rather than try to expand one novel or
create a new story based on Miller’s con-
Throughout the film, selected elements were either rendered in color or had color added
cepts, Rodriguez picked three Miller nov-
in compositing, as in this scene created by Café FX for Big Fat Kill.
els—Sin City: The Hard Goodbye, Big Fat
Kill, and That Yellow Bastard—and com-
piled them into one feature-length film. City: The Hard Goodbye. All three studios had times the blood is in color, sometimes it’s not.
Three visual effects studios worked on the worked with Rodriguez on Spy Kids. Sometimes it glows white in the shadows.”
film, each handling all the shots for one “I needed people who knew how Robert Once the Troublemaker team had fash-
novel. Each novel needed around 600 vi- worked,” says Keefe Boerner, visual effects ioned a basic look that Rodriguez approved,
sual effects shots: The film’s every frame producer. “I wasn’t going to a new compa- they picked key shots from the most complex
is a visual effect. ny to do 600 shots in six APRILs when they sequences in the three novels and translat-
Actors Bruce Willis, Benicio Del Toro, didn’t know what they’d be getting into.” ed those into 3D, working in Softimage XSI
Josh Hartnett, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, and in Mental Images’ Mental Ray. “We built
Jessica Alba, Jaime King, and others were Stylin’ 3D backgrounds, textured them, and lit the
shot entirely on greenscreen stages. Sur- The film’s look was developed at Rodri- scenes, all very quickly to get an overall look,
rounding them, 96 distinct environments— guez’s Troublemaker Digital in Austin, and then Robert would tweak them,” Oliv-
Details
from cityscapes, to car chases, to room inte- where a small team of artists typically ier says. “When he was happy, we sent the
brainstorm with Rodriguez models, textures, lighting, QuickTimes, and
at the beginning of his films, image files to the vendors for reference.”
and then follow the work Miller’s graphic novels provided the
through completion. choreography and the storyboards. With
“We picked panels from few exceptions—car chase scenes, for exam-
Miller’s books to test with ple—animatics weren’t needed for the visu-
live action plates that Robert al effects teams. “There was no point,” says
had shot of himself and a few Olivier. “The stories flowed so well from pan-
other people on greenscreen,” el to panel, they could see what Frank did.”
riors—were created with computer graphics says Chris Olivier, Troublemaker artist. “Our Rodriguez didn’t require storyboards for
in black and white, and, as in the novels, a job was to recreate the panels in 3D and filming, either. “The books were the story-
little bit of color. By all accounts, the film explore different looks to see what would boards,” says Boerner. “Robert knew in his
is as true to Miller’s novels as it could be, be readable. We went from stark black and head what would be behind the actors and
in look as well as story. white, just like the comic, to the opposite— just started filming them on the greenscreen.
“It’s a violent, black-and-white triptych gray scale. Robert decided neither extreme He knows what can and can’t be done.”
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The Hard Goodbye into the river, they wanted to see that. But the book is framed ver-
Working with Rodriguez on set at the beginning was Daniel Leduc, tically, and movies are, of course, horizontal.”
visual effects supervisor at Hybride. Rodriguez shot the film in full In addition, framing the shots helped keep the production effi-
color and stored it in Sony’s HDCAM SR format. “We’d get out- cient. Models were always built from the camera viewpoint. “When
put in full resolution and 10-bit color, and we could record it with the framing was approved, we’d know what needed to be mod-
all the definition. It’s a black-and-white movie, but it has tons of eled,” says Theroux.
shading. We were able to have 10 bits per channel; 1024 shades of To further save time, although the scenes were lit using tools
gray per channel.” Having that much dynamic range made it pos- from within XSI, sometimes artists would paint highlights in Pho-
sible to have details in the dark blacks and bright whites, and to toshop and project them onto the models rather than create CG
create a stylized realism. lighting effects. Particle effects—rain, explosions, water, muzzle
“Some scenes are almost photoreal now,” Leduc adds. “The flashes, and so forth—were handled in Maya.
style changed a lot from the beginning to what we’re doing today. “Sometimes we made images that Robert felt were too real,”
The way the film was done is that the three vendors worked sepa- says Theroux. “He would say, ‘If I wanted real, I would have shot
rately on their books. Robert wanted to have separate styles. That a real background.’”
way, he picked what he liked and didn’t like. Today, I know what Many shots were rendered in 4K and 6K resolution to allow ad-
the other studios were doing, but in the beginning I didn’t.” ditional camera moves in art and compositing. Some were rendered
in color; others in black and white.
“When we turned the color shots
into black and white, they created a
richer gray scale image than if we’d
rendered in black and white,” says
Theroux.
Between 16 and 20 compositors
worked on the project, always in gray
scale, adding color as needed. “When
we have color, it’s an object—the bed,
a red dress, an eye,” says Leduc. “It’s a
comic book look. Sometimes we have
an iconic picture that’s 2-bit definition,
sometimes it’s photoreal, other times
there’s nonrealistic lighting.”
Getting the right look took trial and
error. “We tried to have all the details
in back and white with no clipping and
As with all the scenes in Sin City, actors Rosario Dawson and Michael Clarke Duncan were
without losing the shading in the skin
filmed on a greenscreen stage. The CG backgrounds were added by Café FX.
tones,” says Leduc. “It was tough be-
cause there are so many adjustments
For its part, Hybride delivered 726 shots that included 45 different you can make. You can move the gamma—the brightness slider—
locations, all virtual sets. “All the backgrounds are CG,” says Phillippe or the curves. We decided to use curves because you can change
Theroux, 3D supervisor. Some were 2½D matte paintings—textures the definition in the low blacks and high whites without chang-
painted in Adobe’s Photoshop and projected onto simple XSI geom- ing the middle.”
etry from camera view; some were full 3D sets. “Occasionally—like Toward the end of the production, the studio decided the film
in the jail—we used the same set for 20 or 30 shots, but usually, we needed more color. “The easiest thing was to color the blood,” says
were changing sets every 10 or 15 shots,” he says. Leduc. “This isn’t a kid movie—there’s blood everywhere.”
Although animatics weren’t needed for shot choreography, Hy-
bride’s artists created shot layouts. Sometimes the layouts were Big Fat Kill
quick drawings given to Rodriguez for approval; sometimes the “They tamed it down a little bit,” says David Debner, effects supervi-
shots were framed using simple geometry in XSI to create the back- sor for Café FX, which handled Big Fat Kill. “No one is really a good
grounds, with 2d3’s Boujou and Science.D.Vision’s 3D Equalizer guy; there are just different levels of bad people. They cut back on
tracking camera movements from the live-action plates. some of the gore we created.”
“People wanted to see the same images as on page 25 in the In addition to supervising effects at the studio, Debner was Café
book, the same icons,” says Theroux. “When the police car jumps FX’s onset supervisor. “One unique thing for this film was working

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with the new generation of HD,” he says. “The signal was much Wave, but some car crash scenes were animated in Maya, in which
cleaner. We used a brand new [Blackmagic Design] DeckLink card the programmers wrote a custom rain program,” Debner says.
that’s 4:4:4 compatible.” Some scenes were painted in Photoshop. Cameras were tracked
On set, the film crew had two HD monitors. “It was easy for me with Boujou; and compositing and rotoscoping was handled pri-
to see whether the tracking marks would show up on an image— marily by Eyeon Software’s Digital Fusion with an assist from Pin-
something I can’t see on the video tap monitors used for regular nacle Systems’ Commotion.
films,” Debner says. “One monitor showed the real color; the other “It was nice to do one continuous sequence,” says Debner, “rather
was turned to black and white that a video engineer pushed into than isolated shots here and there. It was almost a movie in itself.”
high contrast to tell if the lights were too hot in certain areas. Shots ranged from an urban alleyway to the LaBrea Tar Pits.
“An advantage of this format,” Debner continues, “Is that it “That’s where they go to stash Benicio Del Toro’s body,” Debner
doesn’t clip the data. We work with ILM’s EXR format in floating says. “Some vigilantes come; there are a lot of bullets and an ex-
point TIFF. The high dynamic range will be noticed onscreen in plosion. But the cool part is the environment we did—everything
this movie. The brights and darks got close attention.” from the grass to the lightning. We have dinosaur statues drip-
As did Hybride, Café FX created interior and exterior backgrounds ping with rain.”
for live-action shots and entire CG car chases, all in black and white Although much of the scene was created in black and white,
with spots of color. In one car chase sequence guest-directed by the cars were built in color to better match the live-action cars. It
Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill), for example, only the lights was a fortuitous decision. The studio later asked for some black-
from a police motorcycle are in color. “Quentin wanted red and blue and-white cars to be re-rendered in color.
colors streaking through the back window,” says Debner “We basically hit the ground running,” says Everett Burrell,
For editing, Café FX used Apple’s Final Cut Pro on Macs; for graph- digital effects supervisor who split responsibility for the 600 shots
ics, PC systems equipped with AMD’s 64-bit Opteron processors run- with Jeff Goldman. “We started in July, and had to have a version
ning NewTek’s LightWave and Alias’s Maya. “We primarily use Light- of every shot done by Thanksgiving so the director could see all
his stuff cut together. Then we went back to the beginning and
started over again with Robert’s notes.”
Toward the end, Rodriguez began singling out objects he want-
ed in color. “Sometimes the sky would be blood red,” Burrell says.
“And sometimes the blood might be white, or black, or red.” Thus,
the studio ended up delivering two color versions for 200 of the
approximately 600 shots.
That Yellow Bastard

One color that didn’t change was the Yellow Bastard’s sickly mus-
tard-colored pallor. Shots for this third of the film were created at
The Orphanage, where visual effects supervisor Maschwitz fol-
lowed live-action rules to create the exaggerated graphic effects.
“This film was an art direction challenge,” Maschwitz says. “Ev-
ery shot was unique, powerful, bold. By following the rules of live
action—the language of movies—we could make it more graphic. I
wanted the combination of live action and CG to feel like the com-
ic book, not have it look like live-action actors were walking in a
comic book. It had to look photographed, even if it couldn’t have
been photographed.” The photographic look was accomplished
through painting, texture details, effects, and lighting.
Roger Gibbon led a matte painting team that included Michael
Pangrazio, a longtime matte painter, who was also a creative direc-
tor on the show. The painters worked in gray scale in Photoshop.
“It made them rethink the way they composed an image,” says
Programmers at Café FX wrote a custom program in Maya to create Gibbon. “As a matte painter, you try to create the illusion of depth
the effect of rain dripping on the dinosaur statues in the scene with and shape, and when you reduce a painting to black and white you
mercenaries from Big Fat Kill (top). Mickey Rourke and Jaime King say have only light and dark to lead the eye. We constructed the look
“the hard goodbye” against a background created at Hybride (bottom). through the placement of patches of light and the way in which
those areas reacted to people passing in front of them.”
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pushed SplutterFish’s Brazil.”

For example, in a night shot,
two shady characters filmed on a
treadmill walk (once they’re com-
posited into the CG background)
past a row of seedy motel doors
toward the camera. Maschwitz
had the lighters add tiny apera-
ture flares as bare bulbs flash into
the scene. Also in this shot, a CG
truck parked in the background
reflects snow from the ground in
That Yellow Bastard played by actor Nick Stahl, here with Jessica Alba, achieved his sickly a hubcap. The snow was baking
pallor in this black-and-white scene thanks to visual effects artists at The Orphanage. soda that the crew photographed;
the truck was rendered with Brazil.
In many shots, however, the snow
Once the paintings moved into compositing, the details disap- was created with particles in Side Effects’ Houdini and rendered
peared—and then, sometimes, reappeared: The compositors turned with subsurface scattering in Brazil.
the gray-scale paintings into high-contrast black-and-white graphic For example, during one of many car chases in snowstorms, a
images. However, when a shadow, for example, moved across a CG Chevy fishtails into the frame. CG supervisor Rodrigo Teixeira
blown out white area, the detail was revealed. Similarly, hints of created the snow by generating 500,000 particles in a box around
details appear in shadowed areas. the car. The box moved with the camera; the camera was tied
“We worked hard not to throw away the information,” says Ryan to the car. The car had a kind of force field around it to keep the par-
Tudhope, associate visual effects supervisor. “If we pushed the graph- ticles from penetrating. To make all this efficient, Teixeira recycled
ic look too far, it didn’t work. We stayed grounded in reality.” particles rather than regenerating them. “Whenever the points hit
In one shot, for example, actor Bruce Willis runs out of the woods the ground, instead of dying, they pop back to the top,” he says.
toward a barn. In Miller’s novel, the barn is black against a white The car was created in Autodesk Media and Entertainment’s 3ds
sky. But the shot takes place at night. “We couldn’t suddenly have max, animated in Maya and 3ds max, and rendered in Brazil. As it
a bright white background
with black shadows,” says
Tudhope. “Everyone in the In this all-CG shot from
That Yellow Bastard,
theater would be blinded. It
the car fishtails into the
wouldn’t work. So we
frame and trails an
thought about how we
almost subliminal flash
would have achieved the
of red from the taillights.
shot if we had been on a set Created at The Orphanage,
or on location. We gave the the car was modeled in
barn an atmospheric glow.” 3ds max, animated in
For this shot and Maya and 3ds max, and
throughout the film, the rendered in Brazil. The
crew used photometric snow was generated
lighting—volumetric lights in Houdini.
modeled after real-world
lights. “We didn’t use CG
cheats,” says Maschwitz. “We even emulated the artifacts you does a 180 into the frame, you see a flash of red from the taillight,
see in films—the way you sometimes see big light flares, for ex- and then it stops and fills the frame. It’s a shot the crew is partic-
ample. They’re totally obvious and totally fake, but they’re part ularly proud of. “We nailed the CG problem of broken reflections
of the language of movies.” and refractions,” says Maschwitz. “Even though it’s in black and
One thing that helped Maschwitz and the team create lighting white, it’s the closest thing to photoreal that we’ve done.”
effects such as these is an artifact of the film’s storyline. “It doesn’t
pay to optimize unless an environment is rendered often,” says Barbara Robertson is an award-winning journalist and a contributing
Tudhope. “So we turned on all the bells and whistles and really editor for Computer Graphics World.
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SuperSp By Karen Moltenbrey T h i s y e a r ’s S u p e r B o w l co m m e rci a l s
e n t e r t a i n e d w i t h su b t l e d i g i t a l e ff e ct s
FedEx/Kinko’s “Top 10”

spot offered tips
for accomplishing message, humor, and effects facility Quiet Man, required rig re-
successful Super effects. Although the moval to erase the compressor and air hoses
Bowl ads, including spots were criticized attached to the animatronic bear. For several
the use of animals, for being ho hum, scenes, though, the artists had to rebuild the
such as this digitally many still managed neck portion of the animal. That’s because
enhanced bear. to provoke a laugh the eye level of the person wearing the cos-
or two, complements of the subtle digital tume fell below that of the bear, requiring the
effects that made them crowd pleasers. man inside to lift a flap cut into the material
T
so he could see while performing a dance
he Super Bowl isn’t The Key to Success and a simulated groin kick. To cover the ex-
just a football game; Humor and effects aren’t the only major in- posed area, the artists rotoscoped patches
it’s an event. Each gredients of a successful Super Bowl com- of fur and rebuilt them using a Flame and
year the broadcast of mercial, at least according to FedEx/Kinko’s Inferno system (Autodesk Media and Enter-
this NFL championship humorous “Top 10” spot, which appropri- tainment), and hand tracked the patch into
matchup draws tens of millions of viewers ately summed up Super Bowl commercial the frame. “The fur had to look natural,” says
who are reluctant to lift their eyes from the content past and, as it turned out, present. executive producer Steve Holiner, “especially
television screen for even a minute, lest they The ad, featuring a dancing bear and ac- when the bear was moving around.”
miss a great play—or a great commercial. tor Burt Reynolds, highlights the Indeed, judging from the high rat-
Without question, the Super Bowl is the 10 key elements of a success- ings the spot received in post-
biggest day of the year for Madison Ave- ful Super Bowl commer- game polls, the audience
nue, annually drawing television’s largest cial: an animal, a danc- seemed to get a “kick”
crowd. And despite this year’s 4 percent de- ing animal, a talking out of the way the com-
crease in viewership, the game still pulled animal, a groin kick mercial poked fun at
in an audience of 86 million. So there’s lit- (popular last year), the predictable con-
tle question why agencies and clients go attractive females, a
that extra yard, and pay that extra dollar, famous pop song, a
to show off their most daring, memorable, cute kid, a celebrity,
and creative efforts. Yet, last year’s negative a bonus ending, and a
publicity stemming from the combination product message, which is
of Janet Jackson’s half-time fiasco coupled optional, according to the Artists added fur to the area
with the predominantly off-color humor of commercial. around the neck of this bear
the commercials had many agencies and cli- The post work for the costume in postproduction,
ents “airing” on the safe side this year with spot, done by Charles Quinn making the faux animal
clever but subdued ads in terms of their and Steve Koenig of visual look more natural.

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ts
act properly, making it appear as
Numerous animals were
if the animals were filmed in
filmed individually
on greenscreen and a group.
“herded” together “You can’t go wrong
for a group shot in a with an animal spot,”
Bud commercial. says Poulatian. “And
people seem to be at-
tracted to the Clydes-
dale commercials; they
are appealing and endear-
ing to nearly everyone, no
matter the age.”
dlers present Apparently the folks at Careerbuilder.
in nearly ev- com agree with Poulatian’s view of using
ery frame. animals in TV ads. In its three popular com-
Moreover, mercials that ran during the game, “Whoop-
some of the an- ee Cushion,” “Monkeys,” and “Titanic,” the
imals, such as the company featured an office staffed by live
tent and gags used in Super Bowl advertise- camel and the ostrich, chimpanzees whose antics thwart the busi-
ments. But what makes the ad so successful were particularly uncooperative during the ness efforts of the only human employee not
is the fact that most of the spots really did filming, and as a result, the film crew lost monkeying around. While it appears as if
use one or more of the must-have elements valuable daylight. “We filmed the first two there are dozens of chimps, there were only
listed in the commercial. animals in the sunlight, and then we lost four, which were dressed in different out-
our light,” explains Poulatian. “So quite a fits for multiple roles. Given their volatility,
Animals Deliver Results few of the beasts had to be filmed at night, however, only one or two could be filmed
Commercials containing animals are a sure which resulted in inconsistent, unnatural at a time. Therefore, it was up to postpro-
bet with viewers. Last year, Budweiser’s light and hard shadows against the green- duction boutique Vendetta Post to staff the
“Born a Donkey,” featuring a burro that screens.” To fix these problems, the group office using a good deal of shot duplication,
succeeded in joining the famous Clydes- first cut the mattes by extracting the performed in Flame.
dales, was the definitive crowd favorite animal, then added each one In one sequence, two dozen
based on postgame surveys. Capitalizing into the environments, chimps are shown
on that success, Budweiser continued the where the artists color- together as
story line this year in “Journey,” as an ar- corrected the images.
ray of zoo and farm animals make their way They also added the
down a dirt path to a barn for an unsched- appropriate shadows,
uled “cattle call” in hopes of fulfilling the lighting, and interac-
same dream as the donkey’s. tion that would have
“Having so many different animals on been present natural-
set complicated the shoot,” says Patrick Pou- ly if the herd had been
latian, visual effects artist at Brickyard VFX. standing together in the
An obvious setback was that “some of the sunlight. This process enabled they exit an
animals just couldn’t be near others with- the team to cast shad- elevator. To accom-
out causing problems.” As a result, each of ows from left to right plish this effect,
the 12 animals—ranging in size from that and have them re- the team used a partial
of an elephant to a pig—was filmed individ- motion-control rig to achieve
Artists roto-
ually against greenscreen. Later, the team the desired camera rotations
scoped shots
at Brickyard used Flame to rotoscope and and pans as each animal
of individual
composite the 11 separate live-action film chimps and was filmed individually
plates into group shots, making it appear composited them stepping out of the elevator.
as if the animals were filmed next to one together to create Using Flame, visual effects
another. They also used the Discreet sys- a group for three artist Crawford Reilly and his
tem to remove the tethers and animal han- Careerbuilder.com ads. group rotoscoped the chimp from
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cine facility The Syndicate augment them in postproduc-

tion, to preserve the quirkiness of the piece. For example,
the unicorn was a white horse with a prosthesis attached to
its head. The group then used Flame to make the animal’s
nostrils flare, its cheeks puff, and, more important, its mouth
move, as when it scolds the father for his white lie.
Conversely, the rabbit consisted of a smaller puppet body and
Spontaneous artists did a complete a proportionally larger costume head, worn by an actor. “The di-
CG mouth replacement that recting team decided this would allow for more extensive head and
enabled this live dog to converse mouth movements,” says visual effects supervisor Kevin Prendiv-
with its owner in a Toyota spot. ille. “It also gave the structure of the animal an odd sensibility that
fit well with the theme.” Later in post, the team tracked and com-
each shot, then tracked and composited all of them into the final posited the bunny head onto the body within Flame, removing the
scene, making sure that the 20-some layers of animals did not ap- rigs from the body puppet. Even though the actor was responsible
pear to be walking over one another while they shuffle forward. for the eye, nose, and ear movements, the post group enhanced
Meanwhile, Toyota’s “Leash” commercial takes the talking ani- those motions and manipulated the facial features.
mal approach to advertising, as a live-action dog prompts its owner “It’s a simple concept with a simple execution,” Prendiville says
to go for a walk. When the owner, who is engrossed in a television of the commercial. “You don’t always need over-the-top effects if
program, declines, the dog tells him that if the leash is the problem, you present a good story.”
it had just heard about the car company’s “$199 a month leash The Syndicate also used a combination mod-
deal,” to which the owner promptly corrects the canine that it is a el—part live action, part animatronic—for its
lease deal, not a leash deal. HD commercial called “Rattlesnake” for
To make the dog speak, artists at production house Spontane- Ford Trucks. In it, a man packs up his
ous did a complete CG mouth replacement for the animal within gear after mending fences, only to catch
Softimage’s XSI to achieve a natural look. Under the supervision of a glimpse of a rattler coiled at his feet. The
director of CG Lawrence Nimrichter, the team modeled the jowls, snake turns to face him, opens it mouth,
lips, tongue, and teeth in 3D, which enabled the animator to move flicks it tongue, and strikes the man’s leg.
the rigging as needed for the animation The man looks stricken until he hears the
“When the dog realizes its mistake, the animal raises its eye- snake coughing before rolling over dead.
brows sheepishly and blinks its eyes inquisitively,” says 2D direc- Using this scenario to show just how tough
tor and compositor David Elkins. “To accomplish this, I created a a Ford truck owner is required extensive im-
2D mesh of the dog, which allowed me to track the movements of age manipulation to the reptile sequence,
the face and adjust areas like the eyebrows, cheeks, and eyes, so which featured live-action footage of real
it’s just not a mouth attached to a face.” The group then removed and animatronic snakes. According to
the real mouth and replaced it with the CG version, tracking the 3D artist MB Emigh, the group rebuilt the
model into the live scene first using XSI and later Inferno. snake in Flame with elements from the
live-action shoot, adding emphatic rat-
Faux Animals Also a Favorite tles to its tail, more coil to its body, and
Live animals are popular in Super choking motions as its body convulses. The
Bowl ads, though faux animals team also used Flame to track the image into
can be equally effective, as dem- the scene, and to composite a 3D animated A part-live, part-CG snake
provided the director with a
onstrated in “Exaggerated Dad.” snake tongue, created in NewTek’s Light-
perfect combination of action
In the spot, a talking unicorn and Wave, into the serpent’s mouth.
for a Ford truck commercial.
the Easter Bunny confront a father “Mixing and matching the snake parts re-
after he makes excuses to his young ally brought the reptile to life,” notes Emigh. “And working in HD
daughter why she shouldn’t sample takes the idea of visual effects to a new level because it is so un-
his Emerald Nuts, lest harm befall these forgiving. You can’t hide anything like you can in NTSC.”
fabled characters.
The Syndicate composited
a bunny costume onto the To give the animals their unique Cute Kid
body of a rabbit puppet to looks, the ad agency opted to cap- Visual effects and design company A52 coupled explosive visual
create this quirky-looking ture the effects in camera, and then effects with a cute kid to sell Nationwide Insurance’s “Science Proj-
character for Emerald Nuts. have artists at visual effects/tele- ect” spot, shown to a regional Super Bowl audience. In this latest

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commercial in an ongoing series, a boy’s The most challenging part of the project, says
homemade robot goes haywire, eventu- Greene, was replicating the lighting changes of the
ally blowing up the family car with Hol- wide shots in the small-scale elements and match-
lywood flare, much to the surprise of the ing the shadows. This was particularly tricky with
youngster and his parents. To ensure that camera flashes going off in most of the sequences,
the digital effects would integrate properly he adds. In situations where the team was unable
into the plates, visual effects artist Simon to match the lighting from the main plate, the artists
Scott supervised the live-action shoot. Later, simply painted the backplate.
using Flame, he and his team composited sev- Pizza Hut and visual effects facility Quiet Man also
eral effects into the scenes, including comput- Digital and practical effects used celebrities—albeit Muppets—for “Destined to Dip,”
er-generated laser beams. resulted in an explosive a live-action/CG spot. The commercial features several
In addition, Scott used the Flame system combination for Nationwide well-known characters, among them Miss Piggy, who is
Insurance’s latest commercial
to achieve the spot’s interactive lighting. “Be- dragged around a room after she catches a fast-
when a robot runs amok.
cause I was on set, I knew where the lasers moving strip of pizza as the rectangular
were going to go and what they were going to hit,” he says. “So we slice tries to reach a dipping sauce.
shot the plate once, and we shot it again with neon tubes placed Using Softimage XSI, lead CG artist Kris
in the scene that illuminated the environment. We then used this Rivel crafted the 3D pizza sticks, which
plate as a compositing element for our interactive light.” had to match the actual food in the first
The commercial ends with a big bang, a practical explosion filmed shot. “Our CG pizza had to look real-
in camera. “It was meant to be smaller, but someone got overzeal- istic, but we had to fix the lighting and
ous,” says Scott. “However, the agency loved it, so we kept it.” create shaders in Mental Ray so that the
cheese and pepperoni looked translucent
Celebrities Sell but not too greasy and unappetizing,” he
Verizon, with help from visual effects company The Mill, used a says. In all, the group rendered five to six
celebrity bent in its HD commercial called “Miniaturization,” which passes of the pizza stick using Mental Images’ CG pizza and a roto-
reduces various stars to miniature proportions so they can be seen Mental Ray, and composited the model into the scoped Miss Piggy
on the company’s new 3G broadband phones that play movie trail- live action using Flame. The artists also used team up to promote
ers, sports clips, and music videos. Flame to remove the extensive rigging that was Pizza Hut’s new
The ad opens to an Oscar-like red carpet as a limo pulls up to needed to animate the puppets. dipping strips, thanks
to postproduction
the curb and a mini Kid Rock jumps from the vehicle amid gasps
work by Quiet Man.
from the crowd, which is told that Tinsel Town is Postgame Report
clamoring to get tiny in order to appear on the The Super Bowl is no longer just about football; it’s also about en-
phone. The camera then cuts to a petite tertainment, both on and off the field, from the players and plays
version of Christina Aguilera, and then to the star-studded half-time shows and the dazzling, ambitious
to a tiny Shaquille O’Neal, followed by commercials that people talk about the next day at the watercooler.
a diminutive Deion Sanders. To achieve In fact, Super Bowl commercials have generated so much interest
these “small” effects, the celebrities and buzz over the years that they have spawned their own compe-
first were filmed against greenscreen, tition, dubbed the Ad Bowl, and even receive their own pregame
and then artist Dirk Greene composited media hype and postgame ratings and analysis.
them into full-size backgrounds. Yet, unlike in years past, there were no clear-cut winners in this
Accomplishing this illusion required year’s battle of the ads, despite the average price tag of $2.4 mil-
careful choreography so that the angles would lion for a 30-second spot. Perhaps that’s because many clients and
Compositing techniques match up in the final plates, as in the agencies overanalyzed their content, ensuring that it was in good
were used to shrink celebri- scene when a small O’Neal had to taste, and chose to play it safe with formulaic material. While it’s
ties, including Shaquille high-five his full-scale teammates. This unlikely that any ad from this year’s selections will appear in high-
O’Neal, in size to promote
was done with motion-control camera light reels years from now, the examples highlighted here show that
Verizon’s new phones.
moves while shooting the players and by using digital effects, companies were able to entertain audiences
then replicating those same moves while filming O’Neal on green- with some interesting offerings. Maybe next year they will apply the
screen. Greene and his group augmented the scene by adding full- technology for more daring ads worthy of MVP status.
scale images of hands and feet, which were shot on a separate plate
and composited with the other imagery using Flame, thus giving Karen Moltenbrey is a senior technical editor for Computer
the scene a greater sense of scale. Graphics World.

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Storage
Storage in the Studio

Storage systems
in the help content creation

and production
studios design digital
Studio
workflows
In the following stories, we

examine the steps these visual
effects studios and postproduction
facilities are taking toward developing
more efficient digital pipelines:
Pacific Title & Art Builds

a SAN-Based Pipeline
DNA’s Disk Storage Ensures
Quality Effects for The Aviator
Sesame Workshop Stores
Sesame Street on Disk
Optimus Turns to Disk-Based
Color Correction
DKP Achieves Full Digital
Rendering and Compositing
SPECIAL SECTION
Tippett’s SAN Aids Workflow

and Creativity
FotoKem’s SAN-NAS System
Streamlines Workflow
Printed in conjunction with
magazine
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The Power of the Pipeline

BY MICHELE HOPE
A
s postproduction houses and visual effects studios continue their quest Nevada. He attributes the turning point to a confluence of issues, including signifi-
to build digital production pipelines, more attention than ever before is cant price drops for Fibre Channel components and new low-cost options for disk
being focused on the data storage components at the hub of these new storage such as disk arrays based on high-capacity Serial ATA disk drives.
systems. Whether used in the production of commercial spots or full-length feature “We’ve reached a time when you can put your money into tape recorders for sin-
films, digital storage devices are now viewed not only as essential to improving the pro- gle users or, for the same price, have multiple users on the same disk storage,” says
ductivity of studio artists, but also as vital to enhancing the quality of their work. Shearer. “The kicker is that you can put any resolution on disk, and after it’s been edited,
This will be a watershed year for storage in digital content creation environments, you can push it to any resolution you want.” This transition from resolution-dependent
says Tom Shearer, a 30-year industry veteran in both the storage and entertainment “islands” to resolution-independent, disk-based storage, he contends, represents the
fields and executive vice president at Bright Systems, a storage integrator in Reno, future direction of production houses.
Pacific Title & Art Builds a SAN-Based Pipeline to a clustered storage network architecture,
based on SGI’s servers and storage arrays
Pacific Title & Art Studio has a long tradi- 2TB for a 2K film or 8TB for a 4K film. and running SGI’s CXFS distributed file sys-
tion of taking bold first steps. Back in the But that’s not the end of the story. “When tem. With the 200TB storage area network
mid-1920s, the Hollywood-based facility you work on a movie, you have multiple ver- (SAN), Pacific Title can now place scan da-
performed titling work for the first talk- sions of it,” notes Andy Tran, Pacific Title’s ta directly onto the network, which allows
ing picture, The Jazz Singer. In the late chief technology officer. “Even at 2K, a mov- the studio’s artists to work directly from the
1980s, the firm was among the pioneers ie could end up with 8TB or more when you SAN simultaneously, saving the time they
that moved into the emerging computer- account for all the versions, and a 4K movie might otherwise spend waiting for data.
generated visual effects market. And since could end up with more than 32TB.” “As an early adopter of a SAN, we allowed
then, the now 86-year-old studio has trans- With that much data, Tran says, the people to work directly from it for composit-
formed itself into an all-digital postproduc- first lesson one learns is to minimize the ing and 2D and 3D work,” says Tran. “Then
tion house that performs everything from movement of data around the network. about a year ago, when we migrated to a dig-
titling to digital intermediate (DI) services “If you try to move such large quantities ital intermediate workflow, we just plugged
for major motion picture productions, in- from one file server to another,” he ex- that directly into the SAN as well.”
cluding, most recently, Elektra, Constan- plains, “it could take days.” Key to allowing the DI workflow to take
tine, and War of the Worlds. In fact, minimizing data movement place on the SAN was to enable 2K film play-
One of the biggest challenges the studio was the main reason the company moved back from the SAN in continued on page 36
has faced in recent years has been to expand
its network and storage systems to keep pace
with the explosion of digital data it has been
SPECIAL SECTION
creating. Indeed, doing the math for the stor-

age capacity required to digitize an average
Elektra courtesy of 20th Century Fox ©2004
feature-length film begins to tell the story.

When scanned at 2K resolution, each frame
of a film requires some 13MB of storage; and
when scanned at 4K, each frame consumes
53MB. When multiplied by the total number
of frames in a feature-length film, the storage
requirements quickly mount up to more than Pacific Title & Art uses SAN storage from SGI for DI and effects work on films such as Elektra.

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Work, don’t wait.

“ For Harry Potter 3, we needed a high-speed data bridge between “Sledgehammer undid the bottleneck. Now we encode via
our CG and Compositing departments. Our Sledgehammer Sledgehammer, liberating our far more expensive gear
is deployed in exactly this capacity and has so these resources can be allocated more
performed flawlessly.” productively—and profitably.”
Steve MacPherson Billy Baldwin
Technical Manager CEO
Moving Picture Company Postworks
“ We needed to create an efficient workflow “We did in-house tests prior to purchase.
and we determined that Sledgehammer, with Sledgehammer performed exceptionally well.
its unique video, storage, content management, So, the combination of high performance and low
and networking capabilities, is the perfect solution.” maintenance has simplified, and fortified, our infrastructure.”
Takehiro Okajima Rich Torpey
General Manager, Technical Division VP of Engineering
Omnibus Japan rhinoFX
Every year, thousands of hours are wasted

shuffling data between servers and users.
Max-T’s products eliminate storage bottlenecks
and save time and money lost to inefficient workflow.
www.max-t.com/cgw
Maximum Throughput provides ultra high-performance solutions for the storage infrastructure
and media management requirements of the entertainment industry. Sledgehammer, our
award-winning networked storage system, and Xstoner, our content management software,
dramatically improve the economics and workflow of video and film production.
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DNA’s Disk Storage Ensures Quality Effects for The Aviator

Back when work on the
Entertainment Group. Courtesy of Digital Neural Axis.

Miramax movie The Avi-
Image ©2004 Miramax Film Corp. and Initial

ator was just getting off
the ground, Oscar-win-
ning visual effects super-
visor Rob Legato realized
he would have to use a lot
of boutique effects hous-
es with low overhead to DNA used a Medéa VideoRAID array to store its visual effects work for 53 frames in the film The Aviator.
stretch his budget. So
when he needed a shop to produce some The bulk of DNA’s work centered on 53 shots recreating flight of the famous How-
key shots for the film and set up a quality ard Hughes aircraft, the Spruce Goose, over California’s Long Beach Harbor in 1947. To
control station to preview work in progress, create the scene, DNA artists took film footage of the actors in a cockpit against green-
Legato and his producer, Ron Ames, placed screen to simulate the historic flight. They then helped create the appropriate window
a call to Venice, California-based Digital views of the harbor from inside the airplane, adding sky, water, and boats to the scene
Neural Axis (DNA), whose president, Dari- outside. These would ultimately be combined with exterior views of the aircraft pro-
us Fisher, was known for his ability to meet duced by Sony Pictures Imageworks, the film’s principal visual effects vendor.
such challenges with off-the-shelf tools. Fisher was also tapped early on to help set up a quality control (QC) station at The
Aviator Inc.’s Imageworks VFX headquarters. The station would allow Legato and Ames
to evaluate work from different effects vendors in high-definition (HD) format. Having
continued from page 34 had success in designing DNA’s viewing station using Medéa’s dual-channel, 2Gbps Fibre
real time, a feat that would require 274MB- Channel-based VideoRAID disk arrays, Fisher was asked by the production team to help
ps of data throughput. To meet the chal- set up its own QC station with a similar, SCSI-based version of the Medéa array.
lenge, the studio had to add several storage In the Imageworks QC suite, the plan was to preview the effects work by loading
controllers as well as perform the associated preview renders from the various VFX vendors onto the storage array connected to an
modifications and integration work. Apple Macintosh G5 workstation. Work-in-progress shots from each vendor would be
Yet, despite enabling real-time play- combined using Apple’s Final Cut Pro HD editing software. The merged shots could
back from the SAN, the studio was un- then be previewed in HD QuickTime playing off the Medéa storage array via a PCI-based
able to completely eliminate data move- HD/SDI (high-definition/serial digital interface) CineWave card.
ment around the network, as some viewing At DNA, the edit room setup was virtually identical to the ImageWorks-based QC
bays and DI tasks still require data to be station, except that a Blackmagic HD card was used instead of the CineWave card. “We
transferred to workstations. To accommo- wanted to mirror the same system that the production team had so we could see how
date this type of data transmission, Tran our shots were working in sequence,” says Fisher. DNA intercut its VFX shots with HD
and his IT team learned that it was neces- footage of the exterior shots for its own review.
sary to add to the systems surrounding the Since both the QC station and DNA’s edit room needed the ability to play back the
storage “multi-dimensionally” to avoid net- frames in HD (24 frames per second, 8-bit, uncompressed) format, it was important
work bottlenecks. “Every time we expand that the storage system be able to sustain consistent data throughput rates of 85MBps
our SAN, we expand our network capac- to 95MBps, according to Fisher.
ity and our servers at the same time,” Tran “In the storage realm, if you’re going to play back 10-bit, interlaced HD footage, you
explains. “That way we don’t bog down need a data rate of at least 140MBps to 150MBps. Our Medéas can read at sustained rates
our servers.” in excess of 350MBps and write in excess of 270MBps. Because we had fewer frames per
What are the benefits of this SAN-cen- second, it brought our data-rate requirements down to between 85MBps and 95MBps,”
tric approach? “The ability to play back di- Fisher explains. “So we had no problem working at the lower data rate.”
rectly from the SAN gives us a leg up in the Each morning, Fisher and his team gathered all the latest renders from the previous
industry,” says Tran. “Even though we’re a day and cut them into the timeline. They then reviewed them in QuickTime format in
smaller company, the SAN now allows us to the DNA edit room.
finish digital intermediates faster than some Combining DNA’s shots with the Imageworks shots provided the creative team with
larger studios. The SAN is also faster for ac- a broader perspective of how the whole scene was shaping up. Says Fisher, “To really
cessing data. The artists don’t have to spend check the flow and pacing of the scene, it was invaluable to be able to see the progres-
time looking for their data now. They can sion of our interior Spruce Goose shots intercut with the external shots from Imageworks,
just continue working.” and see it all played back in real time.”

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Sesame Workshop Stores Sesame Street on Disk
design elements are owned and licensed by Sesame Workshop.

In theory, one of the benefits of producing 35 years of material
Sesame Street® and associated characters, trademarks, and

for the popular PBS series Sesame Street is that segments from so
many past shows can be reused in new episodes. But in practice,
©2005 Sesame Workshop. All rights reserved.

it’s been a different story, as the show’s editors at Sesame Work-
shop have often found themselves struggling to locate and preview
specific clips from previous seasons.
The problem stemmed from limitations of the Workshop’s leg-
acy video-on-demand system, explains Stephen Miller, IT project
manager for the nonprofit education organization. Indeed, Sesa-
me Workshop has been storing the last few years of Sesame Street Sesame Workshop uses a disk array from Nexsan to digitize Sesame
Street clips from past seasons for rapid viewing and retrieval.
programming—totaling some 6000 clips—on hundreds of Ampex
tapes, which required a lot of manual work to locate specific seg- onto disk as well as transcoding each segment into both low-reso-
ments from past shows. lution and high-resolution video files for future viewing. According
Using three large Ampex tape libraries, the system is capable to Miller, accomplishing these tasks required replacing the Ampex
of streaming high-resolution clips in real time from tape, which tape library, connected to three servers (Irix, Linux, and openBSD),
is practical when the editors know exactly where to look for the with a disk-based repository that would be capable of processing
material. But when they need to peruse the content over several the huge volume of data.
shows or seasons, the system has proven cumbersome. So to fa- Miller and his team worked with IBM to determine the key el-
cilitate the search and retrieval process, Sesame Workshop is con- ements involved in the new system. And once Sesame Workshop
verting the files from tape to disk format. performs the June 2005 hand-off of its disk-based library, IBM will
The motivation for making this transition came from an unex- be responsible for managing and integrating the library into a co-
pected quarter. In October 2004, Sesame Workshop signed a joint located facility that will handle the video-on-demand service.
agreement with Comcast, PBS, and HIT Entertainment to launch Storage for the new disk repository came in the form of a
a 24-hour children’s TV channel and accompanying video-on-de- low-cost ATABeast disk array from Nexsan Technologies
mand programming. with nearly 10TB of capacity. The disk arrays include Desk-
As part of the deal, Sesame Workshop is responsible for trans- star ATA disk drives from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
ferring its initial 6000 Sesame Street segments—some 8TB of data— On the server side, the organization uses a continued on page 40
Optimus Turns to Disk-Based Color Correction

The workflow at Chicago-based Optimus the color-correction process, as it required sev- color-correct feature films. They found that
studios, like that at many postproduction eral manual steps that often severely restricted several shops had begun using various color-
houses, would often begin when film foot- the workflow. Color correction had to be per- correction software, such as Discreet’s Lustre.
age was transferred to videotape via a tele- formed from a videotaped version, then ma- Optimus had already been using a vari-
cine machine and then digitized onto disk nipulated in real time using a da Vinci 2K sys- ety of Discreet’s editing programs—such as
storage so that digital artists could add con- tem. The color-corrected version was then fed Smoke, Flame, and Backdraft—on SGI Tezro
tent. Then, as creative work progressed, files back out to videotape again, requiring it to be workstations. So the studio decided to add
would be transferred from disk to tape sev- re-digitized if editors and artists needed to per- Lustre to its suite of tools. With Lustre’s soft-
eral times for key operations, such as when form further work. “If for some reason you ware-based color-correction methods, Leffel
producing digital dailies and performing needed to do final color correction,” he says, and his team can now show clients color-cor-
SPECIAL SECTION
color-correction work. “you had to find the tape that had the scene rected changes to footage in near real time,
While this approach enabled Optimus to on it, bring it upstairs to the color-correction thanks to the use of lower-resolution images
produce a number of top TV commercials, suite, put it back on the telecine, do the color stored on an IBM IntelliStation M Pro desk-
including spots for the US Army and Dell, correction, lay it back off to tape, and take the top system with about 4TB of storage capac-
director of operations Knox McCormac de- tape downstairs and re-digitize it.” ity. The M Pro also uses a digital video card
cided that to maintain a competitive edge, In an effort to eliminate this kind of reliance from DVS that allows Optimus to digitize
the studio needed to streamline operations on tape transfers, McCormac and one of Opti- footage from tape.
by moving to an all-digital workflow. mus’s colorists, Craig Leffel, investigated some “With Lustre in place, instead of taking
Of particular concern to McCormac was of the newer digital workflows being used to the telecine to tape, continued on page 40
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Sesame continued from page 38

DKP Achieves Full Digital
IBM eServer BladeCenter to perform key functions in the
Rendering and Compositing
tape-to-disk conversion process. The ATABeast storage sub- DKP Studios is used to dealing with the challenges of sending large
system was connected to each of the blades via a Fibre data sets over its network. In 1985, the Toronto-based postproduc-
Channel SAN fabric. tion house became the first in North America to go to full digital
The blades include an Ancept Media Server (AMS) from production for its rendering and compositing work, according to
Stellent, which helps track and update metadata about each seg- DKP vice president of production Terry Dale.
ment. The BladeCenter contains a TeleStream FlipFactory blade The company’s increasing workload in HD for TV, video, 3D
responsible for transcoding the 6000 clips from tape to disk. animation, and special effects projects—including IMAX 3D films
Files were first copied over a Gigabit Ethernet LAN con- and animation work for the MTV Movie Awards—recently re-
nection between the Ampex tape library and the AMS blade. quired DKP to triple its storage capacity just to keep up with the
The AMS blade then sent each file via FTP to the FlipFac- growing data files. “The big projects are the feature films and
tory blade that first makes a high-resolution video copy in IMAX projects that chew through huge amounts of data,” Dale
MP2 format of each clip and stores it on the ATABeast disk explains. “One of those produc-
array. At the same time, the blade transcodes a lower-reso- tions can take up 30TB of storage
lution MP1 video file of the same segment for later viewing very quickly.”
in QuickTime via an Internet browser. The low-resolution In the early days, DKP’s efforts
version is also stored in another ATABeast partition. to process such huge volumes of
Once the new disk-based repository comes online, Miller data (typically requiring 24Gbps of
expects the system to improve Sesame Workshop’s current edit throughput) often resulted in serv-
and production workflows by three to four orders of magni- ers going down, artists waiting for
tude. “Our teams will be able to create a playlist and perform massive data pulls, and frames get-
searches for all Elmo, the Count, and letter ‘W’ segments, ting dropped when composited
© 2004 MTV Movie Awards, MTV Networks.

for example,” he says. “Since it will all be digitized, we can work was sent over the network.
quickly browse the metadata and low-resolution versions of “Serving the data to and from us-
segments from five years of programs.” ers, or to and from the render-
Looking forward, Miller plans to install several more ATA- farms, without bottlenecks was a
Beast storage arrays to help tackle the next big job: digitizing real challenge,” says Dale.
the other 30 years of footage. About a year ago, the DKP
DKP uses a BlueArc system to store
team set out to find a system
its animation work for productions
that could help them avoid these
such as the MTV Movie Awards.
types of data storage and trans-
Optimus continued from page 38 mission problems. The equipment they chose included two Titan
we can now take the telecine directly to a hard disk over a data SiliconServers from BlueArc, which now support the rendering
pipe,” McCormac explains. “Data can then be copied into Lustre, and compositing functions of the digital pipeline, says Dale, even
where we perform color-correction work on it. The data can then with the renderfarm running at full capacity.
be saved out to local hard drives.” One 20TB Titan SiliconServer disk array now assists DKP’s 400
According to McCormac, software-based color correction is just to 500 dedicated CPU render nodes in storing renders. This data
the start in Optimus’s quest for an all-digital workflow. He is al- is then pulled from the first array for further compositing. Com-
so installing a 20TB Discreet SAN that combines the fast 1.5GBps posites are written back to the second array, which is approach-
throughput speeds of Data Direct Networks’ storage controllers ing 10TB of capacity.
and disks with two SGI Origin 350 metadata servers and the CXFS According to Dale, the storage system’s ability to change data
shared file system. flow rates on the fly—which he refers to as “throttling I/O” to
With all SAN components running 2Gbps Fibre Channel, Mc- different departments—has been crucial, given the company’s
Cormac anticipates the SAN will allow Optimus artists to push three growing need for rapid data transfers. I/O pipes on the back of
streams of 2K data off the SAN in real time. He expects to have the the systems can be aggregated when needed, he adds, to essen-
full system up and running next month. tially create one larger pipe.
“This is something we’ve wanted to do for more than 10 years,” “Within minutes, we can change the aggregation in order to give
says McCormac, referring to the ability to share data over a digital departments the bandwidth they need to get access to the data,”
network. “But back then it would have cost millions of dollars to Dale explains. All of this results in faster iteration times and faster
be able to pass around data like this. Today, that cost has dropped time to completion. For example, he says, load times for large files
to an affordable level.” have dropped from 10 or 20 minutes to two or three.
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Medéa offers the industry’s widest range of disk

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Our state-of-the-art compatibility lab is stocked with
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the latest content creation gear. We test our arrays in
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real-world applications to ensure optimum performance
special effects, work on a Mac, PC or an SGI,
and trouble-free operation. At the end of the day,we want
you to know our compatibility list is one you can trust. Medéa has a VideoRaid disk array that will provide
you with rock solid operation and unbeatable
price/performance. Check our website to find
out which VideoRaid is right for you!
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Tippett’s SAN Aids Workflow and Creativity

Tippett Studio is no stranger to the storage and network require- shared file system. The studio’s SAN architecture initially included
ments needed to support its creative efforts. During the visual a 10TB SGI TP9500 disk array that connects to the studio’s other
effects facility’s 20-year history, it had to continually upgrade its storage devices and servers via two 16-port Fibre Channel SAN
systems to accommodate the growing size and complexity of the switches from Brocade. Since then, Tippett added an additional
work it produces for television commercials and feature films. 2TB of storage and upgraded several of its SGI Origin 350 servers
In fact, work that the studio recently completed for the film (or CXFS “nodes”) from four processors to eight. The studio is
Matrix Revolutions illustrates how much storage just one scene can also in the process of adding another TP9500 storage array with
now consume. According to Dan an extra 10TB of capacity, along
McNamara, Tippett’s director of with another eight-processor
operations, the shot required sev- Origin 350 server.
Photo courtesy Warner Bros. ©2003 Warner Bros.,

eral terabytes of storage for just the Using SGI’s FailSafe Cluster
rendered shadows to appear on a HA software, Tippett’s admin-
Village Roadshow Films (BZI), Ltd.

scene filled with complex machine istrators can now migrate data
creatures. from file system to file system,
Unfortunately, backing up such or from primary to secondary/
large data sets to Tippett’s DLT backup storage systems with-
tape library created bottlenecks out affecting users, says McNa-
Tippett Studio uses SGI storage systems for visual effects projects
on the company’s network. The mara. Backups now run off the
for TV commercials and films including Matrix Revolutions.
backups consumed as much as 25 Fibre Channel SAN and do not
percent of total bandwidth, says McNamara, and began to impede impede the Ethernet network. Tippett uses an Origin 300 server
the production of other tasks in the workflow. with Legato Networker backup software to back up its files to a
To speed up the flow of data, McNamara decided to change 600-slot Sony AIT tape library.
the studio’s underlying storage architecture, which had consisted How has the new storage architecture improved workflows?
of a 5TB TP9400 storage array from SGI and a 1.2TB EMC Clariion “Before, we had to be frugal about the number of elements we
array. “One requirement was to be able to easily integrate our ex- kept around. Because we had a limited amount of disk storage
isting storage into the new system,” explains McNamara. “We al- capacity available, we had to quickly pull material offline,” says
so wanted to tie it into our backup system so that our tape library McNamara. “The added storage now allows the artists to be
could back up the main file systems off the network. So with these more creative in terms of the elements they have to choose
requirements, a SAN architecture was a necessity.” from to create the final composite. There’s more opportunity to
Tippett decided to use SGI’s InfiniteStorage solution and CXFS mix and match elements across different rendered outputs.”
FotoKem’s SAN-NAS System Streamlines Workflow

FotoKem is a 40-year-old postproduction supports Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and 8TB of content moving in and out of the
studio that often works on hundreds of proj- Irix servers and includes multiple digital 8.6TB Isilon IQ cluster in the editing pro-
ects simultaneously, ranging from creating asset management and creation tools. cess. The storage cluster handles the daily
digital masters to color correction. Recent “While our SAN is good at some tasks workflow of creating, processing, and edit-
credits include the digital processing of film and applications, it did not scale well ing film content and manages hundreds of
trailers for the 2004 Oscar winner Monster when it was loaded with multiple concur- thousands of files in the DI process.
and a variety of other motion pictures. rent jobs,” says Paul Chapman, FotoKem’s According to Chapman, other advan-
To address the requirements of its DI senior vice president of technology. “We tages of the Isilon IQ storage system in-
SPECIAL SECTION
processes, FotoKem needed to upgrade its needed to handle more than 10,000 large clude the ability to scale capacity and
existing storage systems, which include a files in a single directory.” throughput quickly to accommodate
mix of SAN and Network Attached Storage FotoKem opted for an Isilon IQ storage workload spikes, a single view for man-
(NAS) configurations. A typical DI project system, which Chapman says is “optimized aging all content in the system regardless
may include creating thousands of digi- for sequential, linear reads and writes and of the size of the storage pool, and sup-
tal files—averaging 13MB each—that are delivers the high performance that’s requir- port for heterogeneous platforms.
accessed, processed, and rapidly moved ed in our digital content environment.”
throughout the workflow at 24 frames per The studio manages more than 25TB of Michele Hope is a freelance writer. Her
second. FotoKem’s SAN-NAS environment digital content at any one time, with up to address is mhope@thestoragewriter.com.
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WARNIN G TO T
I. . P R O F E S S IO N A L S :
reliable, fast
Do not let co-workers discover how
ef fo rtl es s yo ur Is ilo n Cl us te re d St or age system is.
and
’ll ju st lo ad yo u up w ith a bu nc h m ore work.
They
Isilon Clustered Storage makes managing, storing and accessing large

digital files a snap. Set up your system within minutes, and expand your storage and performance
on the fly in less than 60 seconds — all with no extra staff. Contact us for more information.
Don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone.
1-877-2-ISILON | www.isilon.com Intelligent Clustered Storage
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Portfolio
Student Art Contest
Clockwise from top left: What’s in your dreams? That was the question posed to budding artists
Grand Prize: “Saranggola (The Kite)” by Samuel De Leon from the University of the Phil- around the world by Computer Graphics World for its first annual student
ippines represents one of the burgeoning artist’s early works, and was produced in Photoshop
art contest, and those willing to share their visions did so through beau-
running on a Mac. The piece was inspired by his first glance at Mayon Volcano as a child.
(Appearing directly below the image are three other works submitted by De Leon.) tifully crafted digital imagery, whether photographic-based or CGI. “The
Second Prize: “Nightmare Serenade” by Deborah Kazakoff Moniz from Foothill College contest enabled us to showcase the innovative work by a new genera-
in California represents the artist’s vision of what a punk rock nightmare would be like. To create tion of artists and animators,” says Susan Hughes, director of marketing.
the image, she used Painter and Photoshop, as well as a KPT Lightning filter.
“Computer Graphics World has a rich history of recognizing what’s new
Merit: “The Highwind” by Steven Muniz from the University of Pennsylvania is the artist’s
rendition of the airship from the game Final Fantasy VII, which was mostly obscured from view in the digital arts field, and this allowed us to offer a glimpse of what the
throughout the title. This inspired the artist to re-create the entire ship in 3D, where it could industry can expect in the near future.”
be seen from all angles and where he could inject the model with a personality based on his
knowledge of the game. This was accomplished in Maya and Photoshop.
According to art director Suzanne Heiser, who served as one of the
44 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2005
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judges, the theme of the contest was chosen because of its broad appeal, Clockwise from top left:
and as such, was open to creative interpretation. And this was reflected Third Prize (tie): “Dream Machine” by Eric Shore from the University of Pennsylvania was
inspired by an actual dream in which he saw a robot, like the one in the image, that was capable
in the 110 submissions whose focus ranged from the high-flying child- of controlling the dreams of other people. The image was created in Maya and Photoshop.
hood dreams of the grand-prize winning image to a ’50s-style diner that Merit: “Remember” by Brett Goodwin from the Collingwood Arts Center in Ohio illustrates that
inspires daydreams, the subject of the fourth-place winner. things are not always as they appear, through the use of Photoshop and hand-drawn imagery.
Several prizes, including an HP workstation, Discreet and Softimage Fourth Prize: “Diner at Night” by Erica Ehrlich from the University of Pennsylvania uses
Maya and Photoshop to focus on a period-style diner, after hours.
software, and passes to this year’s SIGGRAPH, were awarded to the
Merit: “Self Portrait” by Lorin Wood from Brookhaven College in Texas projects the artist’s
various winners, whose imagery appears on these two pages. Additional
self image through a collage of iconography and imagery composed in Photoshop.
submissions can be seen on the Computer Graphics World Web site at
Third Prize (tie): “Cloudy Dreams” by Annis Naeem from Lodi High School in New Jersey
www.cgw.com. —Karen Moltenbrey was composed in Photoshop and highlights the artist’s ultimate dream: to fly.
APRIL 2005 Computer Graphics World | 45
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VIDEO
Apple Production Suite

Apple’s software bundle is p o w e r f u l ,
prof essiona l, and a ffordable
B y To m P a t r i c k M c A u l i f f e
A bundle of the company’s high- your video project to motion-

end products for the Mac, Produc- picture film. The Digital Cin-
tion Suite is truly more than the sum of ema Desktop feature lends to
its parts. It’s a synergistic environment in viewing in HD on Apple Cin- Production Suite is a serious set of advanced SD and
which professional postproduction appli- ema HD displays. Thanks to HD tools in an integrated, inexpensive package.
cations work together seamlessly to in- its DVI, the Apple Cinema 30-
crease productivity and creativity. inch flat liquid crystal HD display is one of the ed professional-looking content quickly and
Final Cut Pro HD non-linear editing soft- best-looking RGB displays I’ve ever seen. easily. I viewed all the layers, filters, effects,
ware, Motion for creating sophisticated mo- From a video-editing standpoint, there’s and objects within a project in the Project
tion graphics, and DVD Studio Pro 3 for pro- nothing Final Cut Pro HD can’t do. Its fa- Pane. Every Mac user who is serious about
fessional DVD authoring are at the core of the miliar timeline approach and customizable animated graphics for professional video or
Suite. Also included are Apple’s Soundtrack user interface, as well as the ability to work the Web should have Motion.
audio tool, LiveType 1.2 for resolution-inde- on a single project in several programs, When outputting a finished project with
pendent animated titling, Cinema Tools for make this professional media creation tool DVD Studio Pro 3, Apple’s high-end author-
35mm and 16mm filmmakers, and Quick- the cornerstone of Production Suite. ing program, you can use prebuilt templates
Time Pro and Compressor 1.2 for encoding If you’ve ever envied the sophisticated or opt to label chapters with LiveType, create
to HD and importing/exporting projects for multilayer look of titling on television, Mo- menu objects in Motion, and produce back-
various delivery mediums. tion is your application. Its powerful anima- ground music in Soundtrack. The program
It’s clear that Apple has fully embraced tion design engine provides real-time pre- includes transitions, enabling blur, wipe, or
high definition. In his keynote address at views and procedural behavior animation. other effects between chapters and during
Macworld Expo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs With minimal effort, I was able to create title selection without building a separate ef-
defined 2005 as “The year of high defi- and import into Final Cut Pro a layered se- fects track. DVD Studio 3’s Graphical View
nition.” Final Cut Pro HD works in stan- quence with animated titles and images. tool provides a look at the whole project, in-
dard definition (SD) and, for those with Motion’s Behavior tool automatically cluding the hierarchy of the chapters and the
a high-definition (HD) device, in HD using a generates simulations of fluid motion ef- flow. I was able to open Final Cut Pro HD files
FireWire cable. The ability to capture, ed- fects, such as rain and wind, the actions/ and Motion projects in the application; add
it, and output broadcast-quality HD video reactions of items like billiard balls, or the ef- menus, transitions, and sound; and burn a
over a single FireWire cable is, in and of fects of gravity. Hassling with keyframe ani- DVD. All things in life should be so easy.
itself, worth the cost of this bundle. mation is not necessary; Motion does it for I put Production Suite through its paces
Final Cut Pro HD offers 150 new effects you as you work interactively with elements on a PowerMac G5, creating a 22-minute
for DV, SD, and HD with real-time function- and layers in real time. Using Motion’s ad- video documentary. During the process, I
ality and a new timecode display, generator, vanced particle engine, I was able to cre- found the applications to be intuitive and
and reader. More filmmaker-friendly, the HD ate realistic-looking fire, smoke, and weld- seamlessly integrated, even more so than
version enables you to take a 25 fps PAL vid- ing sparks. I even gave a blocky title a neon similar bundles. I saved time and produced a
eo and export an EDL for 24 fps, transferring glow. Better yet, I used the Dashboard menu video with a high-end look that was easy to
to select an element on achieve. With its unprecedented integration,
A p p l e P ro d u c t i o n S u i te
the screen—a logo, title, serious features, and flexibility for moving a
stats
Price: $1299 ($699 as an upgrade)

or picture-in-picture box single project easily between applications,
Apple Computer
Minimum System Requirements: playing live video—and Production Suite is a coordinated, complete
www.apple.com
Requirements, listed on Apple’s Web site,

vary by application and include a Macintosh animate it on an x, y, or z postproduction package at a great price.
computer with a PowerPC G4 or G5 processor, axis. Spinning logos are a
Mac OS 10.3.5 or later, a high-end graphics breeze. Using the 25 pre- Tom Patrick McAuliffe is a writer, award-
card, 512MB of RAM, 20GB of disk space,
built motions, which Ap- winning video creator, and former member
and a DVD drive.
ple calls Gestures, I creat- of the US Navy’s Combat Camera Group.

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SIGGRAPH 2005
The smart place to be. You’ll find all
the data, techniques, people, and inspiration
you need for another successful year of research,
creativity, development, and production. COURSES :
Upgrade your knowledge. Extend your warranty against
c a re e r o b s o l e s c e n c e . C O M P U T E R A N I M AT I O N F E S T I VA L ,
A R T G A L L E RY : Encounter extraordinary images and learn
from the minds that made them. EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES ,

GUERILLA STUDIO : Optimize your real-time interaction
with digital machines. EXHIBITION , RECEPTION : Interact with

an astonishing accumulation of A-list minds in the world
capital of entertainment and innovation. PAPERS , PANELS ,
POSTERS , EDUCATORS PROGRAM , SKETCHES , WEB PROGRAM :
Join the industry’s best and brightest stars as they

illuminate engineering and art, animations and
equations, allegories and algorithms. Five
Days Only! 31 July through 4 August
2005. For conference details:
www.siggraph.org/s2005
bring your brain

Conference 31July-4 August 2005 Exhibition 2-4 August 2005 Los Angeles Convention Center
The World’s Leading Marketplace of Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
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VIDEO
Digital Voodoo SD|Flex

The company’s new board offers
10-bit uncompressed SD and HD video
By Tom Patrick McAuliffe
For years, the holy grail of broadcast- Bluefish444’s multi-platform

quality digital video boards has been 10- SD|Envy, Wildblue|AV, and
bit input and output. The folks from Digi- 64 RT, the SD|Flex is a Mac-
tal Voodoo in Australia raise the bar with only product. Perhaps cross- Designed for professional Mac users, the SD|Flex offers
its SD|Flex standard-definition (SD) and platform compatibility will be high-end digital output that is future-proofed with SDI.
high-definition input/output (I/O) card. addressed in future software
The SD|Flex offers a choice of SDI, com- driver versions; the ability to use the card on signals to be monitored simultaneously.
ponent (YUV), S-video (Y/C), or compos- Mac and PC would add significant value. Monitoring is customizable and indepen-
ite video in and out. The added feature of I tested the SD|Flex on a dual 2GHZ CPU dent, so you can, for example, monitor an
an onboard Keyer with dual-link support is PowerMac G5 and a single 1GHZ CPU G5 SDI input via SDI/analog and then moni-
unique, allowing full 10-bit keying of a live running OS X Version 10.3, as well as a tor your analog inputs and analog/SDI out-
source together with a composited back- single CPU 866MHZ PowerMac G4 with Mac put. An Internal Keyer, for real-time title
ground in real time. With it, artists can see OS 9.2 and the old 5.2 drivers. The board and graphics overlay of your inputs (SDI),
in real time what graphics will look like supports dual displays, so I attached two enables those working with the Betacam-
when output to video. Sony MultiSync flat-screen monitors. For SP video format to perform RGB-to-YUV
With the flexibility to input and output storage, I used an internal ATTO Ultra- and YUV-to-RGB color space conversion in
a variety of different signals, the end user SCSI card to access a Rorke Data u320 real time. Desktop Preview and Photo
is provided an almost unrestricted work external hard-drive system and a LaCie JPEG support for off-line editing help get
flow with high-quality internal processing IEEE-1394 hard drive. In many ways, the projects done quicker.
and 10-bit color processing. Unlike 8-bit SD|Flex board is a simple affair: install At press time, a new driver was released
capture boards with 256 levels of color, the board into a PCI slot, install the driv- with new functionality, including 8-bit RGB
10-bit products have the full range of 1024 ers, attach sources and output, and away I/O and DV/DVCPro/DVCPro 50 codec I/O
levels. Providing support for Apple’s Final you go. I hooked up analog SuperVHS and support. As with all Digital Voodoo software
Cut Pro HD 4.5, the PowerMac G5, and OS Composite video sources and output SDI updates, it was free to registered users. The
X, the SD|Flex board is a natural for high- digital via a Flying Cow format converter card is covered by a warranty that includes
end power users on the Mac. and a Miranda SDI-to-DV converter. free repair for the first two years. Lifetime
Digital Voodoo has an impressive track SD|Flex’s internal RGB image processing 24/7 customer support, although handled
record: the first uncompressed QuickTime became readily apparent. The video output by one person in the US, is free and offered
video card for the Mac, the first QuickTime looked great—almost better than the orig- via phone and e-mail. An online area for reg-
product to capture full 10-bit video, and the inal signal—with no artifacts or jaggies. I istered users is provided, but no forum. My
first uncompressed SDI solution for Final Cut ran a signal from an expensive Magni test card arrived with no documentation, but a
Pro non-linear editing software. Digital Voo- signal generator to produce SMPTE color user’s guide now ships with the product.
doo offers Mac products, whereas its part- bars. After passing the signal through the The SD|Flex is a solid investment offering
ner company, Bluefish444, offers devices for board, the output was virtually the same excellent image quality, multi-format com-
Windows, Linux, and Mac systems. Unlike on the Waveform/Vectorscope, with a small patibility, and SDI. With image-critical HD
shift to the blue hue and video becoming commonplace and the need
S D | Fl e x a black level just below to support older formats (SuperVHS and
www.digitalvoodoo.net
Price: $2495 7.3 IRE. Well within tol- BetacamSP), semi-pro and professional vid-
stats
erance, they could be ad- eo editors, 3D animators, and video graphic

Digital Voodoo
Minimum System Requirements:

Dual 2GHZ computer with 512MB RAM or more, justed at the source or on artists should consider the SD|Flex.
ATI Graphics card, ATTO UL3D SCSI card with the board.
4x Seagate Cheetah Ultra 3/160 SCSI disks
(10,000 RPM or greater), Keyspan USB Serial Perhaps my favorite Tom Patrick McAuliffe is a writer, award-
Adapter, Mac OS 10.3.5, and QuickTime 6.5.1. function is that the board winning video creator, and former member
enables Analog and SDI of the US Navy’s Combat Camera Group.

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products
For additional product news and information, visit www.cgw.com
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in the gaming, postproduction, and Web au- tion plug-ins for Adobe’s
SOFTWARE
thoring markets. GenHead 2.0 enables users After Effects Versions 6.0
S I M U L AT I O N to create 3D animated heads from 2D im- or later. Developed for doc-
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Crafting Crowds updates, and integrated variable-resolution postproduction studios,
Win Genemation has released GenHead 2.0 mesh. Enabling the production of thousands the Film Fix set of plug-ins
and GenCrowd 1.0, 3D face synthesis tools of photorealistic 3D animated heads, Gen- employs algorithms that
targeted at digital artists and programmers Crowd 1.0 aids users in developing families enable the automatic detection and removal
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inate inter-frame brightness fluctuations. Red
VIDEO Giant Software, now offering Film Fix for the
Windows operating system at a cost of $1995,
Restorative Measures anticipates adding support for the Macintosh
Win Red Giant Software has announced the before the end of the second quarter.
availability of Film Fix, film and video restora- Red Giant Software; www.redgiantsoftware.com
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events
showcase
APRIL
16–21
NAB2005, held in Las Vegas. Contact National
Association of Broadcasters (NAB), 888-740-4622,
www.nabshow.com, www.nab.org.
MAY
17–20
E3 2005, held in Los Angeles. Contact 877-216-6263,
www.e3expo.com.
JUNE
24–26
2005 VES–VFX Festival, held in Santa Monica, CA.
Contact 310-822-9181, www.vesfestival.org,
www.visualeffectssociety.com.
JULY
11–14
Macworld Conference and Expo 2005, held in
Boston. Contact 800-645-3976 or 805-677-4294,
www.macworldexpo.com.
18–21
Digital Video Expo East 2005, held in New York City.
Contact 888-234-9476 or 415-947-6135,
www.dvexpo.com.
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index to advertisers
3D Labs www.3dlabs.com C4 Group Korea

Publisher Paek Kwon
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SIGGRAPH 2005 www.siggraph.org/s2005 47 E-MAIL: mark@
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D2 Software www.d2software.com 21, 55 FAX: 44-1793-610001 Singapore
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Dell, Inc. www.dell.com/SMB/DCCsolutions 3 Tel: 65-6836 2272
France Fax: 65-6735 9653
Luis Matutano E-MAIL:
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Safe Harbor Computers 1-800-544-6599 31
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The ad index is published as a service. The publisher does not assume any liability for errors or omissions.
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Do more for less.
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and are subject to change without notice. Contact your local Avid office or reseller for prices outside the U.S.
and Canada. SOFTIMAGE, Avid and XSI are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Avid Technology Inc. in the
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Computer Graphics World April 2005 PDF eBook-iNTENSiTY

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ComputerGraphics A

Oddworld builds a bizarre

It’s one thing for the machines to

Also see www.cgw.com for computer graphics

Spotlight 4 By Martin McEachern

Market Outlook, Industry News Super Spots 28

PHIL LOPICCOLO : Editor-in-Chief

Pursuing Pirates phill@pennwell.com

COURTNEY HOWARD: Senior Technical Editor

2 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2005 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Work without boundaries.

Dell recommends Microsoft®

Adobe® Video Collection Standard

DELL PRECISION™ 370 WORKSTATION DELL PRECISION™ M20 WORKSTATION

Get more out of creativity. Get more out of now.

1 Beyond Launches NLE Laptop

SensAble Technologies Unveils ClayTools 1.0

4 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2005 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Boxx Technologies Releases New Workstations

Digital Video Market Gains Momentum

6 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2005 w w w.c gw. c om

Image courtesy of Softimage and UVPHACTORY

Don't lose your head keeping up with

Visit www.newworkstation.com/cgw to learn more and buy.

Come see us at NAB 2005:

If You Build It... By Jeff Sauer

The first product review I ever Video professionals

8 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2005 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

O d d w or ld t akes aim a t the

fi r st - per son shoote r genre

B eginning with the re-

In contrast to the game’s dusty, Western look,

one could access to furnish a level. Nevertheless,

12 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2005 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

:\WWVY[ MVY HSS SLHKPUN IYVHKJHZ[ +LJR3PUR,_[YLTL

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Innovatio Innovative Integration.

Add the secret sauce—choose NVIDIA Quadro FX by PNY

BOXX® Technologies, Inc.

In Stranger’s Wrath, players can transition between ﬁrst- and third-

A New Sheriff in Town

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Avid Xpress editing solutions.

tools for storytellers. ®

Shots of actors such By Barbara Robertson

The Devil’s in the

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That Yellow Bastard

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TO ERR IS HUMAN. TO NOT LET PEOPLE SEE YOUR MISTAKES IS DIVINE.

*Manufacturer’s worldwide price.Additional options,shipping,applicable taxes/duties not included. ©2005 Dimension.

pushed SplutterFish’s Brazil.”

24| Computer Graphics World APRIL 2005 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

SuperSp By Karen Moltenbrey T h i s y e a r ’s S u p e r B o w l co m m e rci a l s

FedEx/Kinko’s “Top 10”

28 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2005 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

cine facility The Syndicate augment them in postproduc-

30 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2005 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

TSUNAMI Video Editing Workstations

Terms: POs accepted from

© 2005 Safe Harbor

32 | Computer Graphics World APRIL 2005 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Storage in the Studio

in the help content creation

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