Everyone knows Pixar, the studio that makes fantastic computer-graphics movies. Most people probably realize they couldn’t just make one of those films with their desktop PC. But few people may know that’s not necessarily because of the CG software, but mainly because of the way Pixar converts all that computer data into video.
Steve Jobs is one of the three founding fathers of Pixar Animation Studios
Through a process called rendering, a CG movie is converted from data to video frame by frame. There are 24 frames per second in film. With all the data that go into one frame of, say, "Up," it would take one computer more than 250 years to render a Pixar movie, said Chris Ford, a business director with the studio.
"Generally, if you’re a studio you’ll have a data center, known as a render farm, typically with 700 to 800 processors," he said today. Ford joined Bob Muglia, president of the Microsoft Business Division, on stage at the Professional Developers Conference in Redmond.
Why was he in Redmond? Because, in a proof of concept, Pixar has taken its industry-leading rendering technology — software called RenderMan — and put it in the cloud. The idea is that anybody can use Renderman — via Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud-computing platform — taking advantage of thousands of processors, connected via the Internet, to render CG video at relatively quick speeds.
Click to enlarge - Image courtesy of Pixar
All this data — each balloon, each car, each building, each light source, each texture — are compiled into CG files that must be rendered to create one frame of "Up."
Click to enlarge
With the tool, users could choose the speed at which their video is rendered, paying more for rush jobs and paying less if they have some time to wait. That’s possible because of the elasticity of cloud platforms such as Azure — they can automatically manage how many processors are working on projects at a time.
Ford said Pixar — which, by the way, was co-founded by Apple CEO Steve Jobs — likes Windows Azure also because it is dependable and is a choice that’s guaranteed to be around for a while. Cloud-based RenderMan, of course, represents a revenue source for Pixar not that typical for a movie studio.
Pixar’s RenderMan technology is widely used across the industry. Ford said just about every CG shot you’ve seen on the silver screen since the 1995 release of "Toy Story" was rendered using RenderMan.
Through Windows Azure, Pixar wants to make sure every CG shot you see on the small screen is as well.
Click to enlarge – Image courtesy of Nick Eaton/seattlepi.com
Microsoft’s Bob Muglia, left, and Pixar’s Chris Ford talk to the audience at PDC in Redmond.
Here’s a close-up of the RenderMan Azure based rendering options screen:
Image courtesy of TheNextWeb
Source: seatlepi, TheNextWeb
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