Cloud Computing Democratizes Digital Animation 167
kenekaplan writes "John McNeil is the chief creative officer and founder of a digital arts and communication company based in Berkeley, CA. After turning to Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing service for the first time to finish animation under tight deadline, he was impressed by how it would let him compete with bigger studios. He said, 'Cloud computing is the first truly democratic, accessible technology that potentially gives everyone a supercomputer...it's a game changer. I could never compete or be able to deliver something at the level of a Pixar or a Disney, given what I have at my disposal inside the walls of the studio,' McNeil said. 'But if I factor in the cloud, all of a sudden I can go there. And then the limitations of whether or not I can deliver something great will be on my own talent and the talent of the people that are part of the studio.'"
Bandwidth ? (Score:5, Informative)
Does the CEO realizes that he's trading CPU's limitation against bandwidth's limitation ?
Generating a picture in full HD requires 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels.
But for a movie, the resolution is 4096 x 3112 = 12,746,752 pixels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution [wikipedia.org]
This gives 36 megabytes per picture.
Now, you have to create 25 pictures for one second.
You get 5400 megabytes for every minute of movie.
It may be faster to compute digital animation, but you still have a large IO problem, both in storage and in preserving the data (you may lose pixels when downloading the files) !
It's similar to outsourcing tasks: it's a short-term solution for larger problems.
Re:Why is Slashdot not blacked out? (Score:5, Informative)
I think the SOPA blackout is useful because it helps inform the general public who is unaware of the problems and ramifications of SOPA and it's three vile siblings.
I doubt there is anyone on slashdot who is unaware of the ramifications, even those of use who support some copyright stuff, and who are against piracy, are aware that SOPA is a dangerous piece of legislation that will only harm society, and not help any artist.
Re:gives everyone a supercomputer... right (Score:5, Informative)
Your point 2 is exactly what the guy in the article said, quoted by GP. Except he said it more succintly.
Let me re-quote: "And then the limitations of whether or not I can deliver something great will be on my own talent and the talent of the people that are part of the studio."
EC2 is great as a renderfarm!! (Score:4, Informative)
EC2 let me render in 5 hours what would've taken my own computer about 110 hours to render. The cost came out at about $.06 per core hour. The commercial cloud renderfarms charge about $0.75 core hour for comparison.
Re:gives everyone a supercomputer... right (Score:3, Informative)
This is a different, and more generalized, version of the renderfarms-for-rent that were available in any area where there was a strong animation industry. Some of us were even experimenting with internet delivery of job info, though initial loading of images and models required shipping a hard drive or three.
SGI had something called (iirc) Drums or something like that back in 90s to attempt this very thing. A bit a head of the market, but still a neat project.
The major problem with building your own renderfarm is keeping the thing busy enough with paying projects to justify the capital outlay plus the salaries of competent people to run and maintain it. With EC2 and other such services, the ability to go to an as-needed model for HPC is awesome. Yeah, it's expensive, but if you're not charging your clients more for insane deadlines, you're not doing it right. ;)
Scott