Disney, DreamWorks, Pixar Go Linux 279
robinsrowe writes "Most of the major studios use Linux -- such as DreamWorks with more than 1,500 Linux desktops and 3,500 Linux servers. The MovieEditor Conference is an all-day event on computer-based filmmaking in downtown Los Angeles on August 3rd. Studio technology chiefs and other experts discuss ongoing work using Linux in feature animation and visual effects. Presented in collaboration with LinuxMovies.org."
studio-linux.org (Score:5, Informative)
WTF? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, we already know the answer. Never mind.
Re:Apps? (Score:5, Informative)
Clusters (Score:3, Informative)
Not just Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Apps? (Score:5, Informative)
Movie Making Manual-Linux in film production [wikibooks.org]
- shazow
Re:So what are the reasons? Cost? Customization? (Score:5, Informative)
The choice wasn't Windows vs Linux, it was Linux vs IRIX. This is why SGI's [yahoo.com] stock is in the toilet.
Re:New Linux Software? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:So what are the reasons? Cost? Customization? (Score:2, Informative)
I happen to be an amateur filmmaker... No, really... I really am [durbnpoisn.com]
I have 3 different Linux machines, of the 5 in my house. But, none of the 3 of them are nearly as practical for all the FX work that I do as my Windows machines.
And that really sux! I would really prefer to switch to Linux completely... But, the software simply doesn't exist. Unless, of course, you are ILM and have $countless millions$ to afford the top of the line software.
It's no surprise that these FX houses use Linux. It's been that way for years, in fact. What I would like to see is some of that ingenuity coming down to the home user. It just isn't there yet. And, as a result, I'm still trapped in Windows if I want to get any work done.
not trolling, just a question (Score:4, Informative)
Re:not trolling, just a question (Score:1, Informative)
The renderfarms are fairly standard Alfred + PRman, (sometimes with shake for simple compositing), but almost everything else is custom.
Re:Editing or rendering? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:not trolling, just a question (Score:5, Informative)
Let's Calm Down a Bit (Score:3, Informative)
These are the main factors, but this does not apply to anything but the rendering clusters. The actual artist-driven work is still for the most part performed on Windows systems due to the cost of hardware, availability of highend video cards & drivers, and a wider install base. Maya running on Win32 is the largest segment of the 3D users, and this is not set to change unless Apple starts getting serious and gets highend video card makers to support OSX. For small scenes, the cards that come with G5 workstations are not bad, but once you start doing more complex scenes, it becomes a slideshow.
In the end, this is not really news as this conversion has been going on for the last several years, especially since Maya was ported to linux. But, regardless, it's good news all around as it means a user does not need access to an expensive SGI system to get familiar with cluster rendering systems and lowers the overall entrance barriers to people learning.
Re:Why does the OS matter ? (Score:1, Informative)
Probably, but no -- you're very ill-informed. We (I work at Rhythm & Hues) care very much about KDE vs. Gnome and Konq vs. Firefox. Yes, we have linux running on our render farm, but we also have linux running on approximately 500 desktop machines -- and we aren't all a bunch of power-users. We need our desktop environment to be as friendly to non-computery type folks as possible. Linux is the logical choice because a) we migrated from Irix, and it was an "easy" migration path to b) cheap hardware, and c) margins in this business are already slim enough that if we can run a free OS over non-free OS, we'll do it. Dumb host, indeed. s/h/p/;
ILM used Origin 2000 (Score:5, Informative)
Today things like LinuxBIOS and other clustering advancements have made clusters even more reliable and even easier to admin than big iron SGI/Sun/IBM/HP.
Re:Jobs on Linux? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:not trolling, just a question (Score:1, Informative)
Pixar, for one, uses Maya to model, Gipetto (Pixar proprietary animation software) to animate, RenderMan (also proprietary) for final output w/ alpha chanels, Shake to composite.
They chose Linux to run the heart of their modeling/animation/render farm because it has a $0 per seat licence and is stable enough to run, intensly, for days or weeks on end.
Single frames of Monsters, Inc. took over 48 hours to render. That kind of work load makes other OSs crap in their pants.
The roots of the 3D industry are in UNIX and IRIX, so it's only natural for them to make the move to Linux as it becomes more robust. The people who founded these business have a special place in their hearts for *IX systems, it's what they "grew up" with, and it's what works.
Aditionally Linux is easy to support/diagnose/fix, and in an industry that is creating software and algorithms that constantly break the limist of computing they need this flexability. They don't care about the other frills that commercial OSs have to offer, because they develop their own frills every day.
Re:New Linux Software? (Score:4, Informative)
Pixar writes their own (Marionette, I believe its called), Dreamworks uses Maya and a host of internally developed apps and plugins (for example [linuxjournal.com]), but I'd be willing to bet that most of the post-production work is done using Avid or FCP (and of course stuff like AfterEffects), which, for the most part, don't run on linux (Shake does, and it's damn sweet).
Most smaller companies (commercials, doing stills for magazine ads, and artists) still use commercial products, like Maya, Lightwave, or Animation Master, mostly, I think, for support reasons, but also because, at this stage, they still have features that are missing from Blender (camera/lens types, focal length and depth, and some heirarchy differences). As for cinellera, I don't know many people using it at all (any personally). No one teaches it in film classes, as far as I can tell, and most home users who have the time to mess around with it and understand it either a) also have the money for a cheap mac and use iMovie, which while nowhere as powerful, is good enough for a lot more than you'd expect or b) also have enough time and expertise to get a cracked version of premiere (of FCP if they have a mac) and just use that.
Re:Jobs on Linux? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Pixar has never used Mac hardware... (Score:3, Informative)
Our renderfarms haven't always been Linux on Intel either. For many years our farms were Suns.
Re:not trolling, just a question (Score:2, Informative)
Why Linux is a better cluster platform than Win (Score:5, Informative)
Because it's a pain in the ass to run headless Windows boxes compared to headless Linux boxes.
Because Microsoft's idea [microsoft.com] of clustering is a couple of failover webservers, not a large, highly-parallel computer? (Granted, this makes sense for Microsoft -- "clusters" was a sexy word a couple years ago, before "grid computing" got to be sexy in business rags, and their customers generally have no need for massive parallel computation, but do run web servers and do read magazines that tell them that they need clustering technology deployed yesterday).
Because a minimalistic Windows setup is fatter and eats more disk space and memory than a minimalistic Linux setup, and buying more resources for a couple hundred nodes so that you can run some background crap produced in Redmond is pretty plainly a bad idea.
Because clusters are done by the sorts of smart people that do automation and systems development, and a large chunk of those sort of people can personally benefit greatly from Linux, so they're more familiar with Linux than Windows.
Because there's no reason to bump up your cluster's cost by a significant amount for software licenses when it doesn't help you at all.
Because Linux generally outperforms Windows (especially when you're looking at kernel-level performance), and the sorts of people that get large, expensive systems like this have a lot of interest in getting their code running as fast as possible -- doubling the compute speed means that they require half or less nodes in their cluster. If your kernel can shove more data onto the network more cheaply or context switch a few more times, you're more valuable.
Because they can customize a Linux system much more easily to do whatever they want than the Windows system. I was pretty appalled when someone managed to mess around with an new ATM up at Carnegie Mellon University and left it on the Windows desktop...and the thing was a full-blown Windows box, with all the software installed and whatnot, NOTEPAD, you name it. Not only is that just not professional, it's a sign of the developers having to fight the system to achive the result they want. Linux won't fight you if you want to customize it.
Linux is open source. If you're working on the kinds of projects where a lot of serious large-scale parallel computing is involved, you may well have significant systems expertise available, and hacking your Ethernet drivers or the kernel to speed things up may be reasonable. A large chunk, perhaps a majority of Linux Ethernet drivers started life with Donald Becker, who was working on Linux clustering for NASA, if I remember correctly. The man needed some high-performance networking code, and had the ability to produce it.
And finally, last but not least...Windows isn't fun. Linux is fun. Okay, you can't really put that on a checklist somewhere, but if someone likes what they're doing, they're going to do a better job of it. I'm working on a cross-platform project for my employer at the moment. The Windows developers are kind of apathetic, spend a lot of time chatting and whatnot, but the Linux port guy is a machine. He's *into* what he's doing, he's excited about it. Of course, that's anecdotal evidence, but I've seen a lot more enthusiastic people hacking Linux software than hacking Win32 software. [shrug] Make of it what you will.