Linux goes to Hollywood 313
j2brown writes: " Yahoo! News has this little article about IBM taking Linux to Hollywood. " It's not a very in-depth article, but it is interesting that Big Blue is saying that Hollywood will be moving their rendering stuffs to Linux in the next 12 to 18 months. Wonder how SGI feels about that.
new version of the /. effect (Score:2, Interesting)
Cheap hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
At this point studios want CPU cycles cheap, and they are already comfortable writing toolchains on Unix.
Linux combines the best of both worlds, cheap fast PC hardware and Unix. One studio said they could afford to replace their Linux cluster twice as often as the SGI renderfarm (since it cost half as much) so they could keep themselves closer to the state of the art in processing power.
SGI used to offer awesome custom graphics acceleration hardware but custom hardware limits choice, and costs more than general purpose stuff. And the general purpose stuff is nearly as fast.
Re:Great! (Score:2, Interesting)
There's probably other modelers and user interfaces from BMRT and POVRay. They may not be what George Lucas uses but they aren't shabby. I've seen some amazing stuff done in Blender and it is FREE.
Linux already there (Score:5, Interesting)
Pixar's Renderman runs on Linux, and due to the wonderfully low cost of Linux and the cheap method of build your own machine, renderfarms in racks tend to run linux at many post houses.
Also, Square has entered the arena with one amazing ray tracer. For the white paper inclined, this is pretty sweet. It explains Maya and how it works with their custom app on Linux using Parallel proessing via the Pthread library.
http://www.squareusa.com/kilauea/ [httpp]
I thought Loki's demise = death of desktop Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
It's time for Slashdot to have a laugh at its own expense. [ridiculopathy.com]
Blah blah blah and old news (Score:3, Interesting)
SGI sells linux boxes that can work as a renderfarm just as much as any other rackmount linux solution.
But this is where they should really like it. Hollywood has trusted SGI for years. SGI has major name recognition based on hardware quality and support.
Linux has been in Hollywood for a while now, chances are that the 3D that you see in current titles has had some Linux involvement along the way.
I know we are heading that direction.
All the studios I have talked with are heading that way, if they haven't all ready.
In my opinion, this is a place where VA could have made a name for themselves. Now, I think that the big Linux battle will be between HP, SGI, and the next person to have a killer 3D desktop. If I had to place money on it, I would be pulling for HP.
IRIX mainly used for the design. (Score:1, Interesting)
They Design on SGIs, then use the most cost effective solution on the backend for the rendering. (Of course most cost effective often means Sun saying, "Hey, will give you a ton of sun boxes to render on if you give us a big credit at the end.") Though these days more and more folks are using Linux for such things.
Re:And this is good? (Score:3, Interesting)
What we can do is blackball those who'd work with Hollywood. This can be anything from removing them from mailing lists to ignoring or even hindering changes they'd want to make to applications and operating systems that are open source.
I don't want anything to do with the bastards. I would like to see others take a similar view. Let them live off the dregs of open source, not have the world of free software revolve around them.
SGI will be fine (Score:3, Interesting)
He told us SGI is very dedicated to Linux because it provides a standardized OS across platforms, which is what alot of their customers have wanted over the years.
Its also supposed to play into their Intel strategy, because as a customer grows, and moves up SGIs product line, they pretty much just need to recompile their apps to have them run on the faster hardware.
I suspect that Sgi will like having the rendering move onto Linux, although they may dislike having Sgi boxes replaced by IBM boxes.
Linux on the mainframe: the FUTURE (Score:3, Interesting)
This is clearly IBMs strategy. They will make a lot of money from it. Such installations are very good for customers too: customers save energy, floor space, and staff--and, best of all, get mainframe-level reliability.
SGI probably feels just fine. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easier to go with something that's being worked on by the Open Source community, since you can be pretty sure that any Open project with sufficient momentum will get the major kinks out over time. Besides, it's easier for SGI than to keep on supporting IRIX, which has had its own fair share of disaster stories.
It's going to go back to a hardware battle, and this is where IBM may not be ready to compete. Using Linux is nice, but what about render times? What about the overall architecture? Are these IBM boxes going to beat out SGI in price and performance?
If so, then SGI should worry. Linux has nothing to do with it.
How SillyCone Gfx likes it? (Score:1, Interesting)
News? (Score:4, Interesting)
Furthermore, PDI is using Linux *on the desktop* since early 2001.
-jfedor
And this is good? (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong. I'm not in favour of copyright infringement, but the notion that it should be illegal to watch Dr Strangelove on a Linux box because movie makers are obsessed that someone might use knowledge gained from the movie playing software to make a copy of the film, is absurd in the extreme.
I don't want to see Linux helping an industry that is so negative about open source and ideologically committed to its destruction. I don't want to see Linux helping an industry that lobbied for laws that effectively put the major art form of the 20th Century behind an electronic curtain leading to a situation where we may even lose much of what's important by the end of the 21st. An industry that has consistantly lied, even in court, about the motives of those wanting to break the encryption, and whose products appear to be increasingly designed to prevent consumers having any control or rights whatsoever of things they've paid money for.
I can't prevent it from happening, that's what a free operating system is all about after all, but I can say that those who help Hollywood in this fight and provide open source solutions to them, are a bunch of slimeballs, and insofar as we have a community, they should be blackballed from it.
Sorry, strongly expressed I know, but it's something I feel particularly angry about.
After that, it's not Free software. (Score:2, Interesting)
* No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
* No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Just an FYI, but it would just get really nasty if a lot of people started putting exclusion clauses, etc. in their licenses.
--Robert
Re:SGI probably feels just fine. (Score:1, Interesting)