The Dreamworks production pipeline includes the Dreamworks-PDI studios that add effects to live-action feature films as well as Leonard's studio where animated films are produced. Each pipeline uses two distinct sets of computing systems: those used as back-end "render farms" to produce individual frames of the movie, and workstations used by artists and programmers to create models that are fed to the render farms.
"The desktop agenda was driven by Dreamworks Animation," says Leonard. "About a year and a half ago we deployed a pencil test animation system, where traditional animators would capture images from original artwork and replay them." Leonard says the project was interesting because Linux lacked some of the tools commonly available on their old favorite, SGI IRIX (famous for producing the special effects in "Jurassic Park"), such as multimedia code libraries.
The work Dreamworks needed to do wasn't exactly what Linus Torvalds had in mind when he invented his operating system "kernel" -- the core of an OS. Says Leonard, "We had to push the kernel in real-time ways that it wasn't quite ready for. We had to write software for driving cameras, image capture cards and audio cards." The studio then had the daunting task of making its existing in-house applications work with the new OS, a process that required managing several million lines of proprietary code.
"Dreamworks' work with Linux on 'Shrek!' has been held up as a poster child for the industry changes," says Visual Effects Society (VES) technology chair Ray Feeney, who also founded VFX studio and software maker Silicon Grail. But getting the industry over to Linux wasn't just a matter of having studios rewrite their own specialized (and studio specific) software. The industry had to work as a team to get application vendors to port a number of widely used applications. To do that, the studios needed to break away from the secretive environments that cloaked every production.
The event that marked the start of the changes for the industry was the VESTECH 2000 conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., where a special Linux summit was convened. The VES is the professional society for the industry. It includes numerous Academy Award winners for special effects and technology.
Representatives from 24 of the leading effects companies, including Dreamworks, Rhythm & Hues, Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic and Digital Domain, attended the Linux Summit. The membership determined that it was inevitable that the industry move away from SGI, with its high-cost hardware and questionable business future. As a group, they wanted to take advantage of the low-cost commodity hardware the Intel platform provided.
"Where we come from and where we're going are two different places," said Leonard. "Historically we purchased a large amount of SGIs. Those were amortized over several films. You'd want to get five years out of some of that hardware due to the expense of that investment. With the Intel-Linux strategy today, we're moving toward what we refer to as disposable computing. Now productions are generally two years long, and during that time the technology takes several steps ahead. Usually we anticipate to recoup a large portion of our hardware costs with every production. So with each new movie, we go out and purchase a new render farm. That lets us reset the benchmarks for each movie, letting us tell better stories."
But moving to Intel hardware meant getting third-party applications moved to new computers and finding a new operating system to run them on. Microsoft's NT was offered as one option, but Feeney says most members had already tried and rejected that path.
"There are lots of PC manufacturers which run [Microsoft's] software," said Feeney, dryly. "But there are certain advantages to using a Unix environment for the larger enterprise [large business] markets. Once upon a time there was a great focus on the part of Microsoft that the VFX industry would be the next realm they would conquer -- taking Windows from a consumer tool to the enterprise. They decided later that they would be better off spending their time elsewhere, like on the Web with Hailstorm and .Net. So they never bit on the enterprise market. They're off working on issues that don't solve the set of issues relative to the high-end effects industry."
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