RL: Well, if they’re running some kind of proprietary render management system there’s few studios that want to try to support that in a remote location or a foreign country. There is no documentation on their internal software, the smart guy that wrote isn’t moving to Mumbai or wherever, he’s somewhere on the wrong time zone, and it’s not a deep team of support engineers on that one custom application. It's usually one guy, two guys.  So it’s very difficult to spin up another satellite studio and run a whole bunch of proprietary software. There are a lot of challenges, and we [PipelineFX] have an opportunity there, even if a studio has a lot of proprietary software, to win the satellite studios. 

But, beyond that the big challenge is the studio itself has to distribute the pipeline across every application they use and that’s sort of far beyond us. But, if they can do that, and if they can move all their textures and all their scene files and ship them around the world, then they can certainly use our software. We have a way of running multiple supervisors and you can choose the supervisor you’re submitting to. People have even written software that profiles jobs, and if it’s low data and makes sense, takes a long time to render like a Houdini distributed simulation, that’s worth sending far away to use remote resources. But in general, shipping your rendering away is kind of a hairy thing. It normally doesn’t make a lot of sense. Few people do it effectively. The cost and bandwidth and transfer time to wait for the return of the frames, even if the frames only take, let’s say, five minutes to render,  it’s still an HD stereo set of frames coming back, it’s a lot of data and does it really makes sense to send it out? And that segues into the cloud discussion.

DS: Please! What is the deal with “the cloud?” How can you possibly push all this sophisticated and gear-intensive processing up to a faceless “cloud” of computing resources?  It’s supposed to eliminate the need to have dedicated resources and it’s more cost-effective and you…  

RL: It’s not that I’m not a fan of the cloud, it’s just I’ve been through all this already. If you remember in the dot com era we had storage area networks.  I sat in a Computer Associates conference, watching the CEO’s of ten venture capital funds, and they went out and bought up all the data systems, all the EMC storage, stuck them in data centers all over.  A storage cloud - they didn’t use the word cloud, but that’s what it was – an internet based storage cloud. You’re going to plug an Ethernet cable in the wall and get data storage, tier one, backed up, ultra-reliable high speed, primary storage…  

DS: They built bunkers all around the world to house this stuff. 

RL: [It would show up] On your utility bill, just like your phone bill and electric bill.  They all went out of business and it never happened. So that’s what the cloud is to rendering. It’s not going to happen. I know NVIDIA is doing stuff and Autodesk is doing stuff, but that’s not what it’s [the cloud is] for. The internet is not for that either. The internet is not for us to have high speed data storage for our hospital medical records for the ER [to access] this moment.  That’ll never happen. Hospitals buy tier one data storage in their data center, guaranteed delivery when they need it. That’s the only way that can operate. You’re not going to get it through the internet. The internet doesn’t deliver us 10 GB to the home… 

DS: As it is, ISP’s are beginning to put governors on the amount of data that people can get with all the video being watched online, let alone real high speed applications…