Catmull says Pixar's next film, Up, will again showcase something new in animation. © Disney/PIXAR. All rights reserved.

BD: Well, we can't wait to see how the Toy Story franchise goes 3-D along with all the other upcoming Pixar movies. Now, overall, where do you see efficiency and productivity improvements occurring for the CG industry?

EC: I think that films are made best when there is some optimal size of crew that works on them, so a lot of the technical drive is to figure out how we [can achieve that]. A lot of that is mundane, but it does affect the way they think about the film and it affects the costs, so it's an important drive for us.

BD: And what interests you about new technology out there?

EC: One of the questions is, as the science and mathematics of simulation improves, then how do you take that technology and put artistic controls on it? And that's a fairly difficult problem. The thing about simulation is that while there is a great deal of work that is being done in other industries, they're trying to simulate reality. And in our case, we're sometimes trying to simulate things which aren't real, and, more important, we're trying to guide the simulation. So what that means is that we have to develop new technology to do something unique in our industry.

The Toy Story franchise will be re-released in 3-D in advance of a third installment, due in 2010. © Disney/PIXAR. All rights reserved.

BD: Are there any minor holy grails that you can pinpoint in this regard?

EC: I haven't been able to put them in those terms for some time. But before we could make films, we could grab on to a few holy grails. And now there is so much going on and so many smart people on it, that it's not a single, guiding force, but, rather a large number of creative ideas falling under the umbrella of providing good tools for the filmmakers.

BD: There's been a lot of talk lately about realtime rendering. What are your thoughts on where that's headed?

EC: The drive towards realtime and fast turnaround in the creative loop is still very strong. And we're still a long ways away from that. So, there certainly are pressures to use the hardware and the graphics boards out there in smarter and smarter ways. Those are clear and strong pressures. And people will be creative about that. In addition, the availability of computation power continues to increase, but in different dimension than it used to. For many years, it was just the processors got faster. And now, of course, the hardware vendors are coming out with large numbers of processors. And while the desire to have large numbers of processors has been around for a long time, it’s only when it becomes early enough a mass market item, that I think people will be able to come up with tools to adequately use it. So the result for our industry, of course, is that we will see continued increased compute power and graphics power and people trying to come up with clever ways of applying it that give us breakthroughs in our turnaround time for the artistic loop.

BD: And quality is the key issue.

EC: Yeah, and it's clear that the games' chips are already pretty extraordinary. But then there's this gap between what the best of them can do and the fine quality you can do for a film. And when you try to bridge that gap, you basically have a problem. Then the question is: "How close can you get?" There are some that might accept lower quality. Or you might be able to use it in your decision-making loop and then have it as a pass afterwards to have the processors go and put in what you need to finish it off.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld.