BR: What difference does that make in the way artists work?

CP: Because we have more bandwidth, we can view high res images efficiently instead of relying on compression techniques. We want to move to a place where we can do more internal videoconferencing so that instead of artists having to meet in the theater, they can view images across the network from different locations. Instead of calling Dennis [Muren] and saying, “Let’s meet in the theater,” they can make a phone call, sit at their own desks, say, “Take a look at this,” and both view images at the same time.

The other big thing in terms of flexibility is that we can move artists around more easily. If we have artists moving from one show to another, they can just pick up their things and go down to a new assignment, log on and their environment is set up. They can log on from any workstation in the facility and start working. They don’t have to move their workstation with them.

When the concept of moving to the Presidio came up, we determined it would have taken two weeks; we would have had to close down. So, we came up with a plan to move the facility without any down time. We’ve had a 10GB pipe between ILM in San Rafael and the Presidio and have been moving the back end infrastructure so there would be no down time. When artists leave for the weekend, they pack their personal belongings and when they show up on Monday morning, they’re working.

If the Letterman Digital Arts Center doesn’t inspire creativity, nothing will.

BR: Does everyone get new machines at the Presidio?

CP: They’re transitioning. Our three key vendors for the desktop are HP for workstations, AMD for processors and NVIDIA for graphics. Everyone is moving toward 64-bit workstations. Most have dual heads [monitors] today. They will all have dual processors. We’re working closely with AMD, our processor vendor on dual core processors. We’ll get to the stage over the next year where artists will have a dual core dual processor — two processors on one chip; like four CPUs. Plus, two graphics cards. We’re looking at a workstation equivalent on the desktop that’s more powerful that what we used to have with a fully blown SGI Onyx, something ILM once paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

Our render farm has about 3,000 processors and we have a proprietary tool that lets unused desktops become part of the render pool at night, so we can scale up to over 4,000 processors.

BR: What are some of the ways that will affect production?

CP: It gives artists working with supervisors more interactivity with high res images. Artists can get to a good first take faster. In the past, we’d look at the production schedule and it would take a lot of time getting to that first take because we didn’t have enough bandwidth, the tools couldn’t handle the complexity of the scenes so they would be broken up into bits – section of a scene or section of an asset. Now, we can load all that material into a scene and work interactively, get to the first take faster, and then working with a supervisor, spend more time tweaking to get quality. That happens just by being able to see everything at once.

We’re using the GPU on the NVIDIA cards for preview rendering. Artists don’t always have to wait for overnight renders to see a result when they can take advantage of hardware rendering.

Our interactive lighting tool Lux also takes advantage of hardware rendering. Lux is a big step forward in lighting. Our first tools focused on lighting an asset; our next generation was designed to light a shot, all the assets in a shot. Lux is designed to light a sequence, an entire scene. When artists can light a whole scene, they can make sequence lighting decisions rather than individual lighting decisions. TDs can work on the whole sequence rather than break it down into individual assets or individual shots.