Compositing: fatter pipe makes it quicker, 20/30 integration makes it tighter, and less expensive software makes it cheaper

Post, Feb, 2004 by Ann Fisher

Compositors have become adept at finding creative solutions with technology. Frequently, they are upgrading their systems or even changing them during projects. Rezn8 upgraded its storage capacity while working on a huge compositing package for Battlestar Galactica. Black Box Digital used Shake for the first time on more than 100 shots for Paramount's The Italian Job. Other compositing houses continue to experiment with new tools and combinations to achieve that cohesive interplay between 2D and 3D.

Rezn8, a visual effects company based in Hollywood, created and composited the titles, tags and lower thirds for the SciFi Channel's Battlestar Galactica miniseries that aired in December. It involved taking the show's logo and creating a massive distressed, battle-worn version that almost looks like a ship itself, then compositing it over a spiraling volumetric nebula.

It was done in high definition 1080, 24p. The files were massive compared to standard NTSC, and that was the challenge. "We had to scramble to get all our infrastructure updated," describes Bill Dahlinger, senior animator at Rezn8 (www.rezn8.com). "We didn't have the SAN [storage area network] yet, and I comped everything locally. We have Ultra320 SCSI hard drive arrays on our workstations; it was singing through them. I'm surprised at how well it's going. The transition was a scary thing. It opened up our eyes. Everything's going that way." Seventy-five percent of Rezn8's work is HD.

The house recently acquired I TB of storage along with a SAN that allows its 12 Adobe After Effects workstations to be transferred over Fibre Channel, upgrading its existing 100-base T file server. The hardware is Boxx, all dual 3GB, including 2GB of RAM, running Windows XP.The software is the new AE 6, which supports 16-bit color space; everything Dahlinger now works on has 16-bit color. The 3D elements were created in Discreet 3DS Max.

"We upgraded our network with larger storage and much fatter pipe to the workstations and we purchased a rack of Boxx Technologies RenderBoxx, dual 3.0 GHz render nodes to help us do AE net rendering, which works really well. We do our works on the workstations and then we fire it off to the network renderer. And now we have over 60 machines, we never use all of them, but we have that capability to handle it," he says.

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This was the second HD job on which AE 6 was used, in this case for color correction and compositing. "It worked beautifully," Dahlinger adds. "Sixteen-bit color support is my number one thing. There's also a new vector painting engine to roto out alpha channels to clean up some of the mattes. Before we'd have to [go] frame by frame in Photoshop and clean up the alpha and resave it. And, because we do so much 3D work, we all have really good cards [Nvidia Quadro4 980 XGL] on our machines already, in AE 6 they added Open GL support for scrubbing the comp. Before, to scrub a comp, you'd have to calculate and downgrade. Now it's like lightning fast. Another feature, which is minor for most but big for us, it's got WMV output support: Microsoft's version of QuickTime. We do a lot of stuff for Windows clients, in fact Microsoft is probably our biggest client."

BLACK BOX SHAKES IT UP

Black Box Digital (www.blackboxdigital.com), a boutique-sized Santa Monica compositing house, is an Apple Shake user. Mostly Mac-based, Black Box turned to Shake after Apple acquired it. Now it uses both Discreet Flame and Shake for compositing work. On 125 shots for The Italian Job, Paramount's spring '03 release, 60 percent was done in Shake, 40 percent in Flame. Shake ran on Mac G4s for that project; Black Box is currently swapping them for G5s. "We use Shake mainly for feature work because that's its forte. This was our first big movie using Shake," says Black Box compositing artist/supervisor Ricardo Torres. "One of the nice things about Shake's new Version 3 is the QMaster that allows you to use any Mac that you have as a renderer. Because we do have a lot of Macs, it's natural for us. Any Mac that was available, including the iMac used by the receptionist, could be used as a rendering node. Everybody has a high-end Mac on their desk, so by getting floating licenses of Shake these guys were comping their own shots, not just designing them. It was easy for us to build some of the set-ups and for them to swap the footage with their new design. It helped us tremendously in terms of our pipeline. "Actually it went so smoothly that we decided to switch all of our pipeline [to being] based around the Shake software in terms of our machine rooms and getting file servers [an Apple Xserve that was designated as a renderer]. We had some PCs in the back, the only reason was one of our guys uses Houdini, which is very similar to Shake's tree structure, but unfortunately it's not available on OS X."

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Torres ticks off other Shake benefits. "One of the big issues that we always have to deal with in film is color, what you see on screen is not necessarily what's going to come out on other end. Shake takes a lot of that guesswork out. Its nature of being a node-based compositing tool--that's another benefit. That's one way that more and more software is going, using that tree structure to do compositing. Discreet always had it in there, but a couple of years ago it wasn't very usuable; it has been improved. That's my preferred way of working in Flame now also. It's similar to how Shake works. The best way to describe it is you work in a very nonlinear way."