Lucas and JAK Films see Revenge with AMD64

Post, June, 2005 by Ken McGorry

MARIN COUNTY, CA -- George Lucas and his in-house previz team at Skywalker Ranch, JAK Films, upgraded to AMD 64-bit processors early in 2004 as they worked on Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. While director Lucas has long relied on previz animatics to map out his shots for Star Wars films, SW3 saw something of a change in JAK's workflow: aided by the speed of newly installed AMD Opteron processors, animators could interact much more directly with Lucas in a creative, collaborative way. Episode II was developed using AMD's Athlon processors.

JAK's 12-man previz team used 30 Verari Systems workstations, running Alias Maya software on dual AMD Opteron processors, 4GB PC2700 DDRs and Nvidia's Quadro FX 3000, to work with Lucas on directing realtime 3D assets for everything from designing galaxies and futuristic cities to choreographing action sequences. During an 18-month cycle, JAK used a 10TB cluster-server array and a 140-processor Opteron AMD64 farm to quickly visualize shots, ultimately totaling 6,500, for a film that would finally comprise about 2,200.

Dan Gregoire, until recently previsualization supervisor at JAK Films (he's now working with Steven Spielberg), says that AMD's "64-bit technology in the Opteron chip and HyperTransport were what we were really waiting for to move into Episode III." Gregoire says Lucas could "sit down at a desk with an artist and see his digital environment. He can fly through it freely and set the cameras, animate the characters, and do all the things that he has control over."

During production JAK processed 150,000 digital frames per day representing 150TB of daily data traffic. It amounted to a full-length feature film each day, or a 40 percent increase in workflow efficiency compared to that of SW2. "We're focused on enabling the digital artist to stay in the moment, and AMD64 technology is that mechanism," says Charlie Boswell, director of digital media and entertainment for AMD.