Creating artistic wizardry on Open Source and cloud

BANGALORE, INDIA: Over the years we have seen the media and entertainment landscape evolve to great heights, overwhelming viewers around the world each time with creative storylines and enhanced cinematic experience.

As we kick back and immerse in the wonders of the animated world, have you ever wondered how your favorite characters were brought to life? Who was responsible for conceptualizing those striking visuals? How long did it take and how many frames were there in total? What sort of technology was used to put all that brilliant artistry together?

There is More to Animation Than Meets the Eye

Creating chart-topping and award-winning animation takes collaborative effort based on shared ideas and efforts across a global network. Even though this collaboration often takes place within a single organization, it’s a lot like the open source model.

Open source brings a community of people to work together in contributing to, and building, better technologies, allowing you to look at the code, see how it works, change it so it works better for you, and give your changes back to the community. This collaborative process enables ideas to take shape and grow and build the technology faster, ultimately providing more value to end users.

Open source offers a solid foundation for cloud computing as it provides the scalability, stability, performance and robustness to cope with the requirements for the cloud. Over 90 per cent of public clouds today are powered by Linux and other open source software. And these same technologies are being employed by organizations building their own clouds.

In the media and entertainment business, these cloud computing technologies have been pivotal in providing the compute resources required to create many of the award-winning feature films of today. The demand for digital visual effects, CG animation, and 3D conversion especially, have driven home the need for cloud services due to the staggering number and size of digital files involved.

Needless to say, rendering these high resolution digital graphics is no small feat. It is in fact, one of the most demanding IT tasks involved.

As each successful animation feature raises the bar for the next, Hollywood powerhouses are challenged to scale their computing power accordingly. Leading animation studios around the world require thousands of microprocessors to work together to provide high performance computing capabilities for digital media rendering, and they need the results fast.

Furthermore, they need to be able to flexibly transition capacity to different projects as resources are needed, whether those resources are supplied by computing gear they own and operate or whether it’s delivered by a public cloud.

Animated Films Take to the Cloud

Establishing a cloud environment allows producers to focus more on what they do best, that is drawing in creative talent when it is needed as they can invest more in assembling a higher quality creative team. Furthermore, they can focus on optimizing processes and workflow to deliver creative results rapidly and cost-effectively, without having to worry about or compromise around the technology investment that sits behind it.

Cloud computing also addresses the constant need for speed required when working on a production, thus applying vast performance to rendering jobs — a critical part of creative content production and animation. Tens of thousands of processor cores can be applied rather than relying on rendering with local workstations.

Top animation studios globally have been known to prefer open source technologies to help them churn award-winning animated hits that we have seen in the past years. Cloud computing software can be used to scale their computer needs to meet the demands of their animation productions.

Open Source Puts the Magic in Movies

A cloud built on open source solutions provides access to the vast resources of servers, processing power and storage, delivering the features, stability and technical advantages that animation juggernauts have come to appreciate — offering better value, lower total cost of ownership and faster return on investment than proprietary solutions.

The development and distribution of digital content is exploding. Entertainment companies are racing to keep up with growing consumer demand and rapidly evolving technology innovations. With the ongoing economic pressures, everyone is hard-pressed to achieve greater efficiency and cost containment.

Cloud computing continues to hold significant promise to help the animation industry thrive in this challenging environment and open source can be relied on to provide the powerful stability, outstanding engineering capabilities and performance commitment to help Hollywood studios come up with that epic scene that will stick in your mind long after you walk out of the cinema.

The author is vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific and Japan, at Red Hat.