Sunday, November 25, 2007

Animation Park in Kolkata

The West Bengal government plans to build an animation park in Kalkotta, ANIMATION EXPRESS reports. The park, which will contain animation studios and IT companies, will be under the Special Economic Zone (SEZ).

"Animation park is the initiative by the Bengal government keeping in mind the growing Indian animation, VFX and gaming industry," said Dr Debesh Das, Minister in-charge Department of IT (Government of West Bengal). "After the success of the Webel Academy, we also want to focus on the industry. With this space in Bengal we want to bring studios of all sizes in this state.

"The land for the park will be provided by the government at a cheaper rate. We want the studios to look at Bengal as the next stop to start a facility or expand their studios. The land for the big- and medium-sized studios will be leased and, for the smaller studios, we will keep the option of taking the land or provide them with a built-up studio with complete infrastructure. The rent for the complete facility will be very nominal."

Work on the park is to begin once the land is allotted in early 2008.

Rob Legato advances motion-capture technique

'Beowulf,' 'Avatar' pushing VFX envelope

With Bob Zemeckis' "Beowulf" currently in theaters and James Cameron's "Avatar" now filming in New Zealand for 2009 release, the art of performance capture is finally making its next evolutionary leap. Left behind are the dead-eyed elves, robotic movements and murky teeth of the first performance capture feature, "The Polar Express."

Visual effects master Rob Legato, who put the first motion-capture humans on the deck of the Titanic and pioneered a new mo-cap technique for "Avatar," is an ardent believer in harnessing the technology within -- not apart from -- the live-action realm.

The VFX maverick has quit working for major FX houses like Digital Domain, where he spent six years supervising effects on such pics as "Apollo 13" and "Titanic." A passionate believer in the do-it-yourself approach, Legato is no longer willing to stay within the corporate confines of VFX behemoths like Digital Domain or Sony Imageworks, where shots are so rigidly pre-planned, storyboarded, pre-approved and budgeted that any changes down the line cost serious extra money.

"I disagree with the financial craziness of figuring out a pricetag for each effects sequence based on how long and how many people it will take," says Legato, who now freelances such FX assignments as "Harry Potter and the Sorcer's Stone" and commercial shoots out of his Pasadena basement. "I like to edit and pick and choose and be flexible. So I opened my own place. I'm set up to do whatever the hell I want, when I want. I do shots on my laptop."

As FX supervisor on Martin Scorsese's last two films, Legato was on call 24/7 for the director, shooting second-unit footage and filming, editing and delivering fully realized FX sequences such as the Howard Hughes plane crash in "The Aviator."

"I don't do lists of shots," he says. "I shoot it and cut it and if I need to go back and get another shot, I can. The editors work with what I give them. If it's good they use it, if not I change it to make it better."

He lives for on-the-fly last-minute saves like the final shot in "The Departed," for which he swiftly rebuilt a minimal set, filmed a wider 35mm green-screen shot of the live rat coming down from the balcony railing and iChatted the live video tap to Scorsese, who approved the shot, which Legato then sent to editor Thelma Schoonmaker.

On "Aviator," when Scorsese was unhappy that he was missing a shot of Leonardo DiCaprio holding a photo, the producers said it was too late to fix. But Legato picked up his HD P2 camera and took a tight shot of a DiCaprio lookalike wearing a hoodie and holding a picture frame. Legato then walked his FireWire drive over to Technicolor, and Schoonmaker cut the insert into the film. "Marty approved it at the premiere," laughs Legato. "I like the idea that you can be that nimble."

On the upcoming Rolling Stones doc "Shine a Light," Legato helped Scorsese be more nimble in editing . He set up a digital pipeline, scanning 35mm dailies to create a digital intermediate so that Scorsese can edit as he goes, switching and altering shots, without being penalized for making changes. It saves money. "He can change his mind at will," says Legato.

But Legato's passion these days is finding ways to make motion capture technology serve storytelling while giving directors the flexibility to create genuine moments with their actors.

The reason the hyper-real animation in "Polar Express" and "Beowulf" sometimes looks clunky and stiff, says Legato, is Sony Imageworks' approach to performance capture, dubbed ImageMotion.

In Sony's process, actors covered with white tracking dots perform on a motion capture platform surrounded by hundreds of infrared cameras that feed 360 degrees of 3-D motion data into the computer. Afterward, Zemeckis goes in with a viewfinder and picks his camera moves inside digital environments.

"With Bob's method, they do it like a stageplay," says Legato. "It's theatrical, not camera-specific. Later you have everything built inside a computerized environment. You distort the live-action performance and make it mechanical. When you artificially create every last thing, you miss certain things. It's the equivalent of the performance of an actor in a fat suit. The face can't move, it's dulled down, you're acting through a mask. It's like an entire movie is based on that."

"Beowulf" works best as a 3-D event, says Legato: "You're looking at spectacle, not looking at the scene. But it's a duller version of Tom Hanks or Angelina Jolie. Movie stars have a magic, larger-than-life quality, something about them makes you look at them, no matter what. They can act through anything, whether it's Eddie Murphy or someone else. But if it's a dull performer with no recognition, the artifice of it all doesn't interest anyone."

For many moviegoers, that performance capture techniqueis more effective in a film like the more stylized, cartoony Zemeckis-produced "Monster House," directed by Gil Kenan.

"The less realistic it is," says Legato, "the greater your chance of succeeding."

While Cameron is collaborating day-to-day with Weta Digital's VFX supervisor Joe Letteri ("King Kong") in New Zealand on the complex alien humanoids in "Avatar," the director enlisted Legato to set up the mo-cap pipeline for the film after Legato, with help from ILM, created a four-minute demo using crude CG figures in a digital environment to show Cameron how to deploy a different, more flexible technology than Sony Imageworks.

Legato gave Cameron a director-centric system that allows him to look through a camera, change lenses or pick up a Steadicam. "You look through the lens at a virtual world," Legato says. "But the actors are live through the director's finder. He can stage them dramatically for the shot, follow them, change the shape of scenes. I wanted to illustrate the point that you can start to create on the fly, with a hand-held camera. Cutting live when the actors are still there, you can grab another piece. It's a liberating experience."

Legato made it possible to see the digital environment through the viewfinder while shooting live actors on a bare soundstage -- or anywhere else -- wearing hundreds of dots and 3-D goggles that show them a set that exists only in the computer. "I helped Jim with a different methodology," Legato says. "Having done primarily live-action work, the part I find exciting is the daily input, looking through the lens, the way the light hits, interacting with someone else. You need to see it, to wallow in it. Once you are removed from the outside world, working totally inside the computer, you don't have anything to rub against. You don't get a fluid, natural rhythm."

The selling point for Cameron was that the process was much more like shooting live-action, Legato says. "You can stage a scene, translate performances into a shot. You have to put it in context so that everything can open up. Jim takes the ball and runs with it."

A longstanding member of the Academy's VFX committee, Legato admits that the thorny issue of just what is animation and what is VFX--raised again by "Beowulf" this year -- won't go away anytime soon. "It's an age-old fight," he says. "If it's the whole movie, it's animation. If it's eight scenes, it's VFX. Bob Zemeckis is trying to come up with a new genre of filmmaking."

And Legato believes that audiences want real actors up there on the bigscreen, not simulations.

It's one thing to create aliens, avatars and monsters like "Beowulf's" Grendel with VFX magic, he says, "but we'll never replace what people are primarily interested in -- the nuances and tics in people's faces. A computerized version is a facsimile that leaves you cold. It's another genre. It doesn't replace anything."

Source:http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117976416.html?categoryId=2508&cs=1

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Intel’s Skulltrail enthusiast platform running at 5.0 GHz

By Rick C. Hodgin
Wednesday, October 31, 2007 10:50

Santa Clara (CA) – Every year, we try to spend some one-on-one time with the key companies we cover on TG Daily: Rick Hodgin is currently on a 2-day tour with Intel to find out about some of the latest products Intel is working on. The enthusiast Skulltrail motherboard with the “Seaburg” chipset. Read the latest on Intel’s first consumer dual-socket product here.

We have previously reported about a working Skulltrail version, but since IDF Fall much has happened: During my visit, Intel senior performance analyst Francois Piednoel unveiled a nearly completed Skulltrail prototype motherboard for the enthusiast overclocker.

Integrating the Seaburg chipset as well as two 771-pin “special” Xeon sockets, Piednoel told us that one of these systems has been overclocked in his lab to 5.0 GHz stable, and 5.2 GHz nearly stable. That system uses vapor cooling. The analyst mentioned he's using regular bathroom silicon around key parts of the board to keep condensation from becoming an issue. During Fall IDF he had a similar machine running just under 4 GHz with known BIOS limitations at that time which were keeping it from clocking higher.

It is no secret that Intel does not recommend overclocking their processors beyond specification. In our conversation, Piednoel was very clear on that point. However, he also indicated that Intel is well aware of the fact that overclocking takes place. “Since they are doing it anyway, would it not be better to do it right?” Damaging a system with overclocking is always a concern, but Piednoel assured us that Intel “now has enough on the board to make sure you don’t damage [the board].”

The Skulltrail board. Purple-4 PCI-x16 slots. Red-nForce 100 chips. Yellow-Overclockable CL3 FB-DIMM 800. Cyan-voltage regulators. Green-Dual power ports.

Kingston CL3 FB-DIMM 800 just received. Piednol had already overclocked this memory under extreme cooling, keeping memory at 30C.


Skulltrail has been billed as a large step up from Intel’s V8. While still a dual quad-core machine, it has been designed for more flexibility in overclocking. For example, just ahead of our demonstration Piednoel had removed the heat sinks which normally cover the voltage regulators for each socket (highlighted in blue). The white contact grease was still visible on the chips.

He explained that the numerous regulators were added to allow for very precise voltage adjustments with the large amperage, nearly 90 amps per processor at just over 1 volt (100 – 120 watts). These fine resolution settings were added to a special overclocking BIOS not present on regular Xeon boards. Piednol told us that “the voltage will be rock solid using whatever you can throw at the processors”. Similar design considerations were also added to the memory subsystem, allowing for independent overclocking and voltages. To accommodate this much power, dual input power ports were added.

Skulltrail has all the usual suspects, internal/external SATA, FireWire, USB, Ethernet, S-video, sound, etc. And it should be noted very quickly from the image that the board includes four PCI-x16 slots (highlighted in purple). Interestingly, Intel chose to use Nvidia nForce 100 chips (highlighted in red) for the motherboard. These provide bandwidth to drive four graphics cards. Skulltrail will not be limited to Nvidia graphics cards, according to Piednoel, but will also enable users to connect ATI Crossfire cards. However, the board will only accommodate a single-slot graphics card in the last slot if the second-to-last slot is populated.

Piednoel also provided more information about the “special Xeons” Skulltrail requires. While the board also supports “regular” Xeons, Intel has developed a “special” Xeon just for Skulltrail and enthusiast desktop-based workloads. In contrast to the regular Xeons, the “special” version are designed to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the board, Intel said. For example, Piednoel explained that these Xeons have “aggressive pre-fetchers,” which schedule data retrieval and utilize front-side bus bandwidth differently than traditional Xeons, something the analyst referred to as “tuning”. It’s this internal tuning and unlocked multiplier that differentiates them.

You get the picture, Skulltrail will be an exotic performance platform, more unlimited than anything we have seen from Intel before. That of course will affect the initial price. We did not get any number on that, but you could compare buying a Skulltrail PC to buying a hand-built exotic sports car. In terms of power consumption, the platform will be focused on performance only. You don't buy a Ferrari and then worry about the gas mileage.

Piednoel was initially showing Skulltrail with four 2 GB CL5 FB-DIMM 800 MHz chips as the typical memory, each consuming about 7 watts per stick - thanks to the new multiplexers added at 800 MHz which result in about 1 less watt per stick than 667 MHz parts. He explained that these CL5 chips should equal the performance of regular DDR2 memory. However, Piednoel also took it to the next level. He had received some fresh engineering samples that morning from Kingston - CL3 FB-DIMM 800 modules. All told, they provide 24 Gb/s maximum bandwidth, but with 3-cycle latencies.

Piednoel only had a little time to test the memory before meeting with us that morning, though he said he had already “undressed them”. This meant he had removed the heat shield, added enhanced cooling and overclocked them. When overclocked, he was able to keep them stable and operating at 30 degrees Celsius. While he did not provide us with a benchmark demonstration or any solid numbers, he said they were “insanely fast”. He promised to send us a machine in the coming months so we can verify his performance claims.

The board itself is not yet complete. Piednoel suggested it could be available for sale within a few months. There are at least two OEMs committed to producing the board, he noted, though the names are still under NDA. He said samples had also been sent out to other major OEMs as well.

One another note, while the board itself uses Socket-771 processors, it has the same clip connects as a regular Socket-775 for cooling. This allows for additional possible coolers.

From all outward appearances, this is Intel’s most aggressive attempt to give the enthusiast base exactly what they want: A highly overclockable board. As mentioned above, there is every indication that a 5 GHz system will not be cheap. The special Xeons, CL3 memory and whatever after-market water or phase cooling system will likely be in such the machine, along with all other high-speed peripherals, will cost big bucks.