The computer multimedia industry isn't just games and interactive
encyclopedias: It's television, it's film--it's Hollywood! Multimedia includes
authoring, 3D animation, linear digital video editing, 2D-image manipulation,
and more. If you can put it on a television or computer screen, it's multimedia.
And now, the multimedia development industry is coming down from Mount Olympus
and manifesting itself in common desktop systems. Animators have discovered that
a $5000 Pentium box or a $10,000 Alpha workstation can do the same things they
used to do with a $200,000 UNIX imaging system.
When I saw all the new multimedia tools available in the Windows NT market
at Comdex in November 1995, I decided to take a closer look at them and at the
overall direction of the multimedia industry. I investigated some of the
pioneers in 3D animation and digital video editing to see why they made the move
to NT and how it worked out for them. The results are pretty interesting.
If this report seems Alpha-centric, that's because, according to the folks
I interviewed, Digital Equipment's Alpha CPUs--the 21064, in particular--offer
the best price/performance numbers of any of the currently available processor
chips. Pentiums, PowerPCs, and MIPS processors all have their places in the
production process--even Apple Macs do!--but you can't beat the Alpha processor
for compute-intensive tasks, such as 3D rendering and animation.
The Questions
I asked the owners and directors of some of the top Hollywood graphics
production houses nine sets of questions:
- What (if anything) were you using as your multimedia system before,
and why did you choose NT now?
- What platforms are you running NT on (Alpha, Intel, MIPS, PowerPC)?
Why?
- Of the systems you have, which is the best overall, which is the
fastest, and which is the most reliable?
- What products are you using for your 3D editing? How do they work
for you, and how do they compare with other solutions?
- Do you do all your work on your NT system?
- Is your NT system adequate?
- How much did you spend on your NT system as compared to the other
systems you could have used?
- Is your NT system better or worse than what you had before? Is it
better or worse than other systems you could be using?
- Did this turn out to be the right decision for you? Why?
Joe Conti Design
Joe Conti, whose computer graphics work can be seen on hit television shows
such as Hercules, started Joe Conti Design with several rooms full of
Commodore Amigas (a total of about 40 machines) running LightWave 3D software
from NewTek (see the sidebar "Move over, SGI; NT is here!" on page
56). He also had one of the few NewTek Screamer systems in existence. (A
Screamer was a specialized quad-processor MIPS R4400 system running NT that
required a graphical front-end, such as the Amiga.) Conti's systems were
connected to an Ethernet LAN, and the Screamer was the high-speed rendering
engine. Using distributive rendering, all the machines could be running at the
same time, grinding at different portions of the same 3D scene.
Then came NT on the Alpha--an unbeatable combination once NewTek ported
LightWave 3D to the platform. Conti was able to replace rooms full of Amigas
with one 275-MHz computer from Aspen Systems equipped with 64MB of RAM and PCI
video. Since then, he has expanded to three Alpha boxes.
Why make the switch, especially after he made such a huge investment in
another platform? Conti based his decision on NT's ability to support LightWave
and other industry programs on multiple-hardware platforms. This ability makes
porting files from one platform to another easy. Besides, now that LightWave is
something of a standard in the industry, Conti felt that a $12,000 Alpha-based
system was an excellent alternative to a $100,000 Silicon Graphics (SGI)
workstation.
Conti uses the Aspen computers for about 90% of his 3D rendering and
animation work, but he has regular PCs and Macs on his network, too. "You
have to choose the processors that best suit the needs of the applications you
are running," he explained. For example, although Adobe AfterEffects is one
of the leading 2D desktop compositing tools available, it currently runs only on
Macintosh systems. Therefore, Conti has to do his 2D compositing work on a Mac
instead of an NT system. Another example is texturing work: Adobe Photoshop is
the standard tool, and at the moment it runs only on Macs and Intel PCs (see "Photoshop
3.0.5 for Windows NT" on page 81 for information on the new 32-bit
version).
Conti uses NT for more than 3D rendering. He also uses his Windows NT
Workstations to compile and preview animation in conjunction with a Perception
Video Recorder (PVR) from Digital Processing Systems, or DPS (see "Non-Linear
Digital Video Editing on NT" on page 31). Conti dumps the finished
animation onto Exabyte tape for shipment to the production studio. For 2D
morphing, Conti uses Elastic Reality, which runs on all NT platforms: Intel,
Alpha, PowerPC, and MIPS (see "Elastic Reality" on page 72).
Two other reasons that Conti made the jump to NT were reliability and
technical support, although these weren't assured until after he took the
gamble. So far, Conti's systems have run 24 hours a day, seven days a week for
more than a year, and he has experienced only one hard-drive failure. Aspen
Systems shipped a replacement less than 12 hours after Conti reported the
failure. You can imagine how important this kind of support is when you can lose
$10,000 a day if your system goes down.
Conti also discovered that NT on an Alpha system--particularly the Alpha
systems he got from Aspen--offered a performance gain over his old systems.
Aspen designed its boards and high-speed bus from the ground up rather than from
off-the-shelf components. This strategy gives Aspen's Alpha systems
top-of-the-line performance. And, because most of Conti's work is 3D rendering,
the Alpha/NT combination brought him a huge increase in productivity over his
old Amigas.
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