By Valentina I. Valentini Anywhere from a decade ago to two weeks ago the giant strides taken in the filmmaking process have become bigger better and faster. Think Cameron’s Simulcam or the fourth installment of Pirates where the editor worked on set side-by-side with the 3D stereographer during production. Now think of those blurry lines between production and post-production and imagine someone coming in and streamlining it all to a point where pre-viz teams are working next to VFX artists are working next to DPs are working next to motion capture actors. Silverdraft Mobileviz says it has found a way to iron out the wrinkles of the new crossover between production and post. And because it’s on wheels it can go wherever filmmakers need it. It can pull up outside a post facility that's in need of additional rendering power or be deployed when standing facilities face ‘peak load’ on a CGI-intensive production and need additional computing rendering resources. “Mobileviz trailers can even be dedicated to an existing IT network ” says Michael Cooper Silverdraft’s director of business development. “Ensuring maximum security of rendered assets and production material.” Mobileviz claims to be the first supercomputer-powered digital VFX and pre-visualization studio-on-wheels for picture production. “The whole concept behind designing this system was to help focus on the artists’ needs ” says Amy Gile founder and CEO of Silverdraft. “It’s about streamlining everything not taking away from their process. More importantly it isn’t only for $30 million budgets. Much smaller budget productions can save time and money integrating CGI or VFX into their productions.” It seems that recently there is an expectation from studios and filmmakers to be able to work with their assets as soon as they’re shot. And there have certainly been many technologies invented to make that happen. Now Mobileviz has packaged those technologies together in one very convenient and mobile trailer. These software and hardware technologies which are found within the Mobileviz system include Autodesk MotionBuilder Maya and 3DS Max; Mental Images’ Mental Ray renderer; Chaos Group’s Vray; Qube! render management from PipelineFX; Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid editing; plus on-set dailies and full color management capabilities. It also has 20TB of Micron solid-state storage incorporated into a cluster of 1 536 compute cores. I was given a demo inside the spaceship-like main area of the trailer with seven computer monitor workstations it all became clear. I was looking at a monitor with a motion capture character in volume in a parking lot right next to us. The demo showed how taking all the animated points rigging them to the animated character playing it back in the MotionBuilder then compositing it with pre-viz elements over the live action – a female character a car and the parking lot – allows everyone (the director DP actors for instance) who are shooting to actually see what this virtual environment is going to look like in the final product but there and then ‘live’ on set. The amount of money and time (which in filmmaking as we all know equals money) saved with Mobileviz seems pretty significant. Although there are no numbers yet as the system only launched on March 16 by the time principal photography is wrapped and the footage goes to the VFX team it will all be so much further down the post line. The VFX artists now have the capability to be on set with the crew working in real time. “This technology is really pushing productions creatively as well as schedule-wise ” says Cooper. “We’re hoping to give the creatives a tool to help them integrate faster so that the quality will be better.” The power of this super-computer not only allows a more streamlined workflow to occur its creators are emphasizing quality at every turn. Another goal of Mobileviz is to figuring out how to conjoin existing workflows. “We’re not being proscriptive about insisting on which technologies should be used or how the workflow should happen ” says Gile. “It’s a flexible hub of a production where it’s possible to bring in your own color grading system or on-set dailies system editor team etc. Mobileviz plays well with others.” As Silverdraft Mobileviz systems architect Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan is singularly responsible for the design build functionality and revolutionary speed of the supercomputers that power Mobileviz. “The definition of a supercomputer is so outdated that now your cell phone has more power than a supercomputer ” Srinidhi says when I somewhat naively asked what a ‘supercomputer’ was. “A supercomputer nowadays needs a certain set of characteristics to be called a supercomputer: it needs to have the performance to be able to run a certain set of scientific computing benchmarks one of the main benchmarks is the speed at which the nodes need to be interconnected – [Mobileviz’s] interconnects do over 40 GB per second.” As an example Mobileviz says their computer can copy a feature film DVD in just one second. Srinidhi presently serves at Virginia Tech University as the director for the center of high-end computing systems and as an associate professor in the department of computer science. His pioneering work in super-computing parallel processing scalable network emulation and network routing algorithms led to his development in November 2003 of System X. Srinidhi presently serves at Virginia Tech University as the director for the center of high-end computing systems and as an associate professor in the department of computer science. His pioneering work in super-computing parallel processing scalable network emulation and network routing algorithms led to his development in November 2003 of System X at Virginia Tech. The official ranking of supercomputers is based on a standardized scientific computing benchmark (LINPACK) and the top 500 supercomputers in the world are ranked twice a year in June and November. System X was ranked number 3 in the world in the in Nov 2003 rankings. In 2004 he received the MIT Technology Review Award as one of the top 100 scientists in the world.
