There’s No Business Like Show Business

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:

1. What (if anything) were you using as your multimedia system before, and why did you choose NT now?
2. What platforms are you running NT on (Alpha, Intel, MIPS, PowerPC)? Why?
3. Of the systems you have, which is the best overall, which is the fastest, and which is the most reliable?
4. What products are you using for your 3D editing? How do they work for you, and how do they compare with other solutions?
5. Do you do all your work on your NT system?
6. Is your NT system adequate?
7. How much did you spend on your NT system as compared to the other systems you could have used?
8. Is your NT system better or worse than what you had before? Is it better or worse than other systems you could be using?
9. 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.