00:00Blue Sky Studios is a computer-generated animation studio that has been
00:29in business for approximately 21 years.
00:34We have just completed our fifth feature-length film, Ice Age Dawn of the Dinosaurs.
00:44The solution of moving towards Sun is actually quite parallel to what the relocation was
00:49to Greenwich in that when we moved to Greenwich we built and designed a space that was revolutionary
00:55to how we wanted to make movies in the sense of adjacencies and functionality within the
00:59space.
01:00So not only did we move into a new space with a completely new design and look of our physical
01:04location but with a completely brand new state-of-the-art render form.
01:10We did a complete evaluation like we always do which is run our software, render a whole
01:16bunch of stuff and look at the performance figures.
01:20We discovered that the Intel chip had an advantage in terms of its architecture so it actually
01:25ran faster than the competition.
01:28And the way the Sun was architected in terms of what memory we could get in the systems
01:32and the footprint and the form factor and the way everything was laid out, the price performance
01:38was really the best.
01:39They won the competition hands down.
01:41The new render form gives us twice the CPU performance per watt.
01:48So we're 100% more efficient in terms of how much film we can get out per dollar spent on
01:54power.
01:55Once we realized that, we turned off all of our old racks and just went entirely to Sun.
02:01That server area is the thing that actually renders this movie.
02:07It's the thing that spits out the images.
02:14CGI Studio is our own software that we wrote from scratch.
02:20And it is probably one of the best renderers in the world.
02:24It's completely ray tracing.
02:26The advantage of ray tracing is that it simulates the way light really works.
02:30The way photons bounce around and stuff like that.
02:32So it gives us the foundation for really, really doing very sophisticated lighting.
02:40The major limitations for a lighting workflow is the number of iterations that you can get.
02:44When you have an artist sit down and it takes them two days to return an image that looks
02:49good to them, every minute counts.
02:52With the Sunblade server, we're able to turn that around in sometimes even a matter of minutes.
02:56And that's just a tremendous impact on our workflow in getting a film done on time and on budget.
03:02This was by far the most rendering we put into any one of our films.
03:06You're faced with a deadline that really can't move.
03:08And quick turnaround on these is really key.
03:11Being able to take a very heavy render shot and push it through this great farm, it lets
03:15you get things into the film that you might not otherwise have been able to.
03:22These new sub-machines were cranking these pieces in a quarter of the time at a much higher
03:27resolution than we've ever been able to before.
03:30And it just allows all of the artists more freedom to just get the job done and be creative
03:35and not worry about the machines bogging down and that sort of thing.
03:40Everybody does this because they have a passion for it, but the one thing we can't forget
03:46is that to support that passion, this business needs to be successful.
03:52The support staff and all of what the relationship has been with Sun has been a success at every
03:56level.
03:57Clearly they care about their customers and they want us to be happy as do we want to make
04:01beautiful movies and the two make for a perfect relationship.
04:31But in that period of time, the time of time, the time of time gets fueled by the
04:38reason why the people are being in the past, they are laughing around, which it is
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