IBM Digital Media: Solution for the Media and Entertainment Industry May 2005

Building an animation and special effects studio from the ground up.

George Dolbier, Senior IT Architect Veronika Megler, Senior IT Architect IBM Sales and Distribution Small and Medium Business, Emerging and Competitive Sales, Digital Media V1.0

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Contents
2 2 4 5 Introduction Keeping pace with the Wow Factor Accelerate production with the right workow architecture Threshold Digital Research Labs animates on demand with IBM 6 7 8 9 Building an animation infrastructure Content creation/editing workstations Render farm Vanguard Animation raises aesthetic bar 10 Centralized storage 12 Animation Studio boosts global image 13 Network 13 Putting IT all together 13 Sizing components for an animation studio 17 IBM: One-stop for digital media

Introduction

Sweeping through the entertainment industry is a technical revolution, where complex computer-generated animation, digital landscaping and special effects can be created quickly and at less cost than ever before. This evolving mega-billion-dollar digital effects industry has answers for everything from stylistic fairy tales and monster movies to virtual representations of entire townships, animated commercials and interactive games. Todays animators are pushing the edges of human imagination and many are doing it with IBM technology. This white paper describes the architecture required for digital content creation and editing, and how to size the components to enable animators to be more productive and compete at the highest level. At the same time, it addresses some of the fast-track technologies that make IBM a leading provider for todays established and up-and-coming animation studios.
Keeping pace with the Wow Factor

First, who uses special digital effects? The simple answer is lots of companies. They go by many names: animation houses, animation studios, post production studios, preproduction studios, the list goes on. They render digital effects, 2D and 3D animation for lm, television, games and print. Today most TV commercials contain some form of digital effect. All major motion pictures use digital effects, including the most common of all, digital light and after-production effects. Whatever their names, all of these companies need the same technologies: production content creation software, servers, high-performance workstations and networks, and cost-effective storage. And therein lies the thorniest of issues: With monstrous growth has come monstrous complexity technological and nancial. Animators and studio managers have to ask themselves, what kind of infrastructure do we really need to compete at a world-class level? Economically, how do we build a cutting-edge digital media environment that makes business sense now and down the road? Its not easy to nd the right balance between artistic expression and real costs. After all, lm audiences are hooked, they love animation, and they want todays animators, on big and small screens, to keep blowing them away. To keep the Wow Factor going. So everyone is feeling the pressure to dial up the special effects, at all cost.

In 1922, Walt Disney introduced animation, rst invented by a Frenchman, to the motion picture business. Today, the world of animation has grown into a global industry worth tens of billions of dollars.

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Foodght!, an upcoming animation lm by Threshold Digital Research Labs, is one of the most complex digitally animated feature lms ever produced, with 138 main characters, 6,254 secondary characters and 174 sets.

Markets for digital special effects and animation are proliferating in Latin America, India, China, Korea, Northern Europe, France, Russia and Australia, as well as the United States.

Consider the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which the number of visual effects shots started at 540 in the rst lm and roughly doubled for each of the next two movies.1 The rst Jurassic Park movie had 75 animated shots, while the latest Star Wars movie had an effect in almost every shot.2 All this rendering of animated images takes huge amounts of time. For Toy Story, it took more than three hours to render each frame of the lm on a workstation, although using render farm inherent parallelism let Pixar complete all 114,000 frames of the 77-minute lm in just two years.3 More recently in the movie The Two Towers, WETA Digital used 200 workstations and 450 dual-processor, Intel Xeon servers for rendering. Towards the end of production, they averaged 1,400 processors rendering at any given moment, by using artists workstations as additional rendering stations. In total, the movie took over four million hours to render.4 . Today we see many animators rendering increasingly complex individual scenes, like the one in the movie Foodght! from Threshold Digital Research Lab. In one scene, there will be 13,000 extras, and each extra has an animation cycle. Artists must often repeat the rendering process to improve quality, a process that might require as many as 150 passes. With one frame processed on one central processing unit (CPU) at a time, one cycle could take 48 to 72 hours to complete.5 Along with CPU horsepower, storage is another pressing issue. With all of this data being rendered and shared, studios are scaling up big time. Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), for example, had to double the size of its 40 terabyte render farm to handle the effects in Star Wars Episode III. During the 2003 production, ILMs revamped system supported trafc of about 70 terabytes each day.6

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So while audiences want and yes, expect a continuous dazzle of specic effects, animation studios are looking for sensible ways to keep pace and plan ahead. To compete at a high technological and business level, the solution lies in the constant upgrading of a studios infrastructure. Sufce to say, any technology that can be shown to enhance the Wow Factor, while helping to reduce required skilled staff or make a studio more productive, has tremendous value in todays high-stakes global animation marketplace.
Accelerate production with the right workow architecture

In the world of animated feature lms, the primary goal is to realize a directors vision. Every creative step taken toward this goal goes through an editorial and directional phase. The workow used to create stunning visual effects is very complex, highly customized, and varies from studio to studio. The workow itself can change at a rather rapid pace.

Development Story Development Concept Initial Script Character Development Story Development Story Board Animation Shot Layout Shot Shot Layout Layout

Character development Character Modeling Character Rigging Texturing Test

Editorial

Lighting Shot Layout

Rendering Shot Layout

Compositing Shot Layout

Direction Master development Master Layout Master Lighting Test

Paint Shot Layout

Film Transfer Shot Layout

Example of studio workow

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Everything created during a production is considered an asset i.e., the scenes, shots, and frames that compose the lm or video. As you can imagine from all the loops and steps, asset management, workow and version control are extremely important in the overall efciency of the process. Much of this workow can be easily automated if, and only if, you can centrally store all the assets. For creative professionals, an efcient workow results from a seamless architecture of workstations, storage, servers and software all properly assembled, sized and integrated. With the right components in place, todays special effects wizards are surrounded with the optimal environment for rich artistic expression.
Threshold Digital Research Labs animates on demand with IBM The challenge

Despite increasingly complex animation requirements, Threshold Digital Research Labs, a rising star among digital animation studios, needed to shorten the time it required to produce a lm, while keeping costs down. Threshold also needed access to a scarce pool of talent from around the world while maintaining control of its processes.

In animating the Foodght! ick, Threshold plugs into the Internet and uses computers located in other places. Some 40,000 remote IBM servers now power the animators studios.

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The solution

Threshold engaged IBM to create an on demand digital system that provides an unlimited growth path. The system automates the ow of animation in progress across the world to create a unied corps of designers working around the world.
Key benets

Threshold was able to reduce production time to 18 months, half the length of most animated lms. It expects to trim overall IT spending by 25 percent and overall labor costs by 12 to 15 percent. We have to deliver the highest quality product on a world-competitive budget, says George Johnsen, Chief Technology Ofcer and Chief Animation Ofcer, for Threshold Digital Research Labs. The reality of our business now is that we have to do things faster, cheaper and better. The IBM solution has enabled us to meet this challenge.
Building an animation infrastructure

How do you go about designing and building such a system? Suppose you want to ramp up from nothing to a full-length feature animation studio. What kind of infrastructure will you need? The workow infrastructure is made up of four subsystems: Content creation/editing workstations: In cinematic and broadcast content creation, there are two major uses for workstations: Creating and editing digital content. Render farm: A render farm, in general, means a collection of networked computers, called nodes, all rendering some part or all of a frame of animation. Centralized storage: Animation requires a lot of data, and there are often many people who need to access it. Centralized storage, provided it is affordable, ts this need. Network: Network bandwidth is critical to the timely delivery of any production in todays animation market. Lets take a closer look at each of these major components, how they work together, and their value to the animation studio.

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Content creation/editing workstations

Workstations are high-performance desktops, and in some cases, laptops. As mentioned, the process of creating rich digital content, whether it be video for TV, cinematic lm, or graphics for interactive entertainment (games) can be broken down into two basic activities: content creation and content editing. Content creation is the process of creating 2D or 3D images, animations, backgrounds, textures, and so forth. Content editing is the processing and sequencing of motion sequences into a nal form. Both are graphics input/ output (I/O) intensive processes.
The IBM digital content creation solution provides a exible architecture that allows you to easily upgrade as your needs change and grow over time.

Creating or editing content generally needs high performance, often 3D accelerated, workstations. One of the most popular today is the IBM IntelliStation family of workstations, with models customized to meet needs for graphics, speed and application support. IBM designed the IntelliStation to help animators set ideas in motion, with forward-looking scalability and crisp, responsive 3D graphics performance. A select range of advanced 3D graphic accelerators has been certied on IntelliStation workstations. The IntelliStation can run on a Microsoft Windows or a Linux platform, offering animators the performance and cost advantages of open source computing.

IBM technology is an integral part of our capabilities when it comes to producing CG animation and digital effects for television commercials and feature lms. The IBM BladeCentre provides the core of our render farm, and the IBM Intellistation which runs our Flint were both essential in producing awardwinning recent projects such as the V Energy Drink campaign.
Dave Kelly, Executive Producer: Commercials + Broadcast, F U E L

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Render farm

A render farm is an industry term for what computer scientists might call a loosely coupled supercomputer. Render farm technology arose as a way to meet the needs of organizations attempting to produce compelling content in a reasonable amount of time. The basics are fairly simple to grasp. Special effects and animation are collections of individual pictures or frames. The process of turning a model into a fully lit 2D or 3D picture is called rendering, which is a highly compute-intensive task. Most workstations effectively render only a single frame at a time. Entire scenes can be rendered on the animators workstation, but the process is so intensive that the animator can do nothing else at the same time. If you have three computers, each rendering a different frame, you can render three frames in the time it takes your single workstation to render one. The more computers, or nodes, you have to render frames, the faster you can get your work done. There are two software components that allow clusters of computers to be harnessed, the render engine and the render manager. The render engine is a

Because only a single frame at a time can be rendered on an animators workstation, the business reason for a render farm is to ofoad a rendering to a system that is not being used by an animator.

Europes Oniria Pictures needed to re-engineer its digital content creation process to produce its second animated feature, Renart the Fox. The studio turned to IBM for a complete infrastructure of workstations, servers, storage and support from IBM Business Partners like DISCREET, a worldleading provider of 3D digital content creation, visual effects and animation software.

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software package that is closely coupled to the content creation application. A design goal of a render engine is that it can operate individually, or in parallel with other instances of itself. Typically in a cluster, one instance of a render engine will operate on each node in the render farm. It is the job of the render manager to dole out the work to each render node.
The typical world-class animation studio has a rendering server farm with as many as 1,000 nodes or more.

In building a render farm, clustering allows todays animation studio to harness the power of low-cost systems and advanced technology to handle the computer-intensive tasks of creating digitally rendered images. IBM ~ Cluster 1300 addresses the need of building Linux clusters for animation studios. It enables the studio to tap into the growing Linux skill base and application contributions of the open source community. Smaller animation studios may only need a single server and a few workstations in a render farm. The IBM ~ xSeries system is one of the most commonly used servers in the rendering applications of digital media producers. Many animation studios are also using blades for render servers and IBM BladeCenter for the render farm. With blade technology, you have a choice to either connect the blades directly to storage, or use external servers as storage servers. In general, if you have a moderate-sized to large render farm (100 nodes and up), the IBM BladeCenter is an excellent solution. The chief benets are density, performance, manageability, and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO). The TCO reductions come from the reduced infrastructure required to support CPUs compared to traditional rack-mount servers.
Vanguard Animation raises aesthetic bar The challenge

Blade server form factors scale very easily, and are much easier to manage than traditional desk-side or rack-mount systems in todays rendering farm.

Vanguard Animation, an independent studio launched by Shrek and Shrek 2 producer John Williams, needed to equip its animators with the right tools to produce another potential blockbuster, Valiant, but on half the budget of todays top animation features.
The solution

Vanguard turned to IBM to implement an IBM Digital Content Creation solution, and an IBM ~ system running Linux. IBM Business Partner ERA (European RAID Array) put together a network between Los Angeles and London, allowing animators in both locations to work on developing

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digital assets, creating sets, texturing for characters, environments, animation layouts, lighting and nal rendering processes.

Vanguard Animations Valiant was inspired by the fact that homing pigeons were used during World War II to get vital messages from occupied Europe back to Britain.

Key benets

Vanguard signicantly increased performance and production, enabled additional interactive rendering passes, and enhanced aesthetics by utilizing faster, more cost-effective technology. The machines in our server room right nowrun ve to six times faster on each processor without breaking a sweat. Were looking at approximately a 12 times performance increase, says Curtis Augspurger, Co-producer, Vanguard Animation. The greater the number of iterations that we can process, the better the look and end result. IBM has helped us to raise the aesthetic bar by bringing in faster, more cost effective technology.
Centralized storage

Rich content consumes massive amounts of storage. Centralizing storage offers many operational benets. For instance, when assets are stored centrally, they can easily be tracked, monitored and reused. This leads to improved production efciencies, which lead to shorter production times. Projects can be delivered in a more predictable timeframe. Historically, the industry has shied away from traditional centralized Storage Area Network (SAN) technology due to high capital and operational costs, with low perceived value over local direct-attached storage. However, newer

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SAN offerings and the introduction of low cost technologies such as high performance Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) are changing the buying behavior of the industry. Today IBM is a leader in the storage area. Through its TotalStorage SAN File System, part of the IBM Total Storage Open Software Family, IBM has designed a central storage system to support data sharing and storage management in an open environment. The SAN File System also provides a single namespace and policy-based storage rules. Combined with the iSCSI and NAS technologies, this robust SAN File System allows animators to accelerate the production process.
Centralized storage of animation data, or assets, is the natural and desired state of the animation industry.

One of the more advanced network le systems is an IBM le system that, although not specically designed for the media and entertainment industry, provides some highly valuable features. This le system is the General Parallel File System. GPFS, which has a long heritage in high-performance computing in the life sciences industry, is in use at most of the largest supercomputer sites in the world including a few animation studio sites. It is a well-proven, scalable le system. GPFS provides le data access from all nodes participating in the cluster by

IBM provides animators with a wide range of high performance clustered le systems, depending on specic needs.

providing a global name space for les. Applications can efciently access les using standard UNIX le system interfaces; GPFS supplies the data to any location in the cluster. All application compute nodes appear directly connected to all storage and any client can access information using the combined band width of all storage devices. GPFS allows all compute nodes to have coherent and concurrent access to all storage, which is very important in video production. In the case where your studio has existing workstations of multiple architectures (Apple, SGI, etc.) that you wish to connect using a highperformance le system, PolyServe, an IBM Business Partner, provides a exible alternative to GPFS. PolyServe Matrix Server for Linux is a clustering solution that integrates shared le system technology with high availability services and multi-path I/O functionality into a single cluster management framework.

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Todays studios are now facing the storage and management challenges brought on by the new four-kilobyte digital cameras. Not only are the storage requirements of this new format substantially greater than the old two-kilobyte format, but the performance of storage and its ability to simultaneously support, encode and play out will be critical to studio success. The IBM GPFS le system and the disc storage system are technologies designed to meet and exceed these challenges.
Animation studio boosts global image The challenge

Frances Attitude Studio, a leading player in European 3D graphics and animation, needed to compete with major industry animators in 3D animation and special effects.
The solution

Attitude Studio worked closely with IBM Business Partner ARES Software Inc. to implement an IBM Digital Content solution, IBM IntelliStation workstations, IBM ~ server systems, IBM TotalStorage FAStT700 and IBM General Parallel File System for Linux.
Key benets

The result was a high-performance environment for the creation, management, storage and retrieval of digital images. While producing a full-length animated feature in 3D places massive demands on a storage system, the IBM storage system allows multiple workstations to access

With the help of IBM Business Partner ARES, Attitude Studio has stepped into the international limelight with the forthcoming release of its rst full-length animated feature, entitled Renaissance.

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shared data seamlessly. It helps Attitude Studio to manage its complex workow and deliver world-class animated features on time and within budget. With IBM FAStT700 and GPFS for Linux, we now have a exible and scalable solution which meets our needs perfectly, says CEO Boris Hertzog, of Attitude Studio.
Network

Binding these components together is the network. However, the importance of the network is often underestimated. Video editing alone can easily consume all available network bandwidth. Still, while many companies understand that their operations require a 10-gigabit backbone, they balk at the upfront cost of the equipment. So they buy cheap network equipment at the beginning of a project, only to nd they have to rip and replace their entire network infrastructure once production of a project moves into full swing.
Putting IT all together

Now you have an idea about the various components required to begin building or further developing an animation studio. Next, you need to annotate your architecture, based on your specic needs. Which hardware? Operating system? Application? Storage architecture? File system? Access mechanism? Bandwidth? Once you have the details in mind, you are ready to move on to your last question: How many of each of these components will you need?
Sizing components for an animation studio

You have drawn your architectural diagram, annotated it with relevant information; so now you need to gure out how big your infrastructure should be. In this section, we will help answer that question by sizing each of the components.
How many workstations will an animation studio need?

Industry experts tell us that approximately 75 animators are required for the core production of a typical 50- to 90-scene feature lm, which is to be completed within six to nine months. A studio may use one animator per scene each scene being made up of an average of six smaller shots. Typically,

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Storage architecture/ File system/ Access mechanism

Hardware architecture/ Operating system/ Applications

Render Farm
Centralized Storage

Infrastructure, gateways, backups, Internet services, Asset management, Production Workflow automation, Production Dashboard

Content Creation Editing Workstation (Animators' Workstation)

Animators' Network

Hardware architecture/ Operating system/ Applications

Linkage to other production facilities

Scalable network backbone

Basic architecture for an animation studio

it takes a team of four animators to render a single shot; some complicated shots may take weeks to complete. Each of these artists will need at least one workstation; many prefer to work with two or more screens. As noted earlier, animation and video production are graphics-intensive applications, and the better the quality of the graphics workstation, the better quality that the artists can produce. Obviously, display and graphics performance and quality are all-important. Fortunately, IBM has very good relationships with both of the current industry-dominating players ATI and nVidia who provide IBM customers with best-of-breed graphics tools for their workstations.
How many nodes in the render farm?

The general goal of a render farm is to render an entire scene in the time it takes to render a single frame. Think of it this way: Usually the most granular thing you can do in this workload is to render a single frame that is, one computer can only render one frame at a time. This follows the general

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supercomputing goal of processing an entire work set in the time it takes to process a single symmetrical element in that work set. Once convinced that this is a worthy goal, sizing a render farm is simple math. For cinematic render farms, the rst thing you need to know is the average number of frames per scene. To determine this, rst average the number of shots per scene. In todays world, a typical scene is between three and nine shots, with each shot rarely lasting more than three seconds. Emotional scenes have fewer longer shots, action scenes have many more, and the scenes at the beginning and end of a lm are typically longer than the scenes in the middle and during the climax. Lets say a studio is doing a feature animation and their average is six shots per scene, with an average shot length of 1.5 seconds. It is an action movie using 28 frames per second (FPS). So the optimal starting size of the render farm for this feature is: 28 FPS x (1.5 seconds x 6 shots) or 252 nodes. Far more studios produce digital effects for commercials than movies. These studios are more concerned with high quality shots than scenes, so you can expect that their render farms would contain fewer nodes than those studios doing a full length feature lm.
How much storage will this animation studio need?

Most industry experts agree that a single feature lm requires at least four terabytes of data. Heres how they gured it: For a post green-lighted lm, a studio needs a storage infrastructure that will support rendering 90 minutes of high denition video, at two megabytes per frame (on average), 24 to 28 frames a second. The rendered images will take up just over three terabytes (302,400 megabytes assuming 28 FPS). Factor in one more terabyte for sound, script, image source, metadata, fragmentation, Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID) storage waste, client backup, and so forth. That adds up to four terabytes of data but it could be more if your administration team is less than aggressive in deleting models and data les as scenes are checked off.
How much storage bandwidth will this animation studio need?

For the render farm, you can meet your I/O requirement by following this formula: Each render node can consume around ve megabytes per second of

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Delivering a CG Film production line like Valient would not have been so fast and efcient ve years ago, and Maya played a pivotal role, added Chris Augspurger

storage bandwidth. This is easy to achieve with a single one-gigabit Ethernet adapter on each node. Take the number of nodes you need, multiply that by ve megabytes per second, and you have your storage I/O bandwidth requirement. For example, using the ve-megabyte/second/node rule of thumb, our 252-node render farm would need 1.2 terabytes per second storage bandwidth.
What size should the centralized storage system be?

There are two rules of thumb when sizing current disk systems: First, each disk can transfer about ve megabytes I/O per second. Second, each gigabit network interface card (NIC) can only provide 100 megabytes I/O per second. In general, you will nd that to achieve maximum speed in transferring information, more drives at a smaller drive size will give you better performance.
How many network switches?

Our best advice is to consult a network expert. If you look at the network requirements of animation stations with just a dozen or so render nodes, it does not seem like they would need much bandwidth, but it adds up quickly. Time and again, we see customers avoiding investing in adequate network infrastructure, only to regret it latter. Again, we cannot emphasize this too much: please involve a network specialist in your network switch decisions.

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IBM: One-stop for digital media

For special effects wizards and directors and producers alike, the power and magic of digital media technology is opening up fantastic new worlds to explore. In lm and commercials and interactive gaming, a new generation of animators has awed moviegoers and delighted TV viewers and gamers with breakthroughs in human creativity. As a technology innovator, IBM has been at the forefront of digital media. Backed by its global services resource and industry expertise, IBM provides one-stop shopping for a full range of digital media solutions and services. IBM can help you: Build a technical infrastructure from the ground up Implement a comprehensive range of technological solutions, including workstations, individual servers, rendering farm clusters, storage and software Ensure continuous performance of systems and networks Maximize efciency and value of your existing IT infrastructure Support and train your IT department and users. Years ago, IBM embraced Linux and the open source movement, which has become a major contributor to the cost effectiveness of todays animation technology. Linux means having incredible amounts of processing power to solve any problem. For studios involved in rendering complex scenes and inuenced by rising costs and tight schedules, the faster and less expensive Linux allows them to make more movies. IBM has the knowledge, experience and partnerships in the Linux world to support those objectives. Whatever your needs, IBM is uniquely capable of helping you transition to a next-generation digital content creation and editing solution. To learn more about IBM Digital Media solutions for creative professionals, contact your IBM sales representative or visit:
ibm.com/solutions/digitalmedia ibm.com/solutions/games

As todays studios transition from proprietary to an open source system, IBM is bringing the commercial applications of Linux to the forefront of the digital content creation marketplace.

IBM runs an extensive Web site directory of applications that are popular with todays content creators.

 Copyright IBM Corporation 2005 IBM Corporation 1133 Westchester Avenue White Plains, NY 10604 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America 06-05 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo, BladeCenter, IntelliStation, the On Demand Business logo and TotalStorage are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. Intel and Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT and the Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. UNIX is a registered trademark in the U.S. and other countries licensed exclusively through The Open Group. References in this publication to IBM products or services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. This paper discusses strategy and plans which are subject to change because of IBM business and technical judgments. All statements regarding IBMs future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represents goals and objectives only. All information in this publication is subject to change without notice. All information is provided on an AS IS basis, without warranty of any kind.

Blades, Camera, Action! ComputerWorld, October 4, 2004. Blades, Camera, Action! ComputerWorld, October 4, 2004. Linux in Hollywood: A Star Is Born, Computer, February 2002. Towering Achievement: WETA Digital and Intel Architecture Create Effects for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Intel Business Center Case Study Digital Media/High Performance Computing. Blades, Camera, Action! ComputerWorld, October 4, 2004. The Power of the Incredible Hulkthe ILM Linux Death Star, Linux Journal, July 31, 2003.