How HP Made Animation Faster And Easier For DreamWorks
Submitted by Michael Novinson on
DreamWorks Animation's technology was the laughingstock of the film production world when Jeff Wike started working there as a programmer in the late 1990s.
At the time, the Glendale, Calif.-based animation system was using hardware and software from SGI and operating on the antiquated IRIX system, which was so slow that the artists found it easier to work on their home computers than on the DreamWorks devices, according to Wike, who's now DreamWorks' head of technology for film and TV production.
To keep up with the rest of the fast-moving industry, Wike and his colleagues set about looking for a new IT vendor and operating system that performed better, yet were compatible with DreamWorks' existing tools.
"Technology is the governor of what kind of stories you can tell," Wike said Friday during Synnex's Inspire National Conference in Greenville, S.C.
Most prospective vendors showed up at DreamWorks with an army of salespeople and lawyers, according to Wike. But not HP.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor brought the actual engineers who wrote the pertinent software, Wike said, and allowed DreamWorks to test the software on Nvidia drivers. And on the operating system end, Wike said DreamWorks teamed up with Red Hat and adopted the open-source Linux platform, which was compatible with the tools written for Irix.
Some 15 years later, Wike said DreamWorks is using HP in just about every area of its business, ranging from networking and storage to managed print and workstations.
DreamWorks replaces roughly a quarter of its servers and workstations every year, Wike said, running lab tests on the latter to determine which are the worst-performing.
DreamWorks enjoyed a 43 percent improvement in speed and animation capabilities when it upgraded from HP's Z820 to Z840 workstation, meaning Wike and his team could go from loading and animating eight characters at a time to 12.
DreamWorks uses its HP Workstations for the computer-generated animation process, which entails designing every single character and setting detail appearing in every shot.
