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- Path: sparky!uunet!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!news.claremont.edu!nntp-server.caltech.edu!andrey
- From: andrey@cco.caltech.edu (Andre T. Yew)
- Newsgroups: rec.video.production
- Subject: Re: Vivid-24 and SGI
- Date: 29 Dec 1992 17:22:47 GMT
- Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
- Lines: 62
- Message-ID: <1hq1h7INNbv7@gap.caltech.edu>
- References: <1992Dec29.034858.9390@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> <gregpen.725621307@crash.cts.com>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: punisher.caltech.edu
-
- gregpen@crash.cts.com (Greg Penetrante) writes:
-
- >In <1992Dec29.034858.9390@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> nwickham@nyx.cs.du.edu (Neal Wickham) writes:
-
- >>...for $200,000 you could probably buy 50 or so Amigas with Vivid boards!
-
- > ... But the SGI would still be BETTER!
-
- It'll seem like I'm going to do an about-face here, but I'm
- not! :)
-
- First off, you don't buy a Reality Engine or VGXT SGI system
- to do video production, unless you're into producing HDTV stuff.
- For example, a company a friend is working for bought a Crimson
- Reality Engine primarily as an output device (this company
- does HDTV stuff). The rest of their stuff are low-end SGIs
- and a lot of Symbolics machines. Yet another company in this
- town uses a bunch of Macs and one IBM RS/6000 to do a pretty
- nice animation in a very tight deadline.
-
- Of course, a lot of you have probably seen Babylon 5 clips,
- which were done using 8 Amigas and customized Lightwave
- software (the 3D package that comes with a Video Toaster).
- Somebody else, who might be reading this (Chris?), does
- commercials with a 486 and a Renderman-compliant package.
- James Blinn did a lot of the JPL Voyager videos first on
- PDP-11's then on DOS machines in Fortran. He did the DNA
- sequence in Carl Sagan's Cosmos on a PDP-11. About the
- three best things having an SGI over say an Amiga are:
-
- 1). Speed. But unless you have a lot of fast systems, this
- tends to balance out if you have multiple Amigas.
-
- 2). Realtime graphics. This is really nice for modelling and
- animating. This is probably about the best reason to get an
- SGI for production.
-
- 3). Very advanced modeling, animating, and rendering software.
- I wish Amiga writers of 3D packages would just sit down sometime
- with say TDI software and copy it. So much of it could be
- implemented on a PC-level computer with very little difficulty.
- After you use TDI, for example, and when it doesn't crash (does
- it crash often), and you go back to something like Imagine or
- Lightwave, or Real3D, they all seem so primitive and limited.
-
- I think my point is that a lot of it depends on the
- animator. SGIs do make it more comfortable, sometimes
- (when you aren't dealing with %^#$% beta software that's
- been passed on as production software), but if your
- animators have talent and persevere, they'll do just as
- well.
-
- Also, unless you're talking about us, I'd like to see you
- name some group that dumps minutes of video to tape weekly.
- Not that an SGI will alleviate this any (our bottleneck in
- dumping to tape is our Personal IRIS loading each frame up
- fast enough).
-
- --Andre
-
- --
- Andre Yew andrey@cco.caltech.edu (131.215.139.2)
-