The IT effect in animation and special effects

All of us have been kept on the edge of our seats time and again by the special effects and animation that we see in movies. However, the entire IT gamut behind these goes almost unnoticed. Let us take a detailed look at how this sector is being shaped by IT and vice versa. By Jasmine Desai

What do Robot, RA.One and Avatar have in common? Apart from being blockbusters there is something that ties these movies together—the animation and special effects. Although not much attention is paid to IT usage in this sector, it is in fact the most integral part that leads to its overall success.

Animation and special effects is a data intensive business. Apart from that, there is always a need for computational power. This demand has always been increasing due to the technological advances in software and demand in creating photorealistic visual effects. This calls for high performance CPUs especially for this industry. According to T Bharanidharan, Head – R&D, Red Chillies VFX, “The storage and high performance CPU requirement are taken care of by various vendors. The next big leap would be to start using GPUs like Nvidia’s Tesla. Porting or building applications for GPUs will be the next major challenge.”

With movies moving to 4K resolution, infrastructure requirements have grown exponentially. Added to this, movies like Avatar are challenging directors to create ever more complex visual effects to keep viewers in a sustained state of awe. According to Indivar Nair, Founder & CTO, Techterrain Consulting Pvt. Ltd., “4K resolution and more takes (due to complexity) work out to more data computed, stored and transferred.”

Also, the Indian market is characterized by two sets of studios. There are smaller studios started by artists and there are a few big studios. Their work is creative and characterized by a particular workflow. Every studio and the way that it produces its deliverables is in a different format. Due to 4k resolution, their storage demand in terms of capacity is growing tremendously.  

According to Sunil Brid, Area Sales Director (Isilon Division) – India & SAARC, EMC, “The project gets worked on and has to go to the end customer and, till he is satisfied, certain data will stay on the SAS drive and then other data will move onto SATA and finally get archived. SSD is just making inroads for applications like rendering that are characterized by a HPC environment.” Presently, this particular industry faces financial constraints and is disorganized to boot. Therefore, there are only a few companies that have processes and policies in place.

Not only does a studio require a great deal of storage capacity; it also needs high speed I/O to transfer these images to and from artists’ workstations and render farms. Nair of Techterrain commented, “Storage I/O has doubled from 3 Gbps SAS and 4 Gbps FC to 6 Gbps and 8 Gbps respectively. Core network transfer speeds have moved from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps. Quad Rate Infiniband at 40 Gbps, is also considered for render farm switching needs. For this reason, high speed parallel filesystems like Lustre, Isilon, Panasas etc. are much more popular than SAN storage in this industry.”

Storing such large visuals in a workstation’s memory during processing requires lots of RAM. 48 GB of RAM on a compositor’s workstation is not unheard of.

Bharanidharan of Red Chillies VFX said, “Cloud computing is being used by some studios for their projects instead of procuring all of the hardware that’s required. Some use all of their existing hardware resources as a private Cloud and use it on demand when it is freely available and not in use by anybody else at that particular studio.”

The animation sector is a space where Big Data solutions are destined to play a pivotal role. According to Surajit Sen, Director, Channels Marketing & Alliances, NetApp India, “Computing all of this data, requires a huge amount of processing power. Not only does one need a bigger render farm, each compute node in the farm also needs more CPUs and cores with the highest possible clock frequency.”

All in all, the industry is moving towards a very high orbit, both creatively and technically.

Cloud computing in Animation/SFX

According to Bharanidharan of Red Chillies VFX, “Cloud computing is still at a nascent stage in India. The open mindedness to harness the resources available either in the form of hardware or infrastructure (PaaS or IaaS) or software (SaaS) will take some more time.”

According to Nair of TechTerrain, “In this sector, Cloud computing is mostly used for project management. There are vendors who provide VFX and animation movie management tools in a SaaS model. Cloud-based project management, works well, especially for Hollywood outsourced work, as both parties can monitor the work easily and simultaneously. Client reviews and approvals happen much faster in this model.”

However, other areas like rendering, where Cloud computing could be used, haven’t caught up that well. There aren’t many stories of studios successfully using a remote render farm or even an IaaS Compute Cluster for rendering. This may be mainly because, to begin with, studios working on Hollywood projects are not supposed to outsource any kind of work, including rendering and, secondly, due to the inherent fear of the Intellectual Property (IP) being leaked.

Growing competition

The Indian animation/effects market faces numerous challenges including growing competition from other countries in the region. According to Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director – South Asia, NVIDIA, “There’s growing competition from Asian markets like Singapore and Malaysia since they also offer cost arbitrage in terms of subsidies to animation companies. In India, this industry has partnered with the government to benefit from similar incentives. However, an inclusive and a structured policy has not been announced as of yet.” Not only is there competition, but there’s also a lack of capital, which is posing a huge threat to the industry. Capital is a key challenge for most animation companies as well as studios in India. It is more expensive to create a high quality animation film than to produce a live action movie. Such challenges call for a solution within the ecosystem itself.”

By deploying augmented technology, professionals can deliver better graphical performance in the content created  while creating it more accurately in lesser time. Dhupar added, “Indian players can then create a local market and drive the domestic consumption of animated films.”

According to Nair of Techterrain, “IT usage is relatively low in this industry. Even though this is a compute intensive industry with all sorts cutting edge technology being used, a computerized information flow is relatively absent.” Almost all Indian studios rely heavily on spreadsheets to manage projects. Though this is changing, gradually, studios are not that keen on overhauling this aspect and the pace of change is extremely slow. One of the primary reasons for this is that each studio has its own style of working and almost all project management tools that are available were originally made for a particular studio and being sold as ready-made solutions.

Also, since project or information management tools are not on the priority list of a studio, most studios are not keen on developing an in-house tool either. Spreadsheets are cheap and most project managers are happy working with these, so no one seems to realize what is missing. It’s not just about project management, many studios lack proper communication and collaboration tools too. Things like knowledge base systems are alien to Indian studios.

Even from the vendor perspective, most vendors have wares developed for the general market, which may not be suited for this industry. A better understanding of this industry’s requirements and products developed specifically for this industry are what is needed. Vendors need dedicated people, with deep understanding of the industry’s requirements at all levels, right from the salesperson to the CTO. In spite of these challenges, one can see a silver lining as this industry is maturing and set to grow.

jasmine.desai@expressindia.com