Optimum Machine for Shaking

[Anonymous]

Employer suggested purchasing an inferno suite. As you can see he’s got a very large budget. However, he’s also looking into possibly going with a shake platform. If he went with Shake he would definitely be wanting the absolute best machine to run it off. Would that be a SGI workstation? Or would a linux outperform it? Again, big budget so he wants the best machine he can find.

Thanks in advance!

[Anonymous]

The options for hardware is similar in Linux or MAC (two processors dual Core, lots of RAM and a Quadro video card, the best hardware). More the Shake for Mac has the advantage of plantaform, apple support qucktime, audio, node free to render, interaction with others softwares (Final Cut, Motion, etc) Xserver. More in the Linux you have a bigger flexibility for the hardware choice,more it has a bigger cost of licensing (Shake and nodes for render)

[eltopo]

like Vymer said the configuration between Linux and Mac would be the same.
If you go Mac you can have more with your money for the Inferno budget.
Get an Xserve-XRaid Render farm (the licenses are free) plus better integration with other apps in the same machine (Photoshop + all Apple products)

So i guess is a question on wether you would use Motion, PSD, FCP, Maya (superb integration with Shake) or if you prefer/need Linux because you use XSI or something not available for Mac.

[Anonymous]

Great, that really answers a lot of questions.
Sounds like a mac workstation would do the trick since we’d probably be working very closely with Maya. Definitely going to look into an xserve render farm.

Thanks again!

[Deke]

What are you using this compositing machine for? Film? Video? HD? Client Supervised Session?

If your doing a lot of client session work, especially if your capturing and laying off to tape, jobs that are fire drills where they need stuff yesterday. Then go with a flame/inferno.

If your doing back room compositing, longer term jobs, no client standing at your shoulder. Lots of 3d integration or even full cgi, matchmoving. More of a pipeline where your going to write scripts to automate stuff. Go with Shake.

[-k]

eltopo wrote:

So i guess is a question on wether you would use Motion, PSD, FCP, Maya (superb integration with Shake) or if you prefer/need Linux because you use XSI or something not available for Mac.

Mayas performance on Macs is terrible. A bad joke. Even the new quadro boards did not change this. They are just more expensive than the geforces.
Apple #*$% the drivers.
Maya runs on linux too. I don’t see why the integration between maya/shake should work better on macs.
I’m not working enough with shake to judge myself but apparently the performance was better on linux than on osx (don’t know if still true for 4.0)

Price of shake on mac, better quicktime integreation and a few small things (no support for broadcast monitors on linux) are the plus for the macs.

-k

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