[eltopo]

Use Apple products, they are by far better than anything else under 100K.
They are cheap and particulary DVD Studio pro lets you make professional DVD’s including Dolby Digital, DTS, MPEG2 compression.

[eltopo]

You can work with Maya, Softimage and a lot of other less known software. The Lord of the Rings was made on Linux. The performance is similar since it uses the same hardware as wintel machines (x.86 Processors and ATI and nvidia cards), But is more stable. You can use 64bit processors with Linux, but the majority of software is only available for 32bit (Athlon, Xeon, P4, etc.)

[eltopo]

Nothing can beat the Apple products and it’s price. The best DVD authoring system for a reasonale price is DVD Studio Pro. FCP lets you edit HD in realtime (using a G5 and a AJA HD card).

I suggest to complement it with either After Effects Pro or Shake and Maya unlimited for 3d.
I think you can get each package with a student discount.

[eltopo]

I guess you could justify the Inferno in extremely big projects when a bigger number of processors can be implemented.

Discreet now sells the Inferno for Online work, while flame for standard composition.

[eltopo]

foetz wrote:

yes, kuban seems to have a long-year experience and he’s right.

but there’s still the modular factor that nobody noticed.
take an onyx with let’s say 2x4cpu modules and you have double the bandwidth each ram and each cpu. scalability is one of the most important features of the big irons.

The thing is that as far as I know, Discreet uses the small Onyx, with the IR add on so the expansion is limited compared to the big one. Discreet recognises that the max that a system can have is 8 processors, after that they don’t make a difference (excluding rendering)

[eltopo]

Quote:

in general there’s no onyx3. there’re only onyx3000, 3200 etc.
they are available with 2 graphics: InfiniteReality and InfinitePerformance.
ip is v12 so this could be compared with tezro but ir is the big fish.
please read something about ir.

also due to the totally modular concept you can easily double, triple etc. the bandwidth. can use
multiple gfx pipes, more xio, more ram…
and with every so called brick the bandwidth raises.
e.g. there’s a super-brick with up to 16cpus and 32gb ram.

however, the o3k series are absolutely not comparable to any kind of workstation.

http://www.sgi.com/workstations/tezro/

I made the mistake of using the Onyx 3 name when in fact it was changed to Onyx 3000. The Tzero is a Onyx3K with the Infinite reality subsystem. Discreet made Inferno to run these, however they changed to a Origin350 with the Infinite reality add-on (a brick) since they don’t support the Onyx4 (different architecture – it uses a ATI Fire GL1 graphic subsystem). So it is quite possible that a new Tzero is faster than an old Onyx3K since it have faster processors and the same high bandwidth and graphics subsystem

[eltopo]

A tzero is an Onyx3. Same hardware, same graphics subsystem+some inprovements. The Tzero is a Onyx3 made for the desktop (or rack), so it is perfectly possible that it beats an Onyx 3. If Inferno ran on a Onyx 3900 or a Onyx 4 then it would be faster.

[eltopo]

Maybe there wont be an Inferno 6. Or it just might surprise us and be released on an Altix 350 (running Linux). I guess it depends on what Discreet plans to do about Toxik ❗

[eltopo]

I think they (SGI) even support more colours, though I am not sure

[eltopo]

vancover film school

academy of art university – san francisco

savannah college of art and design

Google for their website

[eltopo]

I have seen some footage of something like that done on Renderman. I think that you need to use a 3d program to do that. The other thing that I can think of is shoot some smoke and some fluids with a camera and then comopose them if you don’t have the 3d app.

[eltopo]

Pixar is switching to a Macintosh Pipeline, and even though it is kind of a cheat, it shows what the macs are becoming.

But going to the Apple point. Yes it’s true that analyst rarely know what they are talking about. However if we take a look at Apple during the late 1990’s strategy of overpricing ‘old technology’ and how it almost broke the company we can see a close reminiscence with Discreet’s current strategy.
Is Toxik becoming Copland?

So Apple had Steve Jobs to save it, but does Discreet has its own saviour?
how many visionaries of that calibre are in the industry right now?

[eltopo]

Even though sometimes it doesn’t seem so, I really like o work on the inferno. It took a while to get used to, but I really like it.

My concern is about getting Discreet to survive. And my point was that they have thougher compettion now, which they do. Apple is a very competent company. And my questions are about pressing Discreet to come up with a strategy different from that of SGI (we all know what happened…) of selling overexpensive out of date products… which is my concern with Toxik

And I think is healthy that concers about it’s business strategy are made public, specially among its customers, because I believe that if you switch to shake (or other) is because you want to, not because you have to

[eltopo]

be a Jedi Master is Photoshop and voila ❗

[eltopo]

I think Shake’s position should be re-evaluated as well. If we thought Autodesk was big, Apple is bigger, richer and more talented. Shake is no longer is the product of a tiny company. It has a tremendous backup in hardware (the hole Apple line-up of g5’s and servers), software (integration with FCP, Quicktime and all the software available for the mac) and tons of money in R&D. Plus we have to take into account that Apple is set to dominate this market and it is doing a very good job.

So now Discreet has a rival that pound for pound is bigger and can actually put the company against the ropes; Shake is just $3000 with render licences for free and being able to run on laptops, workstations and servers, and if indeed rumours are true and professional video cards are just days away plus a new os and an even bigger g5’s for less than 10K you could well have an Inferno killer.

So if Discreet takes longer and longer and it doesn’t make a difference now with a product miles away from everything else, Toxik may well be it’s last product, being too little too late.
And if indeed this happens, Autodesk may as well take the same road as SGI. Move out of the media market and focus of it’s core market (autocad, etc.), maybe keeping 3DS Max, selling Combustion to someone like Adobe and sell as junk the big Discreet operation to god knows who, who obviously will have no way but to transform the products into just another window programme.

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