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I would check out linux rather than SGI at this point.
The reason no one will tell you how much a flame costs is that everyone gets different deals and folks are afraid to damage their good graces with autodesk. Just call up their sales department…someone there will be happy to take your call, I’m sure. There would likely be a hardware cost in upgrading from octane to linux, and if you are not on 9.5 you would likely have to pay for a software upgrade as well.
Peder Nordby is a mad, mad genius. If you need to do any particle work in AE, his Particular plugin is nothing short of amazing. You don’t get all the control you’d get in Maya or Houdini, but they’re pretty flexible, look great, and render really fast!
i don’t understand why people even give OS a consideration for something like this. it’s a $250000 color grading app, not photoshop. who cares whether it has exposé? it’s only gonna run lustre!
rush is indeed platform independent. you can use it to send jobs to any machine that can run it. it’s just a question of how you spend your money… you could buy 6 render machines and put a menagerie of different OS’es on them, but i’d rather have all 6 machines available to all the artists at once. there will be times when the ae guys are busy and the 3d guys are slow (and vice versa.) with one OS on the render machines, they can be rendering as much as possible instead of just sitting there b/c they’re running linux and you’re in the middle of a big AE job (which doesn’t run on linux!)
it’s not rush you have to watch out for. it’s not being able to render an AE project that the mac designer used a mac postscript font on because your farm is on windows. or because you have the PC version of magic bullet but no version of it on your all-mac farm. is this making any sense?
we have a windows-based setup using rush with maya and AE that’s absolutely amazing! whichever OS you decide to put on your blades, i would also strongly reccommend getting some sort of central server (with a nice, fast RAID on it) and forcing everyone to work off of that. you lose a bit of interactive speed when scrubbing clips etc, but then the workstations and render nodes are all looking at the same stuff on the same paths, so you don’t have to muck about with “collecting footage” etc. we have completely abandoned our flames as design tools because the AE + farm setup is so. much. better.
you will save yourself a lot of hassle, and get a lot more horsepower out of your money if you switch everybody over to one platform. you could almost get away with building a windows renderfarm and having everyone render on that, but i suspect you’re going to run into all sorts of fun problems with the mac AE boxen using mac fonts/plugins/etc that the windows render nodes can’t understand. so either get the 3d guys to both switch to maya on the mac, or make the AE guys move to pc. your administration will be easier, and you’ll save a lot of money on extraneous software. FWIW, it takes waaaaay longer to realearn an application (esp a 3d app – Maya has 8 manuals!) than it does an OS, so I’d make the mac guys switch, but I have a well-known long-standing bias against prima donna you-can-pry-my-mac-from-my-cold-dead-fingers asshole artists. 😀
so to sum up:
-get a central server with >= 1TB of RAID storage and some good GigE networking equipment
-pick one OS and support that on the farm, either with mac or windows rackmountsgood luck! watching my renders get cranked by a renderfarm for the first time was one of the happiest moments of my career, and now i can’t imagine life without it!
they might be using fancier video hardware on the 2k suite, but the more honest answer is “marketing.”
I’m not sure if it’s possible to use the FLEX files in flame. You need an EDL referencing the correct timecode to autoassemble everything, otherwise you will have to eye-match.
Things to watch out for while assembling:
1. Timewarps! The new avids have a timewarper like flame’s. They can animate speed changes, and these do not come across in an EDL. Get the editor to write down the values for the timewarp keyframes, and be prepared to spend some time massaging things to get them looking right. The guys at Avid have been complete bastards about handling this. The ramped timewarp data is written into a “dark” layer of their .OMFs (and probably encrypted), so only their products can read their timewarp data. The new AAF bandwagon that everyone’s jumping on will have the same problem. Meet the new boss – same as the old boss! I’ve heard Smoke can read ramped timewarps from FCP via XML, though.
2. More timewarps! If you have a shot that’s timewarped in just one portion (will be 2 clips in the timeline), be sure to check the in and out of the timewarped portion to make sure there are no duplicate frames. We get this a lot.
3. 3:2 Pulldown! If you’re in NTSC land, you will have to remove pulldown before you do anything to your footage. This can get tricky if there are both repos and timewarps.
4. If you have multiple EDLs to assemble, make sure you’ve got “same library reel” enabled when loading them in, and “multiple EDLs” turned on while you’re capturing.
This happens all the time where I work. They will “pull neg,” and send the multiple reels of film to a negative cutter who reassembles the selects they want into a single reel, which saves time switching reels in telecine. Usually the neg cutter provides a new EDL, which they generate from the flex file. Often times they have custom-written software to do this for them. After the new digibeta transfer reel is created, the offline assistant will “overcut” the transferred footage on top of the dailies footage in the avid and generate a proper EDL for us to use in finish. It’s a strange process, and very often involves eye-matching. 🙁 Good luck!
hahaha…we all work in post! you’ve gotta do better than that if you’re gonna post anonymous trolls. at least say he works at discreet or apple!
^– that’s me, btw. didn’t realize i wasn’t logged in!
you’re on smoke or fire, right? you can remove 3:2 on capture, but i think you have to have a consistent 3:2 cadence on the tape in order for it to work. look around in the engineering section of input clip, and check out the EDL conversion tools in input clip.
good luck!
i think the box is maxxed-out, performance wise. you might be able to exchange it for one of the newer linux flints, though. if i were you, i’d call discreet sales and see if there’s any trade-in value left in the old girl. good luck!
i’d just like to jump in and say that from my experience, .SGI sequences import and export the fastest. they’re WAY faster than .TGA, .TIF, and .IFF. your mileage may vary, but that’s what i’ve seen!
Timor wrote:keep in mind that you need a monitor with SDI input capabilities if you want to use the deckling solution. (the also have models with analog output though).
timorYou can also get SDI->RGB converters for about $300 if you want to use the decklink with a broadcast monitor that doesn’t have SDI-in. We’re doing that where I work with great results.
zigfil wrote:also, a friend of mine is gonna sell me the O2 at $1,200 USD… is that ok???The SG O2 has:
The Flat panel monitor of 18″ or so… the one of Silicon’s..
Procesor R10 000 with 250 MHz… it has 750 MB of RAM…
Do you think i should buy it for that price??Wow, you can get a faster machine than that off of ebay for $99 USD. Look here: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=11223&item=5768464674&rd=1
It doesn’t include a monitor, but still. It’s $99. Even if the O2 has software on it, you’ll have to pay full price if you want to upgrade it, as the licenses generally aren’t transferrable between owners. I really, really wouldn’t go anywhere near that O2. SGIs are dead, dead, dead for 3d animation! I’m pretty comfortable with PCs, though, so I’m kinda biased. If you can get around on Windows, you could get a pretty decent Dell for the same $1200. It wouldn’t have dual processors or a super-fancy workstation gfx card, but it would still be WAY faster than the O2. Good luck with your decision!