[-k]

Quote:

like always, it’s just a money issue.
working with an sgi compared to apple or even wintel is another world. mass market stuff will never reach proprietary stuff. not only true for sgi.
quite logical.
for some stuff it maybe enough but never the same icon_wink.gif

Hmm…. apple /wintel does not necessarily mean “mass market” (i.e. flint on linux). Besides, even if so…loot at what (not only) the development of the 3d game cards meant to professional 3D and especially 3D on SGI… Apart from some speciall cases it’s (almost) dead.
Of course the latest Onyx4 with all the possible extensions, etc. performs better than “standard” mass market hardware. However the price of such a system (in most cases) cannot really be justified anymore considering the relatively moderate performance gains.

http://www.zoorender.com/html/benchmark_mental.htm

You would’nt buy the Earth Simulator to render Shrek3…

Anyway, I think we will see Discreet dropping IRIX/MIPS sooner or later (probably sooner). I mean, even SGI slowly moves to Linux/Itanium…
So it’s good to see discreet is ready cause I still love working on our inferno or flame (although I can’t live without burn anymore)

-k

[-k]

I found this mail on the discreet webboard. Somebody actually did a test:

>>>
column 1: smoke 6 on IBM Intellistation, 2 x 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon, 2GB
RAM, NVidia Quadro 2000) – LINUX
column 2: smoke 6 on Octane2, 2 x R12000 400MHz, 2.5 GB RAM, V12 – IRIX

clip length 10 sec:

Soft CW
Simple 5.9 sec 6.4 sec
Selective+Anim 10.9 sec 33 sec

Master Keyer
Simple 35.4 sec 50.8 sec
Degrain 1 min 11 sec 1 min 59 sec

DVE
Simple anim 5 layers SD 2 min 6 sec 2 min 34 sec
>>>

looks like it’s again all the cpu intensive stuff which runs great on linux.

-k

[-k]

…but does Inferno actually make use of more than 4 CPUs? I heard different opinions on this one.
I think the offical discreet statement is no. Not sure though.

anyway. I’d rather put my money into a tezro plus burn renderfarm…

-k

[-k]

“burn” !!!

-k

ps.:
with 12Bit HD and CPU intensive stuff (keys,blurs, edgeDetect, Masks, CCs, etc) I was ten times faster (8x 2.8 Xeons) with burn than an Octane2

[-k]

Check the HD guide here on FXguide. Will give some information.
As for the HD Bit depth, you should not forget that there are only few ways to capture >8 Bit HD Video.
Sonys HDs only to 8 Bit (at least that’s what you get on the tape) with quite some compression (in case of HDCAM).
I just shot something with Thomsons Viper which does uncompressed 10Bit RGB. But then it’s not a camcorder and you have to record somewhere (to harddiscs in my case) which ist not very convenient for many shootings.
So, although todays video-cards are able to capture 10 or 12 Bit only few cameras can (or at least store it to tape).

-k[/quote]

[-k]

Quote:

the tangents in the gmask adjusts the strength of the curve at that point. the tangents in the animation channel cannot affect this.

the ability to resize the tangents would be for the sole purpose of gui readability

Not true. You can do this in almost any other application such as Combustion(!), Maya, etc. It gives you more influence on exactly how the inter-/extrapolation between the keyframes should be.
For exampe if I want to have a real slow outgoing value, in the named apps I can just drag the tangent flat and more to the right. In FFI I have to set several more keyframes, and fiddle around a lot.

-k

[-k]

Quote:

Hello. When i import in Flame, i use to work with the background import option but, i do not why, the last week i can,t import in background because i choose a destination library and i don,t find the import material in my libraries. It dissapear.

I have similar problems quite often. It then just aborts the importing job without giving any info why it did…
If I imported it manually (not with the qeue (sp)?!) then it worked. I think it has something to do with naming conventions. Not sure though.

-k

[-k]

Quote:

I am trying to inport maya iff files with a Z-depth channel into Inferno version 4.1. The problem is, my only option to inport is RGB and RGB+Matte there is no setting to select RGB+Z.

I am working on a 24p HD project and I have tried to strip the Z-depth from the file thru photoshop but the problem with that is the Z depth channel gets crunched down to 8 bits.

What do you mean with “strip”? I’m not an expert but afaik Maya renders 8Bit only anyway… You should be able to render the zdepth channel seperately but be warned: Maya’s ZDepthrendering is crap. It’s not even antialised…

-k

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