Hot on the heels of announcing its re-entry into the visualization arena, SGI has cut two press releases related to visualization and digital media. The first outlines SGI’s continued relationship with the National Basketball Association [NBA for those that don’t watch sports].
The NBA and SGI have announced a multi-year extension of their relationship to expand the league’s work-flow and digital media management system, the NBA Digital Media Management System. The system, first announced during the 2006-2007 season, enabled the NBA to simultaneously ingest and archive footage from up to fourteen games, edit the archival content on the fly, provide full game broadcasts, clips and other NBA content to 214 countries worldwide. The extended relationship will enable the league to accelerate and double the historical digital archiving effort by ingesting 60,000 hours of video content each year. Ultimately, the NBA will digitize the entire history of the league archive.
The second post outlines details of how Vanguard Animation utilized SGI gear for the upcoming animated film, Space Chimps. Vanguard used the newly purchased SGI render management solution for their “really big shots” requiring increased amounts of memory and throughput. All in all, they chewed through approximately 3 terabytes of rendering per night.
Artists were able to use our custom-written lighting tool to pull together scenes and shots, add lights with the art director over their shoulder, and then position them so the key lights and the reflections off of the eyes were all well-placed, and in a very expedient fashion,” said co- producer Curtis Augspurger. “We then put it on the farm through PipelineFX Qube! where it would render on the SGI boxes in a significantly faster speed. For five months we were running at 95 to 98 percent capacity and were able to get through about 10,000 frames or 10,000 frame elements per evening. That is very high throughput.”