Story, Wednesday September 21, 2016

[The Old Hack 2,448]

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Surprisingly, now, when digital effects are much cheaper than they used to be, the quality of shows didn't really got up. Apparently, money are not the ONLY problem.

 

Digital effects are cheap. Good digital effects are still expensive. There is a great deal of difference between the kind of CGI that looks like animated plastic and the kind where they've worked in colour variations, correct light and shadow effects and so forth. T-1000 in Terminator 2 was an example of the latter; Gollum in LotR was a masterpiece. The dinosaurs in the later Jurassic Park movies... maybe not so much. In fact, some of them looked like moving plastic figures.

All that meaning that it still costs time, effort and money to produce a really good product. But if you can make do with cheap trashy effects, you're good to go... at nearly the same horrible low quality level of old. (Mind you, plus points to Ed Wood for having poor Bela Lugosi smack himself with rubber tentacles wrapped around him because the machine that was supposed to move them had broken down!)

[hkmaly 490]

15 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

All that meaning that it still costs time, effort and money to produce a really good product.

Based on some fan movies I saw, I think the digital effect don't need much money now. Of course, they still require time and effort, and outside fan community, those translate to money as well.

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Based on some fan movies I saw, I think the digital effect don't need much money now. Of course, they still require time and effort, and outside fan community, those translate to money as well.

I just read a fascinating article about when the people making Toy Story 2 lost about 90% of their work due to an erroneous computer command.  It mentioned that all of their files for the entire movie were about 10GB.  You can fit that on the cheapest USB flash drive these days!  Everyone put in massive overtime to try to save the film, speaking of doing it for the sake of the characters they'd come to love.  Not only that, but after they'd found a way to recover their work, and finished the movie, the powers that be watched it....and decided that it wasn't good enough, and they had to rewrite the script and basically do the entire movie over again, in about nine months.

I have to think that if a professional company can do that entire movie in nine months, a group of (semi-obsessive?) dedicated fans could put together some pretty darn good effects for a fanvid within a reasonable time.  And if all the files for making the entire theatrical movie were only 10 gigs, then that's well within the size system that fans could afford.  Processing power is certainly a separate issue, but given how long ago that movie was made, I suspect modern desktops could match them, if not greatly exceed them,

Ah, if only we'd had actual special effects when I played Peri in Illinois Smith and the TARDIS Of Doom!

[ijuin 572]

Nine months for the Pixar crew is still several dozen person-years, so an endeavor of that scale is still going to need a crew size comparable to a regular studio.

[Matoyak 51]

2 minutes ago, ijuin said:

Nine months for the Pixar crew is still several dozen person-years, so an endeavor of that scale is still going to need a crew size comparable to a regular studio.

And since fans are going to have jobs themselves, in addition to families and lives outside of the work, they won't be able to put in overtime hours the way Pixar was able to. 9 months of people working overtime as a part of their daily job are going to be able to produce a generally higher quality of work and definitely a much larger body of work than even an equivalently sized group of fans that can only get between a few hours to a few dozen hours of work done per week due to other obligations.

Additionally it's not really all that fair a comparison as PIxar was able to recover around 70% of the stuff they lost due to one of the Leads at the studio having been working from home. She had taken a computer home with her that hadn't been connected to the main server, so when the erroneous backup command had hit, it was spared the wiping. The story of how they drove from her house to the Pixar offices at like 15 miles an hour was quite harrowing.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

1 hour ago, Matoyak said:

She had taken a computer home with her that hadn't been connected to the main server, so when the erroneous backup command had hit, it was spared the wiping. The story of how they drove from her house to the Pixar offices at like 15 miles an hour was quite harrowing.

This reminds me of the time a friend of mine was working at Carlsberg, one of Denmark's biggest breweries. He was supposed to install a system-wide update to Excel. However, the genius that had set up the original installation program on the server had set its defaults to 'Uninstall' and 'All Computers.' My friend hit the return key just one time too many and suddenly the server started to remove Excel from all of Carlsberg's then 1000 office computers.

He managed to stop it when it had 'only' removed it from about a hundred computers. Still, this was not good. It required a lot of toil and swearing (possibly the swearing wasn't required, but my friend did it anyway) to undo the damage done.

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

3 hours ago, Matoyak said:

PIxar was able to recover around 70% of the stuff they lost due to one of the Leads at the studio having been working from home. She had taken a computer home with her that hadn't been connected to the main server, so when the erroneous backup command had hit, it was spared the wiping. The story of how they drove from her house to the Pixar offices at like 15 miles an hour was quite harrowing.

Yup, but that was the *first* time they almost lost the whole movie.  The second time, it was a deliberate choice to throw out almost everything they'd done, rewrite the script, create new characters (like the dog), and redo everything, when they had a hard deadline that meant they had to have it done in nine months.  Kinda sad, in a way, that in the end the stuff they'd worked so hard to recover got tossed soon after, but everyone agreed it was a much better movie in the end, and they wanted to save their friends (Woody et al), the franchise, and the company.

3 hours ago, ijuin said:

Nine months for the Pixar crew is still several dozen person-years, so an endeavor of that scale is still going to need a crew size comparable to a regular studio.

But we weren't talking about fans creating an entire Pixar-quality feature-length all-animated movie.  What I said was, that if Pixar could do that much in nine months, then a dedicated group of fans should be able to put together some high-quality special effects for a fanvid in a reasonable, do-able amount of time.  Whether that's a short, a fake commercial, a music video, or a fan-recast new episode, that's still going to be mostly regular filming, with a relatively small amount of F/X work added on afterwards.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

3 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

But we weren't talking about fans creating an entire Pixar-quality feature-length all-animated movie.  What I said was, that if Pixar could do that much in nine months, then a dedicated group of fans should be able to put together some high-quality special effects for a fanvid in a reasonable, do-able amount of time.  Whether that's a short, a fake commercial, a music video, or a fan-recast new episode, that's still going to be mostly regular filming, with a relatively small amount of F/X work added on afterwards.

That seems reasonable enough. If you don't insist on hugely awesome effects, you can do some surprisingly neat stuff these days. People like the Nostalgia Critic and many of the reviewers on his site are hardly ILM but they still do some quite funny and satisfying effects at times.

[hkmaly 490]

16 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

And if all the files for making the entire theatrical movie were only 10 gigs, then that's well within the size system that fans could afford.  Processing power is certainly a separate issue, but given how long ago that movie was made, I suspect modern desktops could match them, if not greatly exceed them,

That's good example what I was speaking about. In past, processing the effects required costly specialized machine. Now, it can be done on common notebooks (desktop is unnecessary powerful). I suppose in five years, it will be possible to do that on tablets.

3 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

But we weren't talking about fans creating an entire Pixar-quality feature-length all-animated movie.  What I said was, that if Pixar could do that much in nine months, then a dedicated group of fans should be able to put together some high-quality special effects for a fanvid in a reasonable, do-able amount of time.  Whether that's a short, a fake commercial, a music video, or a fan-recast new episode, that's still going to be mostly regular filming, with a relatively small amount of F/X work added on afterwards.

Actually, in fan movies, there are more effects than in professional movies of similar look, because building big sets (and KEEPING it somewhere for months) can cost more than having most on the movie done on greenscreen. On the other hand, greenscreen is not HARD effect, I suppose.

[Drasvin 123]

29 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

That's good example what I was speaking about. In past, processing the effects required costly specialized machine. Now, it can be done on common notebooks (desktop is unnecessary powerful). I suppose in five years, it will be possible to do that on tablets.

Video rendering still requires a lot of processing power, especially as resolution and frame-rate increase, comparable to high-end gaming. I've seen a video from LinusTechTips about editing 4k video on an ultra-portable notebook with dual-core CPU and a dedicated GPU, but for that to work they had to have one of their desktop machines transcode the file into a format that worked well with GPU acceleration. Even then they had framerate drops when adding effect layers. And the GPU was maxed out while exporting the finished video.

Maybe there will be a day when you can do serious video rending on a tablet, but I'm skeptical about five years. There would have to be serious improvements in tablet heat management, if nothing else. 

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Actually, in fan movies, there are more effects than in professional movies of similar look, because building big sets (and KEEPING it somewhere for months) can cost more than having most on the movie done on greenscreen. On the other hand, greenscreen is not HARD effect, I suppose.

There are plenty of movies that make good use of greenscreen sets, as it's cheaper than a traditional set and allows for more interesting camera angles and stunts. Though there can be issues with shadows on the actors and props not looking right if they don't take the effort to adjust the lighting of the shot to match what will be in the finished scene. Also, chroma key (the general term for greenscreen and bluescreen technology, you can theoretically use any color you want/need) technology is easier and cheaper to set-up than a traditional stage, it can run into issues if the people setting it up aren't careful. Shadows are bad for chroma key, because you ideally want to have the narrowest chroma range possible.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

36 minutes ago, Drasvin said:

Maybe there will be a day when you can do serious video rending on a tablet, but I'm skeptical about five years. There would have to be serious improvements in tablet heat management, if nothing else.

Or they could introduce the new George Foreman combination tablet and grill!

[Scotty 1,061]

23 minutes ago, Drasvin said:

Video rendering still requires a lot of processing power, especially as resolution and frame-rate increase, comparable to high-end gaming. I've seen a video from LinusTechTips about editing 4k video on an ultra-portable notebook with dual-core CPU and a dedicated GPU, but for that to work they had to have one of their desktop machines transcode the file into a format that worked well with GPU acceleration. Even then they had framerate drops when adding effect layers. And the GPU was maxed out while exporting the finished video.

Maybe there will be a day when you can do serious video rending on a tablet, but I'm skeptical about five years. There would have to be serious improvements in tablet heat management, if nothing else. 

I'm thinking we have to be getting to the point where graphics quality can't be noticeably improved any further and so hardware would be able to get ahead, as far as I can tell, we've plateaued on audio quality years ago (I base this mainly on the fact that I haven't heard anyone saying I need to use X audio card instead of the one integrated with the motherboard) though audio mixing is a thing that requires different hardware altogether but can be done on the fly easily enough with little impact on CPU, most people when rendering video, can't do much else until it's done.

[Drasvin 123]

Just now, Scotty said:

39 minutes ago, Drasvin said:

Video rendering still requires a lot of processing power, especially as resolution and frame-rate increase, comparable to high-end gaming. I've seen a video from LinusTechTips about editing 4k video on an ultra-portable notebook with dual-core CPU and a dedicated GPU, but for that to work they had to have one of their desktop machines transcode the file into a format that worked well with GPU acceleration. Even then they had framerate drops when adding effect layers. And the GPU was maxed out while exporting the finished video.

Maybe there will be a day when you can do serious video rending on a tablet, but I'm skeptical about five years. There would have to be serious improvements in tablet heat management, if nothing else. 

I'm thinking we have to be getting to the point where graphics quality can't be noticeably improved any further and so hardware would be able to get ahead, as far as I can tell, we've plateaued on audio quality years ago (I base this mainly on the fact that I haven't heard anyone saying I need to use X audio card instead of the one integrated with the motherboard) though audio mixing is a thing that requires different hardware altogether but can be done on the fly easily enough with little impact on CPU, most people when rendering video, can't do much else until it's done.

Graphical fidelity is plateauing (at least for a given size of display. A bigger display can require more resolution to get the same degree of fidelity), but so is the processing power of silicon-based systems. And the audio card can matter for quality depending on your audio set-up. For your typical stereo audio, the onboard audio card is good enough. For complex surround sound set-ups with hi-def output, the onboard audio might strain a little.

 

[Scotty 1,061]

2 minutes ago, Drasvin said:

Graphical fidelity is plateauing (at least for a given size of display. A bigger display can require more resolution to get the same degree of fidelity), but so is the processing power of silicon-based systems. And the audio card can matter for quality depending on your audio set-up. For your typical stereo audio, the onboard audio card is good enough. For complex surround sound set-ups with hi-def output, the onboard audio might strain a little.

 

Just read this article that states 8K resolution is basically the best you can get, mind you it would require graphics cards 6 times more powerful than the best we currently have and most certainly would start out needing multiple cards running SLI/Crossfire. Considering they're already talking about 8K, I'd say it'll be within the next 5 years we see actual hardware for it, another 5 for it to become somewhat affordable for enthusiasts.

[Vorlonagent 442]

1 minute ago, Scotty said:

Just read this article that states 8K resolution is basically the best you can get, mind you it would require graphics cards 6 times more powerful than the best we currently have and most certainly would start out needing multiple cards running SLI/Crossfire. Considering they're already talking about 8K, I'd say it'll be within the next 5 years we see actual hardware for it, another 5 for it to become somewhat affordable for enthusiasts.

Moore's Law willing...

[Drasvin 123]

Just now, Vorlonagent said:

3 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Just read this article that states 8K resolution is basically the best you can get, mind you it would require graphics cards 6 times more powerful than the best we currently have and most certainly would start out needing multiple cards running SLI/Crossfire. Considering they're already talking about 8K, I'd say it'll be within the next 5 years we see actual hardware for it, another 5 for it to become somewhat affordable for enthusiasts.

Moore's Law willing...

Yeah. As I said, silicon systems are starting to plateau. You can only make transistors so small and so tightly packed together before quantum physics starts causing problems. If the transistors are too close together, you can get electrons randomly jumping to other transistors, rendering computations invalid.

[hkmaly 490]

2 hours ago, Drasvin said:

Video rendering still requires a lot of processing power, especially as resolution and frame-rate increase, comparable to high-end gaming. I've seen a video from LinusTechTips about editing 4k video on an ultra-portable notebook with dual-core CPU and a dedicated GPU, but for that to work they had to have one of their desktop machines transcode the file into a format that worked well with GPU acceleration. Even then they had framerate drops when adding effect layers. And the GPU was maxed out while exporting the finished video.

Maybe there will be a day when you can do serious video rending on a tablet, but I'm skeptical about five years. There would have to be serious improvements in tablet heat management, if nothing else. 

Remember that there is no need to do it real-time. Well ... sure, it's more comfortable if you can do it real-time, but there was time where rendering of scene (few minutes) was done overnight. THIS is what I think tablets will be capable to do in five years.

57 minutes ago, Drasvin said:

And the audio card can matter for quality depending on your audio set-up.

What matters is the quality of analog part, where Moore's law didn't helped. But the digital part ...

58 minutes ago, Drasvin said:

For complex surround sound set-ups with hi-def output, the onboard audio might strain a little.

... hmmm, ok, maybe we are not on "even onboard will suffice for everything", but we are near.

50 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Just read this article that states 8K resolution is basically the best you can get

Technically, that speaks about standard monitor in standard distance. You may need more if you want to be able to turn around for example ... on the other hand, why don't turn around just the image instead?

There may be SOMETHING which would require more and which we can't imagine will be useful yet. Also, 3D basically needs twice the resolution (that doesn't mean 16K, 16K is 4x more).

47 minutes ago, Drasvin said:

50 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

Moore's Law willing...

Yeah. As I said, silicon systems are starting to plateau. You can only make transistors so small and so tightly packed together before quantum physics starts causing problems. If the transistors are too close together, you can get electrons randomly jumping to other transistors, rendering computations invalid.

We are getting close to the plateau with CPU, but weren't GPU generation behind? Also, there is still some opportunity in using multiple layers. So far, there are issues with both building it and cooling it, but that are not as hard problems as the quantum physics one.

(Note: you said silicon ; there are experiments with other materials which STILL uses electrons but in way which make them less likely to jump. If THOSE won't work, then we would need to move to photons.)

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Actually, in fan movies, there are more effects than in professional movies of similar look, because building big sets (and KEEPING it somewhere for months) can cost more than having most on the movie done on greenscreen. On the other hand, greenscreen is not HARD effect, I suppose.

Or, fanvids can just find interesting locations to shoot and skip the chroma key.  It all depends on what sort of story you're telling. The BBC isn't the only place you can find old quarries....

2 hours ago, Scotty said:

as far as I can tell, we've plateaued on audio quality years ago (I base this mainly on the fact that I haven't heard anyone saying I need to use X audio card instead of the one integrated with the motherboard)

I suspect an awful lot of people have gotten used to mp3 played over ear buds, and don't really notice sound quality so much unless their attention is called to it.

[Cpt. Obvious 73]

14 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Remember that there is no need to do it real-time. Well ... sure, it's more comfortable if you can do it real-time, but there was time where rendering of scene (few minutes) was done overnight. THIS is what I think tablets will be capable to do in five years.

Things has sure changed a lot since the days of Tron. Back then the idea of real time rendering was a pipe dream. A single frame could take 20 minutes or so, and a 30 second clip would in theory take ten days to render. In practice there were few if any runs that were able to complete on time as the software tended to crash now and then... 
 
Even today most CGI scenes will not be rendered in real time, and the "rendering" referred to when talking about video editing is simply the rendering of things like special effects (scene transitions, text overlays, blur, sharpening and other things like that) and things such as color correction, frame rate conversion, resolution change and aspect ratio correction. 
 
Things like the computer generated content in Avatar is still not rendered in real time on a single machine. I guess the graphics for Tron would be possible to real time render today though, but those scenes were already dumbed down to suit the hardware available at the time. The computer used for Tron, the one and only Super Foonly F-1, had a total of 2 MB RAM and 330 MB of storage. It used a PDP-10 processor cranked to cycle at 90ns which resulted in a staggering 4.5 MIPS! 
Compare that to whatever device you are reading this on and you're likely to have more computational power available just to browse the web... 
 
And if you want to compare it to something a little more powerful then how about an Intel Core i7-6700 that cranks out about 270,000 MIPS. It's about 65 times as fast as the Foonly F-1, and still it doesn't have a chance to render something like the scenes in Avatar or The Hobbit in real time. But GPU rendering, some are likely to say, surely that changes things. And yes it does, but still it's not enough once you crank the resolution to something that will work in the cinema. Tron was rendered at 6000 pixels horizontally, so it used a higher resolution than most CGI used today when 4K is considered fine for the latest blockbuster movies.  
 

14 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

I suspect an awful lot of people have gotten used to mp3 played over ear buds, and don't really notice sound quality so much unless their attention is called to it.

Yes, this is certainly one reason that most people think the on-board analogue output is good enough. And if you think it sounds good then it is good enough. The bad news is that once your expectations no longer is matched by the cheap and cheerful audio solutions you risk falling into the audiophile swamp, and then you're never to be satisfied with any audio system for long. I know that all MP3 files that use somewhat reasonable bit rates are full of artifacts, and I've had it demonstrated again and again to the degree that there is no way I can try to argue with that. And yet I have no problem listening to even quite bad MP3 encodes without breaking out in hives. The on boards audio solutions is another thing though. Even relatively expensive motherboards tend to have a problem with hiss and whistling sounds on the analogue ports. And portables are usually very bad at this. Another problem is that when using a analogue microphone with the on board sound solution every computer I've tested has had a problem with the on board audio solution picking up noise from the power plane. A high end audio card or a cheap USB audio card will usually do a much better job of filtering out that noise.
 

[Vorlonagent 442]

A friend once gave me a tour of Foundation Imaging's facilities.  This was back in the 90s when there was a Foundation Imaging to have a facility to get a tour of.  I still have the friend, at least.  Foundation did the CGI work for the first 4 seasons of Babylon 5 and picked up Star Trek when Paramount finally decided to ditch physical models for their starship scenes.  Foundation had a giant central computer for rendering work which looked to be mostly a huge data bus and a carp-ton of AMD processors.  I don't know if that thing rendered real-time, though it might if it only had one or two tasks at any given time.

I also remember working for a computer game company and bumping into a CGI artist in the halls.  She had plenty of time for socializing because the render her desktop machine was working on would take a couple hours to finish.

 

My biggest problem with sound and mobile devices is bass.  I miss it. 

[hkmaly 490]

19 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

On 10/05/2016 at 0:44 AM, hkmaly said:

Actually, in fan movies, there are more effects than in professional movies of similar look, because building big sets (and KEEPING it somewhere for months) can cost more than having most on the movie done on greenscreen. On the other hand, greenscreen is not HARD effect, I suppose.

Or, fanvids can just find interesting locations to shoot and skip the chroma key.  It all depends on what sort of story you're telling. The BBC isn't the only place you can find old quarries....

Well, I'm mostly talking about sci-fi, so ...

1 hour ago, Cpt. Obvious said:

The computer used for Tron, the one and only Super Foonly F-1, had a total of 2 MB RAM and 330 MB of storage. It used a PDP-10 processor cranked to cycle at 90ns which resulted in a staggering 4.5 MIPS! 
Compare that to whatever device you are reading this on and you're likely to have more computational power available just to browse the web... 

Not only that, but the web is STILL SLOW sometimes.

2 hours ago, Cpt. Obvious said:

And if you want to compare it to something a little more powerful then how about an Intel Core i7-6700 that cranks out about 270,000 MIPS. It's about 65 times as fast as the Foonly F-1

... 65? 270000/4.5 = 60000.

20 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

I suspect an awful lot of people have gotten used to mp3 played over ear buds

Well, headphones can actually do better sound that 7+1 stereo, if you precompute it correctly ... but, yes, I don't think it's true for ear buds.

1 hour ago, Cpt. Obvious said:

Another problem is that when using a analogue microphone with the on board sound solution every computer I've tested has had a problem with the on board audio solution picking up noise from the power plane. A high end audio card or a cheap USB audio card will usually do a much better job of filtering out that noise.

I remember when I was trying to record something on computer. The cleanest recording was on notebook disconnected from power (running on batteries). With onboard audio compared to dedicated, although cheap, sound card on desktop computer.

 

[mlooney 3,417]

If you want to see what is close to current state of the art for real time rendering, visit "2nd Life", and bask in the low polygon count glory.  Due to it being 90% user created content, it does have do most of it's rendering in real time.

[Cpt. Obvious 73]

16 hours ago, hkmaly said:

... 65? 270000/4.5 = 60000.

Hmm... Yes, I should have caught that myself. But what we can take away from this is that a top of the line PC CPU today is way faster than a one off speed monster back in the early eighties.

Sometimes I see things that makes me wonder just what people are doing wrong when they work with 3D. I built a computer for a customer a few years back. It had dual Xeon processors, the fastest available at the time, and eight (8!) Tesla cards, again the fastest available, might have been K80 or M60. This was used to provide real time rendering of 3D models for the products that they sold. Their customers would log in on a website and use a web app that allowed them to slap graphics on the products and see what they would look like, supposedly in real time. I got to see the web app working and I was not impressed by the performance, and most importantly I can't see how what they were doing could require the immense amount of computational power that they had in that machine. But they wanted eight Tessla cards so they got eight Tessla cards. At full load that machine could draw almost 3KW of power... I did some burn in at full tilt and boy was it loud and hot.
 

[Vorlonagent 442]

Maybe their software only leveraged the Xeons?

[hkmaly 490]

6 hours ago, Cpt. Obvious said:

a top of the line PC CPU today is way faster than a one off speed monster back in the early eighties.

No surprise. As I said, even smartphones are faster than those today. But big part of that difference is killed by using much less optimized software. And computing in higher precision.

6 hours ago, Cpt. Obvious said:

Sometimes I see things that makes me wonder just what people are doing wrong when they work with 3D. I built a computer for a customer a few years back. It had dual Xeon processors, the fastest available at the time, and eight (8!) Tesla cards, again the fastest available, might have been K80 or M60. This was used to provide real time rendering of 3D models for the products that they sold. Their customers would log in on a website and use a web app that allowed them to slap graphics on the products and see what they would look like, supposedly in real time. I got to see the web app working and I was not impressed by the performance, and most importantly I can't see how what they were doing could require the immense amount of computational power that they had in that machine. But they wanted eight Tessla cards so they got eight Tessla cards. At full load that machine could draw almost 3KW of power... I did some burn in at full tilt and boy was it loud and hot.

I wouldn't be surprised if the performance was killed by bad implementation on client machine (javascript?) or by slow network. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if they just used that bad software.

3 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

Maybe their software only leveraged the Xeons

... for example.