About 10 years ago we were curious to see how our SGI’s stacked up against other processors in terms of rendering power. We chose a “highly complicated” scene to render with PovRay since it was available for many systems and collected the results.

We just recently re-ran the benchmark on a modern computer and you’ll notice the update at the top of the table. Read more »

The NY Times prepared an interesting graph showing movie grosses for the last 10+ years. Interesting to see the shapes of gross earnings over time.

ABC News visited Sony Imageworks to confirm that actors really are important for mocap movies. View their 4 minute piece on the subject.

For some reason, Quicktime will choose the lowest quality stream when viewing video (by default.) This is particularly noticeable when you are watching DV footage since DV encoded avi’s have both a high quality and a low quality stream. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to watch the low quality stream on any modern computer, but at least it’s easy to fix.

Simply open Quicktime Preferences and make sure the above line is checked.

Congratulations to our two Annie award winners for Surf’s Up. Deborah Carlson won the category of “Best Individual Achievement in Animated Effects” for her wave work and John Clark took the award for “Best Animation Production Artist” for his wave animation contributions. Well deserved!

Tomorrow, Saturday, February 9 from 2-5pm, the Visual Effects Society will offer a sneak peek at some of this year’s nominated work. I’ll be involved in the Surf’s Up presentation.

Come join some of our Nominees as they present their submissions and answer questions. The categories presented include Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Series, Best Single Visual Effect of the Year, Outstanding Pre-Rendered Visuals in a Video Game and Outstanding Animated Character in an Animated Motion Picture.

This is a free event and I understand it’s open to the public if you’d like to attend. You can download this flyer for more information.

Surf’s Up got a couple of nice mentions in Variety today. In the article “CGI Lighting get transformed“, David Cohen speaks to our documentary lighting look while highlighting the Academy award nominated Transformers. Thomas Mclean talks about our animated water in his article, “Digital water sends vfx sparks flying.”

I just read a great post by Mark Alexander on the current state of Multithreading and GpGPU work. Mark gave me permission to re-posted it here. Opinions stated within are Mark’s own, not his employer.

Read more »

Cnet’s Daniel Terdiman writes, “Why Sony Imageworks got an Oscar Nomination for Surf’s Up“. A detailed read about how we made the waves and camera in the film.

If you live in Los Angeles, we also might be on KTLA news at 10:00pm tonight. If it doesn’t air tonight, it will air early next week.