Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/17873
n n n n CGI those layers, Chen made render passes for the color, ambient occlusion, and luminance- depth channels for compositing later in Adobe After Effects. When Chen began working on “Ama- zonia,” he had just returned from screening “Eternal Gaze” in theaters, and with the coun- try moving to high def, he realized that this new film would need to be HD-ready. “From an independent CG filmmaker’s point of view, this was quite daunting because rendering at 1080p equated to almost seven times more pixels to render and composite than NTSC SD,” he says. “So I decided to make a reasonable compromise and render to HD 720p instead, and still use off-the-shelf notebook PCs with standard hardware. And the benefits were worth the trade-off: Most frames took between 10 and 60 minutes to render on two- and four-core systems. With the imagery rendered, it was time put it all together. According to Chen, in the early days of his CG film- making career, compositing was either not done at all or was at best an after- thought, “as it was yet another time-consum- ing phase in the impossibly long and chal- lenging CG pipeline.” However, the art form progressed by leaps and bounds in recent years, and, as Chen points out, it is now almost un- imaginable to create a CG short without the luxury and freedom to make changes and to further enhance and mold a shot in post. “Now, I design and create shots fully with post in mind,” Chen says. “I liken CG post to the darkroom of the traditional chemical film photographer, like Ansel Adams, who took a negative and, through the magic of tried-and- true darkroom techniques and his famed Zone System, was able to coax out an impossibly beautiful work of photographic art. Such was the case in my approach to creating a typical shot in ‘Amazonia.’ ” It’s difficult to believe from looking at the finished film, but Chen admits that the raw shots that came directly from Maya were quite flat and not too interesting artistically. However, when the imagery was combined and layered in After Effects, he was able to experiment with different looks and schemes, all without re-rendering. After individual layers were gamma-corrected and the levels adjusted, they were composited with other layers (such as ambient occlusion and other foreground and background elements) until a semblance of a shot came together. Ten the fun part began. “At this point, the luminance-depth layer 32 August/September 2010 Mobile Moviemaking During the past year or so, mobile computers—both suped-up laptops and mobile workstations—have made quite an impact in the professional DCC space, offer- ing a viable alternative to desktop machines. But can they take the place of their tethered big brothers? In many case, the answer is “yes,” as animator/filmmaker Sam Chen discovered while making his CG short film “Amazonia.” During pre-production in 2006, Chen had used a couple of high-performance Windows XP workstations custom-made by Verari, and a Dell laptop. Both were quite effective at the time, allowing him to previs his entire film with relative ease. As pre-production pro- gressed into production and then postproduc- tion, computers became faster, and all of a sud- den, a 64-bit 4GB quad- core laptop could be pur- chased for approximately $1000. “It was quite an em- powering and revolution- ary day for the proverbial independent CG film- maker,” says Chen. So much so that he quickly made the switch entirely to HP Pavilion notebook com- puters for his entire CG pipeline—from animation all the way to lighting, rendering, and compositing, as well as final HD video editing. Chen used consumer-grade HP Pavilion dv7-1247cl 64-bit AMD Turion sys- tems with ATI HD3200 graphics chips as well as the much faster HP dv7-2270us 64-bit Intel Quad Core 2 with an ATI HD4650, and the newer HP dv7 64-bit Intel Core i5-450M with an Nvidia GeForce G 105M graphics card. All the systems sported 4GB of RAM. “Not only have my electric bills gone down dramatically, but the systems ran cool and quiet in my small home studio,” he attests. “Now, when I turn on the older desktop workstations, they seem unbearably loud and hot in comparison.” Using only laptops for the entire production pipeline has reaped mostly positive results, according to Chen. “When I suffered from cabin fever, I loved the fact that I could take my entire production pipeline to a coffee house and work there, with very little compromise.” What was the downside? The few negatives Chen cited were the generally slower hard drives that ship standard with these systems—sometimes 7200 rpm isn’t quite fast enough for video editing. “Even with the advancements in hardware technology, uncompressed HD video editing still requires RAID and other fast, dedicated hard drives to perform in real time,” he says. “Rendering to HD 720p instead of 1080p lightened the load a little, so I could still use off-the-shelf note- book PCs with standard hardware.” Furthermore, most mobile upgrades, such as RAM, and hard drives are more expensive than their counterparts for desktop systems. Indeed, you will always be able to find faster and cheaper parts made for the desktop, but Chen found that the trade-offs were well worth it in retrospect. “I have found that the HP notebook PCs are desktop-replacement systems capable of empowering the independent CG filmmaker with enough horsepower to produce professional-quality CG films,” Chen says. “I am proud that I made a CG film almost entirely using only notebook computers. positive example and help usher in a kindler and greener way of making CG films in the future.” –Karen Moltenbrey I hope my film can set a