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NVIDIA
delivers a Quadro-based solution for all
professional markets, including DCC, CAD, CAE,
visualization, and corporate markets.
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Consider
this your portal to the world of high-performance
programmable graphics throughout your digital film
production pipeline.
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 “Our 3D rendering and animation work requires
the fastest graphics hardware we can get for our custom
software. We use NVIDIA Quadro graphics so that we can
generate more shots in a shorter amount of time and with
the highest quality possible.” Chris Bond,
president, Frantic Films
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The
Screen Test
Creating a blockbuster
motion picture requires the talents and resources of a
small army. These people work for the major studios and
for hundreds of smaller companies that provide
specialized services. To create visual effects, the
major studios can choose from an entire industry of
creative firms that compete in this dynamic,
cutting-edge market. Frantic Films has managed to
survive and thrive in this fast-paced industry, and
today uses NVIDIA Quadro® graphics solutions to provide
stunning visualizations for both pre- and
post-production stages of film production. Their tools
and techniques also bring film-quality effects to
commercials and other television productions.
“We
have gained a reputation as the studio that can achieve
the impossible, and we rely on NVIDIA graphics to help
us maintain that reputation,” explains Chris Bond,
president of Frantic Films. “We are still small enough
that we can react quickly and change our pipeline for a
new challenge or project. We tend to be asked to do
things that have never been done before because our
clients know that we apply the newest and best graphics
technology and develop the tools that are needed to get
the job done.”
Getting the job done usually
means providing pre-visualization assistance or
post-production effects to the makers of major motion
pictures at Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment,
Paramount Pictures, and Warner Bros. Studios. Frantic
also works for ABC and other broadcasters, and creates
their own award-winning live-action productions,
including docu-series for Canada’s History Channel. |
Background:
Frantic Films provides a variety of pre- and
post-production visualization services to
filmmakers and advertisers, relying on NVIDIA
graphics to support the efforts of their
creative teams.
Challenge: Directors
and production crews require the ability to
preview scenes and sets in real time, making
changes on the fly. The creative team at Frantic
must also be able to deliver stunning visual
effects for the final production, including
completely realistic fluids, surfaces, and
lighting.
Solution:
NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics products provide
enough computational power to support
sophisticated fluid simulation algorithms. The
Cg shading language and optimized NVIDIA driver
software streamline the programming
efforts.
Benefits: The
power of the NVIDIA Quadro platform supports
interactive manipulation of virtual sets for
efficient pre-production planning. The power of
the NVIDIA Cg shading language allows the
incorporation of more realistic surfaces,
materials, and lighting throughout entire scenes
for high-quality previews and highly satisfied
clients. With ever-increasing throughput, the
NVIDIA GPUs effectively take on tasks
traditionally computed on the CPU, introducing
more power into each system and changing the way
that work is done in pre- and post-production.
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| Copyright 2003 Warner Bros. Studios.
Images provided by Frantic Films
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Lights,
Camera...
“For pre-production
projects like we did on X-Men, directors count on us to
create a 3D virtual world of their film. With our model
of their set, they can check out lighting designs,
camera positions and angles, actor positions—every
aspect of each scene. Instead of working out the details
on location, with a crew of 100 people and
million-dollar actors standing around, they can plan out
every scene ahead of time and really nail it when it
goes into production,” says Bond. Besides saving time
and money during production, directors use Frantic’s
pre-production technology and techniques to demo their
ideas and pitch their movies to studios. Actors and the
crew can also be prepared for complicated scenes by
walk-throughs on the virtual sets.
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Pre-production comes down to painstaking
visualizations—giving directors, studio executives,
actors, and production crews a realistic preview of the
end product. The virtual sets and scene previews are
created using high-quality, high-count meshes and
require all the raw computing power possible. Ben
Houston, a visualization expert at Frantic, explains,
“The main CPU runs at 2 or 3GHz. An NVIDIA Quadro
graphics board gives us an additional eight processors
and each of those processors can execute four
floating-point computations per clock cycle. That adds
up to 12GHz of processing power—way more than the main
CPU can give us. This is really affordable power, too.
We combine this hardware speed with the high-performance
NVIDIA driver software to get the best possible OpenGL
performance and deliver real-time interactive
capabilities to our clients. When a director asks for a
change to a scene during a meeting with us, the
performance of the NVIDIA Quadro graphics lets us make
the adjustments on the fly.”
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The visualization experts at
Frantic also take advantage of the NVIDIA® Cg compiler
and programming tools. The Cg shader language simplifies
programming efforts and allows the team to render
higher-quality objects in real time. Combining the
NVIDIA Quadro graphics hardware with Cg results in more
depth and textures in every scene, more realistic color,
and accurately reflecting lights. The ability to fool
the eye with wood grain, stucco walls, windows that
reflect the environment and an infinite number of other
effects contributes to the unbeatable quality of the
Frantic pre-production creations.
…And Action!
In the
post-production stages, Frantic generates some of
today’s most spectacular effects, action sequences, and
computer-generated (CG) scenes. The team of engineers
and artists at Frantic are known for their in-house
tools. Bond explains, “Almost every feature film project
that we’ve done has involved writing a custom tool or
figuring out a technology from scratch. For example, in
The Core, we had to figure out a way to handle millions
and millions of polygons to create liquid lava, and many
other effects that had never been tackled before. We
take advantage of lots of the CAD software solutions out
there, but we often end up falling back on custom
software. We write shaders, tools, scripts, little
applets—anything we need for a particular project. Some
of our tools carry forward to lots of other projects,
like our software for handling liquids—Flood. We’ve
submitted patents for some of that liquid
technology.”
The Flood tool, which took almost a
year to develop, was originally developed as a CPU-based
application. The fluid simulation system was successful
in the earliest deployments, but achieving
realistic-looking fluid was incredibly computationally
intensive. After brainstorming with NVIDIA developers,
the Frantic team set out to modify Flood to take
advantage of NVIDIA GPU floating-point power. Today,
NVIDIA Quadro FX hardware gives Flood a 50 percent boost
in performance, and the ability to generate the
highest-fidelity visual realism for fluids. Another
visualization expert at Frantic Films, Mark Wiebe, says,
“Converting our most computationally intensive
algorithms from CPU-based implementations to GPU-based
solutions was not difficult—the new high-level shader
languages such as Cg give us a straightforward way to
access the floating-point throughput of the GPU. As we
continue to work with NVIDIA, we are confident that we
can fully exploit the evolving capabilities of the
NVIDIA Quadro family and use the hardware acceleration
to change the way that we work when it comes to
generating the most realistic fluid
effects.”
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NVIDIA in the Supporting
Role
The Frantic creative teams need
as much graphics power as they can get. They employ
NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000 and NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000
workstation graphics solutions for the most demanding of
their projects—photorealistic creations for
post-production projects. According to Bond,
“Post-production is a moving target—every project is
different. Our 3D rendering and animation work requires
the fastest graphics hardware we can get for our custom
software. We use NVIDIA Quadro graphics so that we can
generate more shots in a shorter amount of time and with
the highest quality possible. Some of the scenes we
create are massive, and we have to create lighting
effects, character generation, and bring animation and
camera movement into the scene. I can’t imagine handling
the hundreds of megabytes of model geometry, and four to
five gigabytes of textures for objects, without the
NVIDIA performance.”
NVIDIA also gives Frantic
the advantage of a range of graphics platforms. Frantic
often uses NVIDIA® GeForce™ FX graphics solutions for
the pre-production work, when they have to deliver a
large number of shots and scenes in as short a time as
possible. With the GeForce platforms, Frantic can
deliver the same visual quality that characterizes
today’s video games—fast visualizations that are perfect
for the purpose of production planning. “For pre-viz
applications, the NVIDIA GeForce cards are so affordable
that we can go out and buy all new cards for every
project and get the latest features and performance
levels,” says Bond. “And if our 3D models have the same
visual quality as the latest video game, it’s a real
competitive advantage for us in
pre-production.”
Encore
When customers
ask for effects that have never been done before, the
team at Frantic has to deliver. High expectations have
led to their groundbreaking achievements and the
development of many innovative Frantic tools and
technologies. They need the fastest hardware they can
get to power the tools of their trade. Frantic counts on
NVIDIA to deliver the leading performance today, and to
be ready when they need the next-generation solutions.
As Bond explains, “We always want more—more performance,
more memory on the video cards, more throughput on the
buses. That’s why we’re excited about where NVIDIA is
going with the NVIDIA Quadro family. We can’t wait to
get our hands on the next NVIDIA solutions and see what
we’ll be able to do with them. Our business is all about
delivering more—more quality and a bigger scale in every
project. The trend is all about bigger, better, and
more. We have to keep pushing the envelope and pushing
the industry forward, and I think NVIDIA is doing that.”
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