Pixar to switch to Mac

M

macridah

root
got from macrumors:

I'll give you guys the **BIG NEWS** that was announced yesterday at Apple's Shake Users' Event in San Diego.

First, Pixar announced that they're bringing prMan over to OS X and will have a beta sometime in August or September.

Second, Pixar announced that they'll be migrating over to... guess what... the Mac!

They based their decision on issues such as performance, code portability, X11 integration, development culture, vender dedication to the fim industry, app availability, audio/video friendlyness and capabilities.


Now this makes sense since the CEO is you know who. Plus, the G5 supports SMP so building a cluster or farm would be easy ... wait, the xserve has to move to G5, but i think that's for sure.
 
Originally posted by macridah
....

Now this makes sense since the CEO is you know who. Plus, the G5 supports SMP so building a cluster or farm would be easy ... wait, the xserve has to move to G5, but i think that's for sure.
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Pixar is a public company. Its purchasing decisions are based on the needs of the business. If the company's purchases were based on the CEO's affiliation with another corporation and counter to the best interests of the stockholders, then it would be open to a stockholders lawsuit. The SEC might also want to examine the situation. You can rest assured that Pixar is buying Macs because Macs are the best computers for the job.

The issues under consideration for a desktop are somewhat different than the issues under consideration for a cluster. In the CG cinema business, the cluster is used primarily to render the final product. The price of an Intel-based node is so low and the pace to progress so great that it is likely any renderfarm will see no more than one major project before it is replaced. In the budget of a major motion picture, the price of a renderfarm is hardly more than incidental. But, it doesn't make sense to pay more than you have to for a piece of hardware that you will only use once.
 
But they wouldn't have to upgrade a G5 server farm after one movie because they keep their power that long! I'm sure Pixar could get 2 or 3 films out of a G5 server farm before upgrading to better machines.
 
Originally posted by arden
But they wouldn't have to upgrade a G5 server farm after one movie because they keep their power that long! I'm sure Pixar could get 2 or 3 films out of a G5 server farm before upgrading to better machines.
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Three films work out to a 2-3 year span. If there is any substance at all to the rumors about the progress of the G5, then next year's G5 server farm may be substantially faster than one configured for the same money this year. In any event, I can assure you that Pixar won't be using this year's server farm three years from now.
 
Hey, who knows, if they got the right technology, they could get the creative juices flowing and start cranking them out every year or so. Hopefully they wouldn't do this at the sacrifice of quality, though.
 
it takes 2-5 years to complete a proper cgi film, no way would they complete more than one film per set of render farm... i think ;)
 
Just to warn you guys in advance, when Pixar says it is moving to Macs, that would more than likely be for workstations. Right now the G5 out performs (for the price) anything out there, but that doesn't mean that Macs would be replacing the render farm which they are currently in the process of building, which is Xeon-based using Linux. This is the system that they chose to replace their original render farm of Suns with back in February.

The key thing to remember is why they went with Linux in the first place. Sun really wanted to stay in Pixar and would have cut them a sweet deal to keep them using their equipment. But Pixar is also a software company, and they have needed to show (in a big film way) that their software works as good on Linux as it does on Solaris. They have had Linux products for quite some time, but it is hard to sell a product that the company that makes it has never used for one of it's major productions.

This is not that different from when they moved some of their workstations from SGIs to IBM IntelliStations. That move was also motivated more to sell software. They had used their software on IRIX workstations for quite a few movies, but they wanted to show that they believed in the Linux version of their workstation software enough to make their own movies with it.
 
if pixar is using Macs now for there workstations that makes me want to work there so much more. :p
 
Originally posted by MisterMe
Pixar is a public company. Its purchasing decisions are based on the needs of the business. If the company's purchases were based on the CEO's affiliation with another corporation and counter to the best interests of the stockholders, then it would be open to a stockholders lawsuit. The SEC might also want to examine the situation.
Click to expand...


And they say that idealism is dead! I have seen such favoritism over and over in various industries. It is very common behavior.

---jmo
 
Renderman, for one, which is certainly used in non-Pixar productions. However, much of their software is either used exclusively in-house (like the software used to generate the waves in "Finding Nemo"), or is highly customized for particular applications.

Incidentally, Photoshop was originally a product of Lucasfilm's computer graphics division (or at least of an employee and his brother and used by ILM in at least a few films), which eventually became Pixar...
 
OK, just found this thread...
I was at the Shake UG meeting and the switch is for desktop systems only.
They will still use the rather large Linux renderfarm they already have.

Among the reasons quoted for the switch was ease of use of the OS, simple to set up and maintain and the existance of a universal cut and paste. Also was Apple's stated dedication to the industry.

There was a rather extreme reaction in the room when the announcement was made... even some applause.

One thing that did suck was the keynote presentation crashed when the presenter tried to flip backwards through pages too fast. WHY does keynote do that!
 
Beta software?

I'm sure another factor that played into Pixar's decision was the new pixlet codec in Quicktime.
 
Pixlet was a codec designed at Pixar (with Apple's help).

Incidently, I was one of the presenters at the Shake UG. Pixar's reasoning was very sound. But in today's day and age, you often don't have piles of cash to throw around, everytime there is a new computer. I figure that the Mac will be a more widely spread CGI platform in the movie industry in a few years. It will happen slowly as workstations "age", and the studio wishes to try and find a more suitable replacement.

On an side note, linux render farms are really cheap. However, software licenses are fairly expensive. Also, there are several applications that are either windows or mac only. While Xserves are almost double the cost of a linux box, they do bridge the need to have two sets of (or *uughh* dual booting) intel servers. Also, if you are running Shake, the render nodes are free. (A huge incentive, right there..)
Its the classical "performance vs. productivity" comparison.

Lastly, you can do several movies on a render farm. Usually the render jobs are que'd using a job controller, which disperses frames over the entire r-farm.

bob..
 
Yeah, Pixar helped develop pixlet (that's where the "pix" part came from), and only Apple has control of the codec.
 
Hmmmm...I know it's a long shot, but what does Pixar DO with all those "old" year old G5's when they're done with them? E-bay? Auction? Throw them in the dumpster? Donate them to schools? I wannnnnt one.
 
Ask them in a year or two.

They will be using the G5's as workstations, so they probably won't be replacing them for quite a while, until they actually start showing signs of their age, I'd guess.
 
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