Katzenberg Says DreamWorks Will Render In Realtime, Speed Up Animation Work 50X

Making an animated movie is a tedious process because of all the intense computing power and rendering required. *”An expert animator can do about 3 seconds of animation in a week,” Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg says, speaking onstage today at the Techonomy conference. *But a joint R&D effort with Intel, which he describes as the largest such effort in Hollywood today with a budget in the “many tens of millions of dollars” promises to change the way computer-generated animation is produced. *Katzenberg expects a 50X to 70X improvement in the productivity of his animators.

The research project is in its third year, but has never been revealed before. *It takes advantage of Intel’s Sandybridge multicore processor. *The issue with multi-core processors is that software is way behind in taking advantage of their paralel computing capabilities. *”The problem is software does not let you optimize all this,” says Katzenberg, “it is almost like having a 1,000 horsepower engine in your car and driving 30 mph.”

Animators have to work with low resolution files, then send it to rendering overnight for 8 hours and see if it came out right. Then they do it again. ” The Holy Grail would be for us to have an artist actually see their work as they do it,” says Katzenberg. *And that is exactly what this research project aims to do for Dreamworks. The animation house had to rewrite all of its in-house animation software, but is already seeing the fruits of the collaboration, which runs through next year.

The fruits of the research is already showing up in Dreamworks movies. *”This now allows us to operate at 50X to 70X of what we were doing,” he says.

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