Now Playing at a Theater Near You: Linux

By Dan Orzech
Internetnews.com

It may not be getting as much hoopla as Spiderman or the latest
Star Wars flick, but Linux is making a dramatic entrance this
summer in movie theaters across the country. The animated film
“Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron,” released last month, marks a
milestone in movie making: It is the first movie created entirely
on Linux systems.

It won’t be the last, either. Today’s announcment that the Walt
Disney Company will be shifting to the Linux platform for their
movie-making is just the latest in a long line of Linux sucess
stories in Hollywood.

The digital animation industry has been experimenting with Linux
for several years–parts of the 1997 film Titanic, for example,
were done on Linux. But now, Hollywood’s animation studios are in
the midst of a wholesale migration to the open source operating
system. At Dreamworks Animation, the studio responsible for Spirit,
as well as films like Shrek and Antz, almost all film production
work is now done on Linux. The move has slashed the company’s
computing infrastructure costs in half.

Like most of the digital animation industry, Dreamworks has
relied for years on high-powered graphics workstations from Silicon
Graphics. Two years ago, with the lease coming up on its existing
SGI machines, the company decided to switch to Linux on Intel. “We
wanted to get faster machines to our animators,” says Ed Leonard,
Dreamworks’ Head of Animation Technology. “And the performance of
Intel-based systems was growing more quickly than that of
proprietary hardware.”

Dreamworks replaced $25,000 SGI systems with machines that cost
well under $5,000, and provided more performance to boot. “We’re
getting machines that are four or five times faster at 20% of the
cost,” says Leonard. “That’s pretty compelling.”

The company’s animators now do their work on more than 500 Linux
workstations, primarily dual-processor Hewlett-Packard systems
running Red Hat Linux. In Dreamwork’s render farm, a similar number
of rack mounted Linux servers are used to turn the single frame
drawings created by the animators into lifelike movies.

A Linux Tidal Wave

While Dreamworks is further along the Linux path than most other
Hollywood animation studios, the rest of the industry is not far
behind. Linux is already being used to make movies at studios
including Digital Domain, which used it to render some images of
the ill-fated Titanic, at Weta Digital — think Lord of the Rings
— which is Linux on SGI systems, and at the Moving Picture Company
(Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone).

The movement towards Linux among animation studios is nothing
short of a “tidal wave,” says Mike Balma, Linux Solutions
Strategist at HP, which is making a major effort to supply the film
industry with Linux systems. At least two major studios, Pixar and
George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic, are reported to be on the
verge of major deployments of Linux.

Getting to this point, however, required an unprecedented level
of cooperation among competing studios. Many studio executives were
growing increasingly concerned about relying solely on one vendor,
SGI, which dominated the high-end graphics industry. Their
technical staff saw the advantages of being able to run Linux on
inexpensive commodity hardware, and wanted the flexibility that
access to the operating system’s source code allowed. But while
some of the studios internally produced packages, such as Pixar’s
PRMan image renderer, ran on Linux, much of the key third-party
software required to produce animated films didn’t.

That changed with a summer 2000 meeting of the Visual Effects
Society, the industry group for the film animation industry. Dubbed
the “VES Linux Summit,” the studios used the occasion to make the
case for Linux to their software vendors. Software producers such
as Alias|Wavefront, of Toronto, Canada, paid attention. Shortly
after the meeting, Alias|Wavefront announced a Linux port of Maya,
its well-known special effects package. “Customer demand for a
Linux version of Maya has driven this development,” said Bob
Bennett, General Manager of the Entertainment Business Unit for
Alias|Wavefront. Today, there are Linux versions of most of the
industry’s key software packages.

Support for the new systems was also a concern for studio
executives. When Dreamworks bought its systems from SGI, says
Leonard, “We had one company supplying an integrated system: CPU,
graphics cards, operating system and software. Now that those
pieces come from different places, trying to synchronize them can
be a challenge.”

Dreamworks tackled this by signing a support contract with HP,
which is also supplying many of its machines. But not running
proprietary hardware also gives the studio flexibility. “Since
these are commodity components,” says Leonard, “if a computer
breaks, we can just go to Fry’s [Electronic’s, of San Jose, Calif.]
and pick up the parts we need.”

Other film studios have been impressed with the techie-to-techie
help available online from other Linux users. “The quality of
technical support in the Linux community,” says Steve Rosenbluth,
control systems designer at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop studio, “is
equal to or better than the technical support from commercial
companies.”