Lucas's New HQ

pin_gween writes "The KS City Star reports George Lucas (of the "It's not about the money" fame) has opened a new headquarters for digital film works. The campus has, among several movie theaters, "data network with more than 300 10-gigabyte ports. Fiber-optics cables are connected to every artist desktop, allowing high-resolution images on each computer. In all, there are 600 miles of cable throughout the campus's four buildings." Not too shabby, or cheap."

This has been open for a while...

[ip_freely_2000]

The Presidio facility has been open for a bit. Yes, it's sweet and one thing that can't be said about George is that he does thing half-assed.

Of course, the expectation is that you work INSANE hours. I only wish I could get this set up at home so I can balance my life a little better.

Fine and Good

[Tibor the Hun]

This is all fine and good, but it would sure be nice to spend some of that money on writing classes, or directing semminars.

Yes, all that technology is nice, but ultimately worthless, if the movies coming out of it have no substance.

byte or bit?

[grub]

data network with more than 300 10-gigabyte ports.

I think that means gigabits. Unless they started rating cards in bytes overnight.

Re:Fine and Good

[sciop101]

"all that technology is nice, but ultimately worthless, if the movies coming out of it have no substance"

Substance and Soul movies do not make money. Hollywood is about the $money$. Hollywood has to pay the mindle$$ actors to perform in mindle$$ crap.

Actor$ are expert at "performing as directed", not the subject of the performance.

These actors then appear on any and every star-worshipping television show to proselytize a science-fiction religion or world peace thru a high-fiber diet.

I don't think I like the tone of this post....

[cryptocom]

The paragraph submitted above for this article makes it seem like Lucas is hoarding all his money and somehow going against a cardinal rule of not making money. For one thing, non profit artists may seem romantic and all, but in truth we all want to get paid...and if what we do is make movies that cost millions of dollars, you better believe we want to get paid millions of dollars or more. Secondly, it's not like he's spending all his money on Bugatti's and trips to Bali...he's invested a large chunk into a creative complex where artists and movie-goers can benefit from his fortune. I'd say that's pretty damn cool.

Re:Fine and Good

[oogoliegoogolie]

Just because you and I have outgrown it doesn't mean he has.

I haven't outgrown Star Wars-I still watch the original movies and watch scenes from the new ones every once in a while. No, the new movies were just bad movies; even the animated Clone war shorts were much better.

comments like yours demonstrate your inability to understand who and what the movies are for

Movies dont have to be divided into "for children" and "for adult" categories. Countless movies have been made that have appealed to both. Pixar and Disney can do it, but Lucas can't, at least not anymore when he directs. In an interview from the 80's Lucas said "a boring movie with great special FX is still a boring movie. He seems to have forgotten these words.

You know, the "it's cool to bash Lucas and the prequels"

On slashdot, everything gets bashed.

Please stop with the reverse psychology crap

[Anonymous Coward]

And just watch the modders hit me on the head

You ought to get modded down just for pulling this reverse psychology bullshit. It's kinda insulting to us. Here's a radical notion: why don't you post your feelings and let the moderators decide whether to mod you up or down and you refrain from making predictions/comments about the process?

Re:Fine and Good

[Tibor the Hun]

Yes, you're right, the new trilogy is exactly like the crappy cartoons of old (GI Joe, Smurfs or Transformers.) (All of which were my favorites beyond belief.)

Remember the relationship between Solo and Leia. How it was all uncertain untill she said "I love you" just before they froze him? And then he says "I know". That was awesome.

The best he can come up with now is "I love you" "no, I love you" "hihihihi"
No amount of bandwidth and hi resolution images is gonna make that enjoyable.

Re:Hope it's better than ILM of the past.

[sgant]

What most do is get the ILM badge under their belt then move on to better places to work, like Pixar or Weta. Which is why ILM can't keep ahold of the good animators anymore cause they treat them like shit. But as I said, this may have changed.

But I hate this mentality of "well, you can work somewhere else". It's like the idiocy of "be thankful you have a job" nonsense. Why can't it be a nice place to work AND make a profit? Why does it have to be a sweatshop?

Re:I wish I had fibre optic on my desktop

[rsmith-mac]

Sure it will - you're looking up gigabytes of textures at any moment.

Re:Nice, but...

[marc252]

The point is that is easy to get a new computer every 3 years but it's quite difficult to wire a hole building every 3 years.

Not just rendering

[Namarrgon]

3D rendering involves a LOT more than just output, as someone else pointed out. And digitally post-producing movies requires a LOT more than just 3D renders.

There's all the live footage elements to consider - potentially dozens of layers for every final frame - each of which must be stored, converted, colour-graded, maybe stabilised, grain-matched, composited and edited.

What's more, any CG in the movie would be rendered as multiple separate 3D layers, not just a single frame, and all those layers also have to be colour- and grain-matched, unstabilised and composited with the live elements.

I've worked on a scene that required over 40 live and 450 CG layers for each frame of the shot - and each of those layers ranged from 40-80 MB (the shot was around 300 frames). That's around 20 GB per frame of pixels alone, not counting textures, CG geometry etc. And this data was used and re-used repeatedly as the shot evolved over the course of months.

A 10 gbps pipe to each workstation would really have helped, believe me :-)