Computers in the movies

[Derek Simmons]

It was not exactly a computer but the other night I was watching the
last Starfighter and noticed a Heathkit HERO robot running about in a
scene.

Bye the way, the extras on the DVD has a feature recounting the making
of the film with some of the special effects people working with Cray
super computers. In it the show one of the Cray's used to generate the
film and animators working at CALMA workstations.

Derek

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Derek Simmons
It was not exactly a computer but the other night I was watching the
last Starfighter and noticed a Heathkit HERO robot running about in a
scene.
Bye the way, the extras on the DVD has a feature recounting the making
of the film with some of the special effects people working with Cray
super computers. In it the show one of the Cray's used to generate the
film and animators working at CALMA workstations.

I heard that halfway through production a Y-MP became available to them
and they redid a lot of scenes because they could now render a lot more
polygons.

[Eugene Miya]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Derek Simmons
It was not exactly a computer but the other night I was watching the
last Starfighter and noticed a Heathkit HERO robot running about in a
scene.
By the way, the extras on the DVD has a feature recounting the making
of the film with some of the special effects people working with Cray
super computers. In it the show one of the Cray's used to generate the
film and animators working at CALMA workstations.

I heard that halfway through production a Y-MP became available to them
and they redid a lot of scenes because they could now render a lot more
polygons.

Y-MPs only came available in 1988.
LSF was way before that.
Had to have been an X-MP.
I can't remember anymore what Whitney-Deimos had (a 1 or an X).
Mostly run in a scalar mode.

Very few Crays in open motion picture film business.
They can't afford the maintenance.

--

[Keith Thompson]

Post by Eugene Miya

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Derek Simmons
It was not exactly a computer but the other night I was watching the
last Starfighter and noticed a Heathkit HERO robot running about in a
scene.
By the way, the extras on the DVD has a feature recounting the making
of the film with some of the special effects people working with Cray
super computers. In it the show one of the Cray's used to generate the
film and animators working at CALMA workstations.

I heard that halfway through production a Y-MP became available to them
and they redid a lot of scenes because they could now render a lot more
polygons.

Y-MPs only came available in 1988.
LSF was way before that.
Had to have been an X-MP.
I can't remember anymore what Whitney-Deimos had (a 1 or an X).
Mostly run in a scalar mode.
Very few Crays in open motion picture film business.
They can't afford the maintenance.

According to <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/trivia>, The Last
Starfighter was

The first movie to do all special effects (except makeup and
explosions) on a computer. All shots of spacecraft, space, etc
were generated on a Cray X-MP computer.

[Larry Luther]

Post by Keith Thompson

Post by Eugene Miya

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Derek Simmons
It was not exactly a computer but the other night I was watching the
last Starfighter and noticed a Heathkit HERO robot running about in a
scene.
By the way, the extras on the DVD has a feature recounting the making
of the film with some of the special effects people working with Cray
super computers. In it the show one of the Cray's used to generate the
film and animators working at CALMA workstations.

I heard that halfway through production a Y-MP became available to them
and they redid a lot of scenes because they could now render a lot more
polygons.

Y-MPs only came available in 1988.
LSF was way before that.
Had to have been an X-MP.
I can't remember anymore what Whitney-Deimos had (a 1 or an X).
Mostly run in a scalar mode.
Very few Crays in open motion picture film business.
They can't afford the maintenance.

According to <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/trivia>, The Last
Starfighter was
The first movie to do all special effects (except makeup and
explosions) on a computer. All shots of spacecraft, space, etc
were generated on a Cray X-MP computer.
--
<http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
San Diego Supercomputer Center <*>
<http://users.sdsc.edu/~kst>
We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.

I was there, see "Larry Luther" in programmer's credits.

We ended up with a Cray XMP.

Production was late, scenes were redone only if they were faulty.
We had a lot of vectorization in the renderer, written in Fortran
(Cray's only viable offering).

Hardware:

* Digital Equipment Corporation Vax (11-780) was used as the central hub.
The Cray was used as a graphics rendering peripheral (2 million 36 bit
words).
Ramtek frame buffers were the display devices.
Users communicated with the machines using ASCII terminals.
Film recorders came from III.

The production pipeline was:

* Encoding started with Evans & Sutherland PS-300 vector display machines
which communicated with our VAXs at 64KB/sec and had to be programmed
with data flow techniques (very odd but someone thought theoretically
elegant).
Communication to machines was slow and unreliable.

* Motion choreography wasn't originally planned for!! Ken Dozier and I
saw the hopelessness of that and quickly created a motion choreography
program for the PS-300. This quickly proved the concept to the art
director Ron Cobb who loved seeing and editing the motion before it was
rendered (which took a long time). We eventually got IMI's UNIX based
(System V) machines which communicated over ethernet and had a far more
standard graphics architecture where you created a graphics assembly
program
with a few well understood commands. The Prevue program remained
split between the Vax supporting the user's interface and the IMI vector
display.

* Technical directors were responsible for motion choreography and for
lighting etc. They used Ramtek frame buffers 1280x1024x24 (2 buffers)
which cost about $100,000 for displaying the pictures.

[Keith Thompson]

[...]

Post by Larry Luther

Post by Keith Thompson
According to <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/trivia>, The Last
Starfighter was
The first movie to do all special effects (except makeup and
explosions) on a computer. All shots of spacecraft, space, etc
were generated on a Cray X-MP computer.

[...]

Post by Larry Luther
I was there, see "Larry Luther" in programmer's credits.
We ended up with a Cray XMP.

[...]

Post by Larry Luther
Production was late, scenes were redone only if they were faulty.
We had a lot of vectorization in the renderer, written in Fortran
(Cray's only viable offering).
* Digital Equipment Corporation Vax (11-780) was used as the central hub.
The Cray was used as a graphics rendering peripheral (2 million 36 bit
words).

Really? I thought the Y-MP had 64-bit words.

[Larry Luther]

Post by Keith Thompson
[...]

Post by Larry Luther

Post by Keith Thompson
According to <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/trivia>, The Last
Starfighter was
The first movie to do all special effects (except makeup and
explosions) on a computer. All shots of spacecraft, space, etc
were generated on a Cray X-MP computer.

[...]

Post by Larry Luther
I was there, see "Larry Luther" in programmer's credits.
We ended up with a Cray XMP.

[...]

Post by Larry Luther
Production was late, scenes were redone only if they were faulty.
We had a lot of vectorization in the renderer, written in Fortran
(Cray's only viable offering).
* Digital Equipment Corporation Vax (11-780) was used as the central hub.
The Cray was used as a graphics rendering peripheral (2 million 36 bit
words).

Really? I thought the Y-MP had 64-bit words.
--
<http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
San Diego Supercomputer Center <*>
<http://users.sdsc.edu/~kst>
We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.

Yes, my error it had 64 bit words.

P.S. The Cray XD1 I'm using now is using SUSE 9.3 which they have
modified to support their backplane.
P.P.S. I would not recommend this box, the disk I/O is less than
15 MB/sec. No further work is going to be done on the system
which might have fixed the problem.

[Eugene Miya]

Post by Keith Thompson
The first movie to do all special effects (except makeup and
explosions) on a computer. All shots of spacecraft, space, etc
were generated on a Cray X-MP computer.

I think it's almost 20 years since I took the Bay Area SIGGRAPH
Presidency. So today I had lunch with and "on" one of my old graphics
friends who founded PDI. He and his firm have come a long way.
I had left (minimal) graphics a few years prior after leaving JPL and
only came back to organize a tired chapter. Then I dropped graphics
again for more interesting computing. I knew PDI was it was 5 people.
They employ 400 permanent and up to 1200 part-time on a film, and they
have a pipeline of films. We considered looking at the current server
farm, but we thought better of it. Now they are just Linux boxes after all.
We talked about mutual friends at pixar (I once helped run the ski cabin)
and Lucasfilm (which spun off pixar). Real space is more interesting.

I have no regrets as I didn't have a lot invested in synthetic image
generation (just student exercises, much more in image processing).

--