Several Types of Featured Films That Need VFX

Posted on 04/25/2013 by Janus Cheung

Speaking of films need VFX, I can think of four types of them, Sci-Fi film, Fantasy film, Disaster film and Super-hero film. Let’s see why these four types featured films need VFX so much.

Sci-Fi Film

Obviously, Sci-Fi film got to use lots of VFX. It is almost impossible to let audience have great watching experience without using VFX in Sci-Fi film. Landing on Mars, alien invasion, bio-mutation, robot rebellion……scenes like this definitely need help of visual effects. Common audience would prefer to experience visual impact rather than to think about those theories related to science. In fact, most scenes in Sci-Fi films turn into reality later. So the contribution of special effects artists is more than just films.

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The Magic Power of Visual Effects to Films (1)

Posted on 04/10/2013 by Janus Cheung

The most basic concept of visual effects to a film is to make things that are not existent. For example, there are tons of crazy plots in the science fiction disaster film 2012; including towering waves dragging USS Roosevelt up to the land, the White House being destroyed by flood, Tibet becoming the manufacturing centre of refuge spacecraft Noah’s Ark and being transformed into a sci-fi military base, volcanic eruptions happening to Yellowstone National Park and causing fireballs crush to the land and destroy the whole park……
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Facts about IMAX

Posted on 03/19/2013 by Janus Cheung

Nowadays, when a new title is released and we want to watch it, especially a sci-fi film, the first thing we may concern is whether it is IMAX. Yes, we talk about IMAX A LOT these years! But what is IMAX exactly?

IMAX is the abbreviation of Image Maximum. It was a set of cinema projection system which was invented by three Canadians during 1970s. Usually the standard for IMAX screen is 22m wide and 16m high. Therefore, the resolution of IMAX projection system is much bigger and higher than the traditional projection system. But it does not mean all of IMAX theaters are built according to this specification, for example, the IMAX theatre of the China Science and Technology Museum; it is 22m high and 29.58m wide. Actually, as IMAX movies becoming popular, the IMAX screen is becoming bigger than before. Yet, some theatres are built inside malls, which means those theatres have small screens that do not reach the standard.

In order to play IMAX movie, the cinemas usually purchase or rent IMAX projection system from IMAX Company and sign contracts to build up IMAX theatres. As long as it has IMAX authorized trademark, it is IMAX theatre. Except for IMAX screen, there is also IMAX dome, usually for planetarium and museum. Emerging in recent years is the IMAX 3D giant screen, bringing audience a double moviegoing experience by integrating giant screen and 3D technology.

Back in the old days, when we talk about IMAX movies, we mean IMAX 15/70, the real IMAX. The projection system uses rolling-loop 15/70 film technology. And that is why IMAX cameras have huge volume. Take MSM 9802 for example, it is much bigger than the usual 35mm camera. Although the images are crystal clear by using IMAX cameras and 70mm film, not many directors use them. Actually the fact is, there is no such a film which is totally shot with 70/15 and IMAX camera. Only Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and upcoming Star Trek into Darkness and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire have sequences that are 15/70 filmed. That is because the cost for producing real IMAX movie is too expensive and IMAX Corp has developed DMR technology.

MSM 9802

DMR (Digital Media Remastering) can convert conventional films into IMAX format, which means directors can keep shooting films on 35mm and those films are able to be shown in IMAX venues. DMR gradually make IMAX movie become the mainstream and acceptable for audience. However, since the volume of 70mm film is too big, usually the cost for transportation is very high and the cost for 70mm film itself is expensive as well. To get rid of this predicament, IMAX debuted a digital projection system Digital IMAX.

One good thing of Digital IMAX is, the film can be saved into the hard disk and projected through two projectors. This definitely reduces the cost for converting 35mm into 70mm, transportation and project system. But there is a controversy regarding Digital IMAX. The screens for Digital IMAX are smaller than IMAX Classic and the projectors for digital IMAX are 2K-resolution. Some audiences think it is fake IMAX and it does not have the same crystal clear images as IMAX classic.

Sure there is a huge difference between Digital IMAX and IMAX 15/70. It is still hard to decide which one is better, since the technology keeps updating. But no matter how, we have reason to believe the prospect of IMAX movie is really good, just like black and white silent film in the old days developing into color talkies. Audiences always want a better viewing experience as the quality of life improves constantly. In order to satisfy audiences, the film industry continues to make breakthrough to make existing technology get to next level. As one saying goes, artists are always challenging the limit of technology. Of course, Fox Renderfarm is constantly breaking through the technology bottleneck as well. We believe we can provide world-class render service with our users and help artists around the world to show their creativity and make dreams come true!

4K Production, the Mainstream in Film Production

Posted on 02/05/2013 by Janus Cheung

I am sure lots of people hear technical terms of digital cinema like HD, 1K, 2K, even 4K a lot. For example, you meet a friend today and he says “Hey, I heard that Tom Cruise’s new sci-fi film Oblivion is coming out and it is a 4K movie!” Yeah! You heard this kind of 4K term again. You know its existence, but what exactly do these terms mean?

Today I am going to elaborate these technical terms of digital cinema so that people, especially those who just stepped into the door sill of digital cinema.

Binary arithmetic is generally used in the field of digital technology, and the pixels that make up a picture are used to describe the size of the digital image. Usually we use K to represent two to the ten which is 1024 due to the huge number of pixels.

The term we may be most familiar with, for example, HD, is 1920 × 1080. 1920 is the horizontal pixel resolution while 1080 is the vertical. For 2K, it is 2048 × 1080, and 4K, 4096 × 2160. During the production of digital master and digital projection, the horizontal and vertical pixels of image need to be adjusted according to the different aspect ratio. And for simplicity, we usually use the pixels in the horizontal direction to refer to the image size. So 1K means there are 1024 pixels in the horizontal direction while 2K means 2048 and 4K means 4096.

Nowadays, 4K digital film has become a mainstream. When we talk about 4K digital films in professional production, we usually mean the film is captured by 4K CGI or 8K scanners or 8K sensors cameras (8K is 7680 × 4320 pixels). Yet according to the aspect ratio it is used, 4K digital films may be scanned or stored in a number of other resolutions.

Why do I say 4K production has become a mainstream? Actually, it is not just 4K production but also 8K production is becoming a mainstream. As we can see, compared with 4K and 8K production, HD is out of date. To provide audiences with best experiments in watching a movie, more and more studios choose to produce high resolution footage. For example, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Dark Knight Rises and 007: Skyfall are all shot in 4K; and upcoming we have The Smurfs 2 and Oblivion. We can also see the number of 4K digital movie is increasing and so will be 8K movie.

For most studios, the difficulties of producing 4K or 8K movie are equipment and budgets. You need not only great high-res camera like 5K Epic from Red or F65 from Sony, but also powerful facilities for post-production. Though our company Fox Renderfarm is not able to provide clients with one-stop post-production service, we definitely can contribute to the post-production in terms of rendering. Of course most studios have their own render farm and I believe they are all well-equipped, yet the existence of Fox Renderfarm is to solve sudden rendering problems for our clients. It is normal that there are always some unexpected problems occurring in the process of production. And that is why we have Fox Renderfarm. We are here to provide rendering solutions with our clients from CGI and movie industry and endeavor to offer great watching experiments to audiences!

Estimation Doubt

Posted on 02/27/2012 by Janus Cheung

The most concerned issue from artists and designers who decide to use a Render Farm would be SECURITY and PRICE.

Let’s talk about PRICE issue here today.

Once, a client asked me to estimate for his project. First, he asked me how much it would take to render 10 still images in our render farm. I asked him how long it took to render 1 frame on his machine and what his machine spec was. He told me, and I did the estimation for him. Then after 2 days, he asked me how much it would take if he wanted to render a 5 minutes animation. I still asked the same question. But this time, he wouldn’t tell me and then questioned my professionalism by saying “Do you not know anything except for how to plug in numbers to a formula? Do you have any actual experience in this business?”

I have to say, yep, I’m not a typical 3D designer, BUT I had professional training before and I’ve tested our platform on my own with different scene files. The reason why I ask so many questions about your machine spec because I’m trying to be responsible. Every client renders different scenes, some scenes are simple and some scenes are complicated. Every client may use different processor to render their scenes, some will be faster and some will be slower. If I’m going to do an estimation for you, how can I do that more precisely without knowing any information about your scene files and machine spec? Actually our first suggestion is always “You can register on our website and do a free testing for your project.” YES! Once you register on our website, you will have 20 credits to experience our platform and do the estimation for your project.

Honestly, the estimation from the system is far more precised than the one I do for you. And you can also get to understand how our system works. If the credits are not enough for your testing, tell us! We will add more in your account!

Speaking of this, I have to stress again, rendering simple scenes (it means it only take 10-60 seconds to render 1 frame on your machine) usually takes more time in our system because the time of running software maybe longer than the actual rendering time. We are figuring whether we can minus this software-running time out of rendering time so that we can save the cost for you. We are trying to take some measures because we don’t want to lose any clients for this problem. It takes time. But eventually we will make it.

Be patient! We will keep you posted!

Upload and Download

Posted on 02/21/2012 by Janus Cheung

Time to time I hear from our clients that the uploading speed is too slow. This is the last thing I want to hear because it is true that sometimes it takes a long time to upload files to our servers if you are far far away from China. Sometimes I feel frustrated about it since it is a distance problem and this problem may cause our clients give up on us so that they can not experience how great our service is.

However, we still figure out several solutions that may do some help on this.

a) If you are uploading by FTP, and the speed is slow, try use WEB uploading. In theory, WEB uploading is faster than FTP since it is multithread;

b) If you are uploading by WEB and the speed is slow, try use FTP. Sometimes FTP is just faster WEB uploading;

c) If both these ways do not work well, please contact us at sevice@foxrenderfarm.com or Skype-foxrenderfarm.com and MSN: foxrenderfarm@msn.com. We will provide you another FTP which is based in USA. It’s much faster, but we have to manually copy the data to our servers after your uploading.

Now let’s move forward to downloading.

Actually there is nothing much to talk about it, it is almost the same as what I said above. What I want to say here is most of our clients have never used our self-developed widget for downloading. On my opinion, it is very convenient. After submitting your task, you can leave for a break, letting the widget download rendered images for you.

a) This widget is only an exe. file, no need to install and just put it in the desktop then you can run it.

b) This is how it looks after you running it, then enter your username and password.

c) Then click ‘+Add download task’, or right click to add download task, as shown:

d) Then the interface will show your recent 10 tasks and you can select one to save.

e) As it is shown, the task has been added to download list. Even though this task is being rendered, the rendered images will be added to list automatically. And you can continue to right-click to add other rendering tasks to the list. As long as you run this tool, rendered images will be downloaded automatically. So at this point, you can take a break!

That’s quite almost what I want to say today. Hope this is going to do some help for your rendering service!

It’s time to enjoy my high tea now—Strawberry Tart,（¯﹃¯） yummy! I believe high tea can always help people go back to work with energy after a hard day. Have you had it yet?╮(╯▽╰)╭

Configuration Updated

Posted on 02/13/2012 by Janus Cheung

Hello Everyone!

I am thrilled to tell you all that the machine configuration of Fox Render Farm has been updated.

You can see the hardware specification as follows:

Processor: Intel Xeon E5645, 24 cores with hyper-threading

RAM: 24GB

Local Networking: 20Gbps InfiniBand

As you can see, the hardware specification of our machines is much better than before and I am sure it is going to do a better job in helping you render out your job in a much shorter time with a higher perfomance.

And now I also want to solve a doubt which confuses some of our clients for a long time. As you see, we have such powerful machines, and it is only right and proper that these machines can render all scenes in a very short time.

However, recently I heard from some clients that our machines render ever slower than theirs!

What exactly happened?

The truth is, the rendering time includes the time of opening a scene, running a software and rendering. Unlike rendering on your own machine, which is already on and will not stop working unless you turn it off, our machines have to be rebooted every time they need to render a scene. So if you are rendering a less complicated scene, let’s say you render a scene which takes like 30s to 200s on your own machine, it may take longer time on our machine. However, if you are rendering a much complicated scene, our machines definitely will have a higher performance than yours and save much more time for you.

Now the problem is coming: so if I need to render a less complicated scene, I should not use your render farm because it will take more time and therefore the cost is higher?

Answer: Of course you can use our render farm and have your job done within the budget! Don’t forget we still have Unlimited Render Package for you. You are allowed to submit infinite tasks to render during the period of validity of package. There will be more CPU cores than those listed above to render your scene if our machines are idle. The system will assign machines to your task automatically and it is Free! It definitely save for your budget and have your job done in time!

I have to say our platform is not perfect, just like everything in the world. But we do kick ass to make up our deficiency. And we are open to accept any suggestions or advice from you. We may be not the best, but we definitely want to be better and you can help us with it. So, let me know~If you have any suggestions for us! Thank you so much!

p.s: Right now is the best timing to enjoy flowers in China, I’m posting a pic of peach blossoms I took days ago. Hope you will enjoy it! Have a good day~

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