_46526627_gpus-harry-potterbodAs the capabilities of GPU continue to amaze us, movie studios are the first to jump on the bandwagon as a means for reducing their rendertimes.  The BBC talks to guys at Sony Pictures, LucasFilm, and ILM to talk about what they’ve seen.

“With this system, the creative process has been transformed from tedious to fun,” said Rob Bredow, chief technology officer for Sony Pictures Imageworks, which used Nvidia’s GPU to make “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.”

“When an artist can do 10 times as many iterations of an effect in the same amount of time, the quality of the end product will be that much better. Renders that would have taken 45 minutes or more to run on a CPU, are now cut down to 45 seconds,” he said.

Mr Kerris from LucasFilm is in total agreement.

“In the past, a lot of times the director would say ‘I want this kind of effect’ and the team would go away, do their work and a year later come back with it and if it wasn’t what you as a director wanted, then the whole process had to get re-instated.

via BBC NEWS | Technology | GPUs: the next frontier in film.