The latest production diary from The Hobbit covers their impressive use of dual Red Epic and a Beam Splitter rig from 3ality to shoot the new film in 3D. They cover much of the technical details of the rig, and show lots of how they’re doing their video capture, preview work, and review.
Definitely check this out.
The Hobbit – Production Diary Video #4 [HD] [Official] – YouTube.
Kim Rees has a great article on many of the papers at VisWeek, focusing mostly on the ones in the InfoVis track.
While many of the research was focused on trying to “do something better,” there was one paper that presented a novel, new type of data visualization. GestaltLines (PDF) by Ulrik Brandes and Nick Bobo of the University of Konstanz used balance to visualize dyadic relationships. Even in its most basic form, a ‘Gestaltline’ shows type, extent, and time of the relationship. Color is left as a degree of freedom to encode other variables. Using a sparkline or multivariate glyph approach, a gestaltline can easily be placed within text as a dataword. The technique seems like a very intuitive way of viewing relationships.
He includes PDF’s to the papers that he can (a welcome addition that I’m adding to my Evernote collection right now), and also covers some of the Visweek flops.
via The Most Interesting Papers at the Infovis Conference (VisWeek 2011) – information aesthetics.
Finishing this week’s theme – the economical issues surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement -, we’ll start featuring a quite recent infographic created by the folks at JESS3 and Fast Company, breaking down the responses of a survey conducted at occupywallstreet.org. After that, Bankrupting America, Business Insider and Loans and Credit help us understand another major problem, related to the curtrent crisis, and this one not only in the United States: international debt.
I thought it worth bringing to your attention a new Special Interest Group (SIG) within the ACM dedicated to High Performance Computing called ‘SIGHPC’. I really like this line in their charter:
The scope of SIGHPC specialty is high performance computing (HPC) in the broadest sense of the term – spanning the full range of high-performance technologies, systems, and applications. It embraces not only people who study, develop, teach, or support HPC, but also those engaged in applying HPC across a broad spectrum of scientific, engineering, and business domains.
So, it sounds like the perfect place to possibly take what used to be the scientific visualization angles of SIGGRAPH. Right now tools like VisIt and ParaView, along with the many research aspects of Data Visualization & Analysis on petascale and exascale machines are a bit lost within the ACM, winding up mainly in IEEE venues like VisWeek. Maybe with a bit of interest and effort, they can find an ACM home within this new SIGHPC.
If you’re interested, membership is currently only $25 a year, and they will have more information in a few weeks at SC11 in Seattle.
Sad news from AMD today, as they announce an unfortunate 10% Workforce Reduction (1,400 employees by some counts) that they hope will reduce operating expenses by $118 million in 2012.
“Reducing our cost structure and focusing our global workforce on key growth opportunities will strengthen AMD’s competitiveness and allow us to aggressively pursue a balanced set of strategic activities designed to accelerate future growth,” said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. “The actions we are taking are designed to improve our ability to consistently address the needs of our global customer base and stake leadership positions in lower power, emerging markets and the cloud.”
It’s not terribly surprising, as AMD has been having a bit of a rough patch compared to NVidia and Intel. Their CPU’s are falling short of Intel’s performance figures, and their GPU’s are falling in market-share compared to NVidia and the new Intel Sandy-Bridge. With Intel rapidly entering the GPU space and NVidia moving powerfully into the mobile space, AMD will soon have to find a new way to compete.
Update: Quickly doing the math ($118 Million over 1,400 employees), that’s an average $85k per employee. Not CEO’s, but not exactly assembly line workers either.
Update #2 9PM: More info, this time from BSN via a Letter from AMD CEO Rory Read.
From what we heard, of the 1400 people that AMD laid off, there is about 60% of the marketing department, with known executives such as Patrick “Pat”Moorhead (VP Marketing), John Volkmann (VP of Brand), Dave Kroll (Head of PR), complete product reviewer support team all getting the boot.
The cuts however, did not touch just the marketing and sales staff. Key Fusion engineers were let go as well.
As the third paragraph states, AMD will announce its new course, codenamed “Project WIN”on November 9th, 2011.
via AMD Optimizes Cost Structure to Enhance Competitiveness and Accelerate Growth.
NICT and JVC Kenwood have come together to create an extreme display that’s being touted as the world’s largest full-HD 3D display, that offers views from 57 differetn angles.
“This display lets you watch video from 57 different angles. And no matter which angle you’re viewing from, you can see a Full High Definition resolution image. With an ordinary display, the viewing range is basically around 180 degrees, but with this one, it’s 13 degrees, which is very narrow. But within that range, for example if you look from the right edge, and from the left, you can see the picture from different angles. So for example, if you’re looking at a square box, you can see the sides at well.”
This is something similar to what Alioscopy and others in their displays, but it’s the first time I’m aware of someone doing it with projectors. But 57 projectors? I can’t even imagine the calibration nightmares of such a setup. Once it’s all setup however, I’m sure it’s amazing to watch and would be perfect for something like a display showroom. Check out the video below.
via NICT demonstrate the World’s Largest Full HD Glasses-Free 3D Display « Akihabara News.
Dreamworks had lots of experience with the characters and environments of the Shrek series that they could reuse in much of the new Puss In Boots film, but the additional new characters required a good bit of new design and development work. They actually found that their previous fur system used in the Shrek films didn’t scale to having Puss and his companion Kitty as major characters, so they had to find a new system.
On prior films, Dreamworks had relied on a proprietary fur system, but this time around artists used Houdini for much of the fur. “We found that Houdini could handle an order of magnitude number of curves bigger than we’ve been able to in the past,” says Bielenberg. “We had a one to one representation of curves for the fur that were interacting with other objects like the belt. The character FX artists could pull up Houdini and really get a WYSIWYG representation. You could see how the curves were interacting with any forces in Houdini. And four or five simulations could happen in the one package, rather than a serial process.”
Cinedeck has just announced a new version of their Cinedeck EX system that adds in support for their new Cinedeck Controller software, offering remote control of up to 24 different Cinedeck units simultaneously and new playback and archive management features.
“Users already enjoy the experience of using, and interacting with, Cinedeck EX, and their feedback has resulted in the new Cinedeck EX v2.5 software version containing a host of enhanced features,” said Cinedeck CEO Alan Hoff. “These new features focus on usability and performance improvements to optimize the fundamental operation of Cinedeck EX where it matters most – in production. With the new v2.5 version available now, current and new customers will enjoy the Cinedeck EX experience even more.”
Maintenance customers can get it now, free of charge. New customers will have to shell out $8,00 for it. Get the full release after the break.
Today’s selection brings the works presented by Credit Loan, Forbes, Focus and Vistage, trying to understand what happened to the stock market, the drop in U.S Competitiveness, and the small business credit recession, just to quote some of the facts mentioned in these infographics.
Google’s newest mobile OS “Android 4.0″ has lots of improvements to the UI and guts of the system. However, one thing many people don’t know that the new OS combined with newer ARM systems enables one additional exciting feature: GPU computing with the RenderScript API. Alone that’s impressive, but combined with some of the unique hardware features it could really prove amazing. Check out the new memory and cache system supported on the new Mali-T604 (Rumored to be the guts of Samsung’s upcoming products):
The ARM Mali-T604 GPU is designed to work with the latest version (4) of the AMBA (Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture) which features Cache Coherent Interconnect (CCI). Data shared between processors in the system, a natural occurrence in heterogeneous computing, no longer requires costly (in terms of cycles and energy) synchronization via external memory and explicit cache maintenance operations. All of this is now performed in hardware, and is enabled transparently inside the drivers. In addition to reduced memory traffic, CCI avoids superfluous sharing of data: only data genuinely requested by another master is transferred to it, to the granularity of a cache line. No need to flush a whole buffer or data structure anymore.
These memory flush’es are one of the worst things of modern GPU & GPGPU systems: One little branch conditional can destroy your performance. In addition, every time you have to flush your data back to main memory, or load memory into the GPU, that’s a lengthy and performance-killing operation if done often. These new unified designs have the potential to nullify the impact of these operations, making GPU programming closer to CPU programming than ever before.
via GPU Computing in Android? With ARM Mali-T604 & RenderScript Compute You Can! – ARM Community.
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