the goose

that laid the

golden egg

With predictions of $1 billion in new business coming to sgi from the film and television market in 1996, the question is, will the post community buy in as heavily as expected ?

Silicon Graphics workstations are increasingly common sightings in animation and effects environments; sgi’s market share in animation is an astounding 90%. Now the company is expanding into other areas of film and video production, addressing the potential of digital retooling as a huge area of growth and positioning itself in the fast lane of the information superhighway.

sgi calls its broadcast marketing thrust The Silicon Studio. It is built around three tiers of hardware solutions for the film and television market, but also relies on a diverse group of partners, alliances and parallel efforts for the synergy to make it work. Those partners are, first and foremost, software companies – experienced sgi providers with new offerings; companies moving applications to this platform; and ‘black box’ manufacturers applying their experience, code and customer bases to open-system versions of their devices.

The Silicon Studio is like a supermarket for film and television technology, one in which film and video companies can shop for the combination of computer hardware, software, and third-party peripheral products, such as digital disk recorders, that’s right for their work, people, and capitalization. It’s a pragmatic approach to the inevitable transition to workstation-centered production.

Silicon Graphics is also positioning itself as a key solutions provider for the infobahn, developing set-top devices and testing interactive tv in 4,000 homes in Orlando, Florida. A joint venture with Sprint is providing high-bandwidth dial-up links between sgi users. Add Project Reality, a joint venture with Nintendo to develop new game technology (with Nintendo standardizing development of this technology on software from Toronto’s Alias Research), and you’ve got a profile of a company moving fast to make sure it’s front and center in the digital entertainment environment on all fronts.

The Silicon Studio offers solutions in most areas of post-production: paint, titling, illustration, 2D and 3D animation and effects, compositing, nonlinear off-line and on-line editing, rendering and digital disk recording.

While you can make a strong case for other platforms in many of these areas (the Macintosh, for example, has a loyal following in the audio post business), there is agreement that the raw horsepower of sgi’s high end is not duplicated on any other ‘white box,’ the industry’s term for general-purpose computer hardware.

INDY, Indigo, Onyx:

the SGI hardware lines

sgi has three clear platform choices: indy, the sgi entry-level computer; the Indigo family, considered the workstations of choice for the work you’d normally associate with sgi – 2D and 3D animation and effects; and the Onyx, a supercomputer-class machine about the size of a small fridge.

While prices start at $7,300 for the entry-level indy, a basic effects configuration, including 64 megabytes of ram, a one-gigabyte hard drive, and Alias Animator software was recently advertised at under $30,000.

According to C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures’ partner Derek Grime, ‘The indy is not souped up on the graphic end. It doesn’t have the hardware to do 3D interactive work. It’ll do it, but at a much lower rate of performance than an Indigo. But it’s still better than something like a Personal Iris, and it’s fine for student work.’

The Indigo line, currently the workhorse of the sgi family for all broadcast applications, has three levels: the xl, which does not contain a hardware graphic engine; the xz, which contains two graphics engines; and the Extreme, with eight graphics engines. Cost for a professional-level system, including a program like Alias Power Animator with Advanced Animation, is in the $60,000 range.

At the high end ($200,000-plus), the sgi Onyx, Crimson and Challenge provide the raw horsepower for real-time 3D rendering, real-time compositing and special effects, Virtual Reality applications, and large networks. The graphics engine of the Onyx, the Reality Engine, is essential for the heavy-duty applications the post community throws at it. In addition, the Sirius Video card for the Onyx allows you to take video in and out of the computer in real time. The Onyx/Reality Engine/ Sirius Video combination is touted as the fastest graphics machine in the world today.

Dome Animation’s John Stollar says, ‘The biggest area of growth is series and effects work. And for this work you have to deal with volume. Where sgi is headed is real-time in, and real-time out. To handle that amount of pictures and processing, you need power, and that’s what the Onyx gives you. You can do serious work without the Onyx, but at a cost I wouldn’t want to contemplate; it takes up all your capacity.’

Only time will tell

But can an Onyx replace the Henry or the dedicated on-line equipment? Regan McGrath, a sales representative for the video and film market with SGI Canada, says, ‘I think the black boxes will be around for a reasonable amount of time. Dedicated hardware does a real good job on certain things. Time will tell as to how fast computer technology and software development moves along to really see when all those black boxes go away and everything’s general purpose.

‘It’s not fair to say that in five years, nobody will buy a black box anymore. If you want to spend the ultimate amount of money, there will always be dedicated things that will do stuff faster.’

All sgi computers utilize the unix operating system. It seems unix has been around forever; there are some 1,500 applications available commercially, covering everything from word processing to wind tunnel simulations. Silicon Graphics has determinedly stayed out of the software business, although it has provided some much-needed innovations in unix technology in the form of Indigo Magic, a point-and-click, icon-based graphic front end that fights the command-line fear the word unix has been known to inspire.

Software: a full suite

We’ve listed most of the major players in the Canadian market here; to prevent confusion, product names are bold.

As you can see, there’s a staggering amount of choice in the post world. And that doesn’t cover it; there are also special-purpose software packages for tasks like blue-screen matte creation. Every company Video Innovations spoke to had a different suite of tools, the final decision being a combination of the preference and experience of their creative staffs, training, upgrading, and support provided by vendors, and the effectiveness of the mix between the software and the artists using the software. Price was never mentioned as a selection issue.

No ‘one-box’

solutions

Is The Silicon Studio to broadcasting what desktop publishing was to the print world – one box, many tools in the box, little need to buy more than a couple of peripherals? Probably not.

TOPIX Computer Graphics and Animation’s Chris Wallace says: ‘It’s a one-room solution. There’s no such thing as a one-box solution. What you get is one box among many boxes that all interconnect, hopefully, and work. They (sgi) have a box that will sit in the center of all that, and connect to all these other boxes, and it works.’

Says Stollar: ‘I agree with it being a one-platform solution. Their competition are the closed systems – the black boxes. It certainly makes sense to us from an animation perspective because it gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility in what we can make this tool do, even though the tool itself hasn’t changed. What they’re moving to, editing, compositing, and promoting it as a tool that can do everything, I truly believe that is the direction it is going in, and I’m focusing my company in that direction. I believe in it quite a bit.

The price is right

‘Another thing it has going for it is price; a setup for digital editing and compositing, say something equivalent to a Henry, costs a lot less money. If you look a year or two down the road, which is a long time in this business, it’s a safer investment. Let’s say I buy an Onyx. If I’m betting that everything is going to be done on one box, and that’s how it turns out, it’s a pretty good purchase. If it turns out that they’re not able to come up with the proper applications, or people just aren’t comfortable with it, I’ve still got a box that can make me a lot of revenue. And that’s what makes it a very safe investment,’ Stollar says.

‘The other thing I think it will do is break down the barriers to entry in post-production, which right now are pretty large. The standards will not change. But if you want to get into high-end video post-production, effects and editing, right now the standard – Grass Valley, Henry, digital compositing and digital D1 suites – add up to a lot of money.

‘In Toronto, it’s not a surprise that we’ve lost a couple of major post-production houses in the last two or three years, but it does tell you something. If my entry is $400,000 or $500,000, it’s not as difficult to make that (investment) pay.’

A billion-dollar market

– and competition for it

Film and video currently accounts for about 15% of Silicon Graphics’ overall business. McGrath says ‘next year, we’re looking at about $200 million of incremental business; the year after that, one billion in incremental business. That’s our guesstimate, and it includes interactive television, animation, film and video, everything connected with the business.’

This projection, if fulfilled, represents a huge jump in revenue for sgi; the company’s revenue in 1993, the last year for which figures are available, was $1.09 billion.

sgi is facing tough competition from the smiling face of the Macintosh. The Avid Media Composer has been well received in Canada, and is a standard feature of post houses. While a software product with the familiar Avid interface, Avid Media Suite Pro, will be released for the sgi platform in the fall, no one’s saying yet whether it will have any new features, or run faster on sgi boxes.

Another big question mark in the business of computers in broadcast is the ultimate fate of the Commodore amiga, the engine which drives Newtek’s Video Toaster. With Commodore in receivership, talks with several large consumer electronics organizations about a sale are in progress. There are 70,000 Toasters out there, and lots of nervous owners who don’t want to see their babies orphaned.

Education: going

beyond Oakville

Since sgi’s foothold into the digital broadcast market came from animation/effects, training has traditionally been the turf of Sheridan College in Oakville, Ont. It’s common knowledge this school has funneled a startling number of creative types into high-profile companies across North America. As the penetration of these machines expands, other institutions are gearing up to train communication arts students and retrain corporate employees, including the University of Toronto’s Information Technology Design Centre and the Centre For Creative Imaging in Camden East, both of which are certified Silicon Graphics training centers. Certification of other institutes is imminent.

The people in the business who use sgi agree training has to be a priority for all the parties involved, and that there is no substitute for sgi-specific training. topix’s Wallace says an understanding of unix is critical. ‘(Without it,) it’s kind of like somebody getting their cab licence in London but not knowing the streets, they haven’t lived there all their life. They’ve studied the book, but they don’t know the one-way streets.’

Dome’s Stollar agrees. ‘The biggest issue I’m facing is if you believe that things are going to move to these workstations, where are trained people going to come from? A lot of people come out of Sheridan and U of T’s architectural department, familiar with softimage. But I use prisms here, and there isn’t anybody coming out of these schools with prisms experience. A lot of my efforts are now focused on trying to promote the software that I use, so when graduates come out they can come here and work.’

Endlessly seeking

sizzle

George Hughes of Design Vision, an all-sgi shop for seven years, believes computer hardware and software will become commodities, and success will depend upon the ability of companies to add value to those commodities. And that’s good news; adding value, after all, is what Canada’s post community does best.

c.o.r