Never thought, the public cloud from the Chinese film special effects rendering 5 years

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The film "Never Thought: the West Travel article" The special Effects production company Beijing concentrated Painting Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as: Spotlight picture) general manager and visual director Xu Fei told reporters, the international early in 2009, "Avatar" has been through the cloud way to achieve the globalization of data transmission and rendering, but specific to China's situation, No special effects rendering with public clouds will be considered for at least 5 years. The reason is simple, network bandwidth does not give force.

Founded in 2011, the spotlight is a full-process visual special effects and high-end video technology service providers, has completed more than 30 domestic and foreign Film project post-production effects. The works include "Gold Robbery", "The Heaven of Heaven", "The Dragon King of Dee", "Wolf Totem", "Taiping Wheel" and so on. As one of the most famous production companies in the domestic film and TV special effects industry, the spotlight will be listed in the new Sanbanxi.

"Never thought" of the special pressure

Xu Fei Introduction said the film "Never Thought:" The whole film of the West Tour 90 minutes, of which the special effects accounted for One-second. Before filming, 350 special effects lenses were planned, but with the progress of the film, the whole effect lens was eventually appended to 1000, while the production cycle was only two months and the data storage capacity was up to 85TB.

In contrast, the "Mars Rescue" special effects lens is 600, the production cycle of 6 months, "Dragon Quest" special effects lens in 1200 shots around, production cycle of 18 months. In the spotlight four-year project, nearly 30 movies added together will only need 100 TB enough to cope with, peak is only 400 special effects lens.

For the spotlight, "never thought: The West Tour" of the special effects of the production challenge is "never thought of", concentrating on their own workstations and servers are uninterrupted hours running. Xu Fei that the domestic public cloud is difficult to adapt to this high strength, high pressure, time tight special effects rendering production requirements.

Another animation produced by the Pursuit of light animation "gods" animated effect is part of the use of Ali public cloud. Chasing light animation rendering technical guidance Shun Cheng told reporters, this is mainly because of the animation special effects produced by the planning of strong, can be low-intensity, low-pressure, less-effective rendering tasks to share the public cloud. 3D animated film "Gods" produced a total of 29 months, involving animation Lens 1940, nearly half of the rendering task on the Ali public cloud completed.

"Never thought" the IT system behind it

So, what are the requirements for an IT system for high-intensity, high-pressure, time-tight special effects rendering?

First, security. For film production, the protection of copyright and the secrecy of the footage before the release of the film are very important. Before, Hollywood's * * * door incident is because hackers take advantage of the icloud Cloud Disk System vulnerability, and "Batman" source of the outflow incident also shows that it system vulnerable to hackers. Since its inception, the spotlight has set up a very strict IT security mechanism, its employees in the company can not connect to the Internet, external data transmission and USB ports are in a closed state, the entire company only one person can transfer data, so that the fundamental elimination of security loopholes.

The second is reliability. "Never thought: the West Travel article" on the data throughput requirements is very high, this is because the whole film produced more than 80 versions, for different lenses produced a different version, the director often requires different versions of different lenses splicing up the test effect. As a result, the spot shadow does a system image store every five minutes to ensure that each overwrite and replacement is stored. Once you accidentally overwrite the previous version, it might be a waste of one months of work.

Spotlight is the first in the domestic special effects industry to adopt Hitachi Data Systems Company (hereinafter referred to as: HDS). Hitachi's storage solutions for unstructured data processing, such as large-scale images and videos for the film and television industry, support block-level replication and second-level file snapshots to ensure secure storage of special effects data. The solution also uses FPGA programmable logic circuit chip to process file, network and storage transmission processing in parallel, and can be competent to render large multitasking parallel processing. This set of technology has been used in "Avatar", "Transformers", "Titanic", "Lord of the Rings" and "X-Men" and other U.S. blockbuster special effects production.

Of course, high-intensity, high-pressure, time-tight special effects rendering production for IT systems also requires efficient task management and file management. "Never thought: the West Travel article" 1000 Special effects lens split down, including modeling, mapping, animation, lighting, rendering, synthesis and other more than 10 jobs, split into nearly 8,000 tasks. The spotlight has been used for two years to develop a set of its own process management software, has been successfully applied to the "Dee" and "Big Noisy heavenly" task management. In the area of file management, Hitachi's solutions provide ultra-large file management capabilities, with a single file system supporting 256TB, a single directory supporting 16 million of files, greatly simplifying file system management and maintenance.

"Small file processing is the key

It may surprise many people that the most critical challenge in the production of movie effects is the processing of small files.

Due to the particularity of the production of film and television special effects, it is necessary to operate ultra-large-scale small files, for example, hair processing may be the tens of thousands of hair silk files to synthesize. For the "Never Thought: West Travel" special effects processing, every second there are tens of thousands of small files read, this high-throughput file IO for the CPU is a huge challenge.

Inversiona, technical director of Hitachi's China Enterprise Division, introduced the dual requirements of bandwidth and small file IO pressure for film and TV effects processing, and HDS has abandoned traditional storage technologies using the Intel CPU-based sequential file access approach and used FPGAs instead to build hardware file systems. Through FPGA processor directly from the underlying logic circuit to read a large number of broken files, parallel processing of video file access, in order to achieve high efficiency IO and improve the stability of the hardware file system.

For its own rendering farm, the compute node, which consists of hundreds of render servers, is processed in parallel to full load, which is the limit for data access and data storage, and the performance of storage access drops sharply, which is mainly due to the large number of small files read (read accounted for 90%). HDS's Hnas solution shortens the rendering cycle and reduces the pressure on the overall storage pool by creating read buffers and Flash disk buffers.

As "never thought: the West Tour article" of the investor, one film president Liu Kaihui said, "Never thought:" The Western tour of the special effects are all produced by the domestic team, which overcame a lot of unprecedented difficulties, this is an uphill battle. But because of this tough battle, the Chinese film industry has the opportunity to master the core technology and ability, it is possible to finally achieve the revitalization of Chinese film. (Text/Ningchuang, this article first Titanium media, Itvalue)

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Never thought, the public cloud from the Chinese film special effects rendering 5 years