Intel ® Visual

india’s animation industry
To explore the importance of technology at a pair
of leading animation studios, Visual Adrenaline
reached out to executives at Crest Studios, a local
production house, and Rhythm & Hues, an
international producer with developers in India.
They discussed their technology infrastructure
and the importance of Intel-based systems, and
demonstrated their enthusiasm for future
product development.
Cutting Down
Compute-Years
Starting in 1987, Rhythm & Hues transitioned
from creating simple flying logos to more
challenging animation. Today it creates Academy
Award-winning VFX. Gautham Krishnamurti, CTO
at Rhythm & Hues, described how his company
grew into a powerhouse in the global animation
industry. “In 1999, we acquired VIFX from 20th
Century Fox, and in 2001 we opened our first
international studio in Mumbai, India. In 2007,
we expanded to Hyderabad, India, followed by
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2009. We are currently
opening a facility in Vancouver, British Columbia.”
The company currently employs over 1,400
workers in three countries. Recent and upcoming
projects include Mr. Popper’s Penguins (Fox),
X-Men: First Class (Fox), Life of Pi (Fox), Everybody
Loves Whales (Universal), Alvin and the
Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked (Fox), Moneyball (Sony),
and Snow White and the Huntsman (Universal).
Gauth explained that significant changes have
recently occurred in his industry. The VFX
requirements have become significantly more
challenging, while the production schedules have
grown tighter. “It took us 2,000 compute-years
to render the imagery seen in HOP,” an Easterthemed
movie released in early 2011 that was
produced by Universal Studios and Illumination
Entertainment. “Prior to that, our most intensive
job only took 400 compute-years. We had to
scale our infrastructure eight-fold to handle that
show’s demands,” he said.
E.B., the star of the movie HOP.
machines with four to eight gigabytes of RAM.
Today, they range from quad-core to dual six-core
machines, with 24 to 64 GB of RAM.”
Gauth reserves the most powerful workstations
to handle the most compute intensive tasks.
“Some VFX artists have access to 24-core Intel
processors with 64 GB of RAM,” he said. “Some
simulations take up to five days to compute.”
Rendering imagery is his most expensive compute
operation, but with shrewd investments, their
latest batch of rendering servers, which rely on
Intel® Core i7 processors, has met the challenge.
While technology issues have been solved with
hardware investments, hiring artists to run those
machines has been difficult. “Finding suitable
talent is a global problem,” according to Gauth.
“All of our facilities have the same issue—having
to train a lot of the artists—so we created
apprentice programs for the various disciplines.”
Hooray for Bollywood!
While speaking with AK Madhavan, CEO of Crest
Animation Studios Ltd., his passion and enthusiasm
for the Indian animation industry was contagious.
In 1999, Crest delved into long format animation
in the computer-graphics animation space. “I think
we have established credibility and a comfort level
among several ‘big boys,’ like Universal, Sony, and
Lions Gate, and we are doing some great work
for Disney and DreamWorks. So the industry has
grown fairly well in the outsourcing model,” he said.
“I believe that in the television space, India delivers
much higher quality than other Asian outsourcing
facilities. We’ve moved from work for hire to
co-owning intellectual properties and building our
own ideas.”
The key behind Crest’s growth has been continual
investment in technology, according to Madhavan.
“Over the years we made many mistakes; we
The growing power of multi-core CPUs with
hyper-threading have made Rhythm & Hues
rethink its programming paradigm. “Our compute
infrastructure includes workstations
and render nodes, and our latest hardware uses
Intel® processors. A few years ago, most of our
compute infrastructure comprised dual-core
Source: FICCI-KPMG Indian Media and
Entertainment Industry Report 2011.
intel visual adrenaline no. 10, 2011 37