The Load isn’t Heavy Enough
An interview with Hugh Laurie, still awesome in House, in this past weekend’s Observer magazine mentioned a documentary he did about funerals. The stable lad for the funereal carthorses mentioned that the horses don’t like this sort of work because “the load isn’t heavy enough”. I was reminded of the time I visited the Microsoft computer lab at Pembroke College in Cambridge and saw a supercomputer with 1TB of RAM designed to calculate fluid thermodynamics being used to play minesweeper.
This comes to mind today because Creative Cow sent me a marketing email this morning about the Redbox parallel processing unit. Essentially a render farm in a box, it increases productivity by a factor of 8, where productivity is measured by the time your computers spend doing insanely complex mathematics. We don’t need one at Oakslade because “the load wouldn’t be heavy enough”. We don’t do the sort of processor-intensive graphics, animation and visual effects that would need a Redbox. However every project here does need a certain amount of computer heavy lifting. If HD footage were an object it would be the kind of thing you pass to a friend and go “feel how heavy that is”. And the point comes where the edit is finished but the graphics need to be rendered out one last time, just to be sure, and then the project usually needs to be compressed for delivery. All of this tends to occur as the deep stomach-churning rumble of an approaching deadline gets uncomfortably louder.
Luckily we don’t need a Redbox for this, our gigabit Ethernet network allows for distributed computing power amongst our sleek detachment of Macs to handle the heavy lifting and continued investment in equipment here means that the load still isn’t heavy enough.
Tags: , creative cow, news, post production, redbox, render