Return to Independence

Indie filmmakers enhance productivity with Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium and Intel Xeon processor 5400 series based on Quad Core HP xw8600 Workstations

Ever think of an idea and watch the hourglass go by? Ever lose your train of thought while you wait for your system to respond? Ever wish you had a system that combined optimized software and powerful new hardware technology in order to scream through new ideas, test new concepts, and just plain have fun introducing new ideas that not too long ago would have required a supercomputer?

Read about how Unified Pictures, Adobe, HP, and Intel conspired to change imagination into reality faster than ever before through the use of new technology and new workflows that compress the time between imagination and reality.

Benefits

When offered the chance to test drive two new xw8600 Workstations from Hewlett Packard featuring Quad Core Intel Xeon processor 5430 series, Kurt Rauer of Unified Pictures didn’t have to think twice. “I wanted something that could perform multiple simultaneous processes at full speed,” he explains. “I think the machines have more than met my expectations.”

Expectations and ambitions run high at Unified Pictures. Since being founded in 2004, the independent film house has produced three films, co-distributed another, and has four more in development. The Perfect Sleep, XII, and Bob Funk debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008. In the two weeks before the festival, Rauer and company were working at a frenetic pace, compressing and converting footage for promotional trailers and Blu-ray Discs, creating print collateral and billboards, and launching two websites. Just days before leaving for Cannes, the Unified team was still using Adobe After Effects CS3 software to create additional effects shots, and dropping them into the timeline of the nonlinear editing system while printing the film to tape.

“You spot something that’s missing, so you do a little here, a little there to patch things,” Rauer confides. “It was ridiculous.” Scrambling to make eleventh-hour deadlines is a fact of life for any filmmaker. What stands out in Unified’s case is the sheer volume of work being produced by a staff of 22, 5 or 6 of whom do most of the heavy lifting. For Unified Pictures, doing more with less is a way of life.

Not surprisingly, the HP xw8600 Workstations with Quad Core Intel Xeon processor 5430 series played key roles in the pre-Cannes workflow. To understand how, we need to paint a more complete picture of the organization, workflow, and mindset in action at Unified Pictures.

The Unified approach

Unified Pictures occupies a nondescript industrial park in the Los Angeles area. Like so many of its counterparts, its outward appearance is deceiving. There’s nothing to hint at the work going on behind the plain glass door, allowing the people inside to go about the business of making movies without the distraction of curiosity seekers. Nor is there anything to indicate that the high-efficiency filmmaking facility is under construction. Though they’ve been in the building for two years, the facility is still being built out. The building houses a 10,000-square foot stage, post-production sound rooms, several HD editing bays, and an in-house financing division. Walls are in various states of unfinish, but essential operations continue.

“We’re juggling multiple film projects and raising capital,” Unified Pictures Creative Director Shaun Clapham explains. Being able to juggle multiple tasks is a prerequisite at Unified Pictures. As creative director, Clapham spearheads the creation of marketing and packaging collateral for upcoming films and does web design. In addition, Clapham and Rauer laid the fiber-optic cable that runs throughout the facility, providing dual, 4GB high-speed connectivity to 56TB of shared storage.

Kurt Rauer, Unified Pictures founder and producer, is himself a man of many talents. His background is in architecture, but he’s also a 3D modeler and animator with game development experience. He is currently president and co-owner of ElectroAge, a company that serves as the in-house effects arm of Unified Pictures. While giving tours of the facility, Rauer’s ability to multitask is in full view. Pointing out various aspects of the facility, he describes the roles of the in-house financial department; he can quote the number of millionaires in the United States; and he nonchalantly fields calls from staffers who need to know if one of 19 1TB portable disk arrays is available. It’s obvious Rauer knows where each of those drives is and what it’s being used for at any given moment. Excluding the HP xw8600 Workstations, Rauer and Clapham hand-built the PCs that are in use throughout the Unified Pictures building.

Gearing up

Unified Pictures runs both Macintosh and Microsoft Windows-based platforms. “Everything under our desks is a PC platform, and everything in the editing bays is a Mac,” Rauer explains. “We’ve been able to use both platforms seamlessly. We move After Effects comps between platforms, but the majority of our After Effects plug-ins are PC-based. To accommodate an effect that requires a plug-in,” Rauer continues, “we’ll render a layer and open it in our NLE. It works pretty well.”

The PCs use a mixture of Quad Core Intel Xeon processor 5430 series. The Macintosh computers were top-of-the-line for their time—two G5 Power Macs and two G5 Mac Pros. Each computer is equipped with between four and seven gigabytes of RAM. Relying on white-box, DIY computers is a practice common among game developers. Rauer tells us that his tenure as a game developer taught him what works and what doesn’t. He used all name-brand components in Unified’s white-box computers—Intel motherboards and chipsets, Kensington RAM, and so on. When something requires service, each machine is essentially interchangeable.

That said, Rauer sees a definite advantage in the HP xw8600 Workstations. Pointing to the xw8600 with Quad Core Intel Xeon processor 5430 series, Rauer says, “That machine is faster than what I could build myself with off-the-shelf components. I might pay less if I built it myself, but I would also have to support it myself. Whereas, with the HP xw8600, if needed, I can call someone and have it swapped with a new machine. It doesn’t take half a day of me pulling a CPU out or a bad stick of RAM.”

The HP xw8600s reside in Clapham’s workspace. The machine outfitted with Dual Core Intel Xeon processor 5430 series sits to the left of a monitor, while the xw8600 with Quad Core Intel Xeon processor 5430 series is more readily accessible at the other end of the L-shaped desk. As Rauer puts it, “The HP xw8600 is the party machine. If we have a task to perform that’s labor and computationally intensive, and that can be performed in the background while we’re doing something else, the xw8600 is the go-to machine.”

Unified workflows

Clapham put the HP Workstations through their paces producing everything from a 7-meter x 3-meter billboard to one-sheets and postcards to promote Unified Picture’s activities at the Cannes film festival. He repurposed key art from the films, created new digital images and text with Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended and Adobe Illustrator CS3 software, and handed it off to a subcontractor in Santa Monica for assembly in a page layout program.

With dual PCI-e Gen2 x16 graphics interfaces, the HP xw8600 delivers up to four times the graphics processing bandwidth capability of previous generations while supporting high-end 3D graphics cards and up to four 3D or four 2D displays. With nVidia Quadro FX4600 graphics cards installed, the xw8600s were natural choices for tackling the huge file sizes of the billboard project. Additionally, leveraging the workstations’ multitasking capabilities proved essential for being able to continue working while long render times took place in the background.

Thanks to the Quad Core Intel Xeon processor 5430 series, the HP xw8600 was the logical choice for handling video compression and trans coding tasks. The Quad Core Intel Xeon processor 5430 series features the Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions 4 (Intel SSE4) instruction set that enhances video encoding acceleration functions. For example, many video codecs perform motion estimation. To do large motion estimation, a video encoder must perform a massive number of sum of absolute difference (SAD) operations that include calculating absolute values, addition, and subtraction to find the best match in an area. The SSE4 instruction set reduces the entire operation to a single instruction.

HDCAM 1080p footage was transcoded to a variety of formats for web-friendly trailers and distribution on high-definition Blu-ray Disc. To watch the trailers, go to www.XIIthemovie.com and www.bobfunkthemovie.com.

High-definition

While Unified Pictures has collaborated on various projects with such Hollywood notables as David Lynch (Inland Empire), and distributed the award-winning Don’t Move, starring Penelope Cruz, their emphasis is on producing artistically innovative, intriguing, and commercially viable films in a variety of genres.

The Perfect Sleep, directed by Jeremy Alter, was the first project Unified shot on HD. Using Sony F900 cameras as their starting point, the team designed a workflow that would allow them to work with 1080p content at full-resolution. “No 3:2 pull down to video and offline, to conform online,” says Rauer. “We wanted to stay at full resolution so we could tweak the images, go through a digital intermediate using software like Adobe After Effects, and basically keep the post-production in house, it was a great way to hold the costs down.” Rauer continues, “To accomplish that we put together a dual-Xeon-equipped PC with a Blue Fish 4:4:4 card in it and an internal 6TB RAID array. We were naive enough to tell the director, ‘Look we only have six terabytes. That’s huge, but you’re going to have to figure out which eight hours of footage you want to put on it.’” They quickly added another 6TB array to the setup. Rauer goes on, “It was at that point that we learned the big difference between HD and film. In HD there isn’t that critical moment when you’re almost out of film, you can just keep rolling. The pressure galvanizes the talent, and they hit their marks, they give you the performance you need. That’s film’s bonus.”

The Perfect Sleep is a film noire project. Being independent allowed the DP to push the boundaries in ways a larger studio might have shied away from, creating really deep, rich blacks. “The Perfect Sleep was in production a long time,” Rauer says. “We went through editorial and a re-shoot before wrapping. We used the Panasonic Genesis camera for the re-shoot.”

Rauer explains how they were able to match the Genesis footage with the F900 footage. “We pulled it off by down-rezing the 1920x1080 Genesis footage to match the 1440x1080 HDCAM footage. It chunked up just enough to make them match.”

Martin Hunter, who edited Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, was brought in to cut the picture. After Martin’s cut, Unified Pictures was able to get Fotokem to do a final color-correction using their daVinci. Of the 130 visual effects shots in The Perfect Sleep, Adobe After Effects was used to create 100 of them. The effects shots consist of clean-up, additional muzzle flashes, and some notable green screen effects shot through a hammered glass door. As the door swings open, it reveals flashback sequences.

Hunter is not part of the core team at Unified. External talent is recruited when time and budget either permit or necessitate. “With the indie stuff you don’t have a lot of extra people. At least at the budget level we’re working with,” Rauer explains. Describing their division of labor tactics, Rauer says, “We try to overlap where we can, or disengage where we have to. For example, Tim Montijo, founder and producer, and I did some of the effects shots for XII—we have Motorola logos on cell phones all over the place and they have to be removed. But with Cannes coming up, we both backed off so Tim could focus exclusively on music and we brought on extra hands to handle some of the final effects work.”

In keeping with Unified’s goal of producing work in a variety of genres, XII is a horror film that Unified took to the Fangoria convention prior to Cannes. Bob Funk is a romantic comedy starting Rachel Lee Cook. XII was shot with Sony F900s, whereas Bob Funk was shot with a Thompson Viper. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to do it,” says Rauer, “but I’d like to be able to give out 1080p compressed versions of the films and trailers to blogs, web runners, and press. Put a fair use copyright on it, and say here you go. That’s something the larger studios just don’t do.”

Other projects in the works or on the drawing board include Beneath the Shadows, which Rauer describes as a prison escape thriller that’s Shawshank Redemption meets Jacob’s Ladder, and 55 Holly Star, which is in the same vein as It’s a Wonderful Life.

Going mobile

55 Holly Star and Beneath the Shadows are both being shot out of state at the end of this year. Sitting in the parking lot behind Unified Pictures is a partially built trailer Rauer says they’re building to house a mobile production studio. They plan on bringing it on their shoots in Illinois. “We’ll probably outfit the trailer with 12-20 terabytes of storage, two nonlinear editing systems, two 42-inch diagonal LCD monitors, an Xbox 360…” Why did Unified include a game console in the mobile production studio? “For producers,” Rauer explains. “The idea is to be able to capture one or two streams of 4:4:4 1080p footage coming over a proprietary bi-directional connection that can be up to a mile and a half away from the set. We could have an editor or an assistant editor assembling a cut in the trailer and be able to send the assembly back to set so both the director and producers can see it. We’ll have a color-correction monitor in the trailer, so we can set up LUTs (color lookup tables) to create a custom look on the fly.” Does Rauer envision a role for the HP Workstations in the trailer? “Absolutely,” he says. “It’s the reason we wanted an AJA Xena card in the machine. That way we can capture and play back uncompressed dual-stream footage. It’s important for us to view our footage at the best resolution and color depth.”

Ramping up

Unified Pictures plans to add five key people to its talent pool to handle the early design work for their first foray into producing an animated film. Titled Noah, Rauer envisions using Maya as well as Lightwave 3D as their animation tool set running on HP xw8600s. “We’ll probably bring in specialists, but we won’t ask them to specialize. We won’t run a top-down operation the way some animation studios operate. We’ll be a light-weight production, though at our peak we may need as many people working on it as a studio pic.”

Summary

As of this writing, Unified Pictures has been utilizing the HP Workstations for a few months. Asked to assess the machines, Rauer says, “I’m very pleased with their power and stability. In terms of raw horsepower, they’re fantastic. The case is cool and heavy. I mean, they each weigh a lot, which is great. They’re rock-solid. And HP engineered the inside to make it easy to slide components in and out so you can customize it quickly.

“As fast as these machines are,” Rauer continues, “the real measure of the benefit they offer a production facility like ours is how many things you can do while the machine is busy doing something else? How many processes can you do? How confident are you in your machine?” Rauer cites a racing analogy, “The deeper a race car driver gets into his turn, the faster he’s going, the more trust he imbues in his car and in the technology supporting him. He might have great reaction time, but the car is taking a lot of force, and he’s got to know emotionally that it’s going to be there for him. Computers are the same way. You’re rendering something in After Effects, and you don’t want to stare at the screen, what else can you do? It used to be you would go to another machine to check e-mail, or have a second machine under your desk to play music on. As things get faster and more capable, you can begin to put more and more processes on the same machine. Being able to multitask while your computer multitasks in the background gives you power and flexibility to be more productive.”

Putting the productivity gains in financial terms, Rauer says, “We used to only buy machines in that sweet spot—when the fastest machine was 3GHz, we’d buy the 2.6GHz or 2.8GHz, because it was half the price. That’s kind of our philosophy. Take the 5% hit and save half. But as a business owner, there’s another way to justify the cost of these HP xw8600 Workstations. The math is actually easy. For a business owner in the animation world, if you have a 3D artist and they’re making X-thousands of dollars a year, if you can increase their efficiency by 10%, that’s X-thousands of dollars saved in a single year. So if you’re able to see a 10% return in speed, spend the money. Spend the $6,000 or $8,000 dollars for a great workstation. The productivity you gain will more than cover the expense.”

Some assembly required

Unified Pictures uses Los Angeles-based DV411 to build, design, and configure systems for their digital production workflow. Cutter Stevens, DV411’s technical director explains, “No off-the-shelf system is ready to perform in these environments; specialized software and hardware need to be added, settings tweaked. Unified needed a system that would handle their After Effects and encoding projects, as well as serve as a backup system for color grading, and be compatible with video files from the editorial suites. We installed an AJA Xena 2K card into a base HP xw8600 system to handle uncompressed HD I/O and configured it to work with Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium software.”

The AJA drivers provide HD-SDI input and output, and preview plug-ins for After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Photoshop CS3 Extended software. Stevens continues, “Next we integrated an nVidia Quadro FX 4600 graphics card and ATTO 42ES fiber channel card to connect to Unified’s shared storage network. This basic configuration allows full raster and frame rate RAM previews over HD-SDI from After Effects, and will accelerate any 3D OpenGL effects we can throw at it.” To round out the setup, DV411 tweaks various system settings to ensure each application runs at optimal levels.

About DV411: DV411 specializes in high-performance digital video editing workstations and components, professional video gear, system configuration and upgrade services. In business since 1992, DV411’s clients include a who’s who of the entertainment industry. For more information on their services, go to www.DV411.com.
 

Unified Pictures