DreamWorks Animation is one of the most well-known movie animation studios around. Pixar might be a bit more popular, but DreamWorks has certainly come up with some classic hits recently. The company announced, alongside HP, that their latest film used HP workstations to render animations and create graphics for the movie “Turbo.”
Specifically, DreamWorks Animation used HP’s Z800 and Z820 Workstations, as well as the company’s DreamColor displays and printers. If you know anything about the level of animation that these movies contain, it’s quite impressive. A single frame in an animated film takes hours and hours to render based on the amount of detail in the frame, and HP’s workstations were put to the test doing just that.
HP claims that DreamWorks was able to execute tasks at twice the speed than previous workstations. During the evening, these workstations were put to use by running rendering jobs, and it took “75 million render hours” to render the entire Turbo film, according to HP. Of course, that’s over 8,500 years if DreamWorks was only using one workstation, so they undoubtedly had an army of workstations that worked together to render the film in a timely fashion.
Of course, this leads to a lot of files needing stored, and HP was obviously there to deal with the “230 terabytes of files” that it took to make the movie. It’s a good thing we have compression software, or else movies would come in 60,000-disc sets. HP and DreamWorks have actually been working together for quite some time, and we even took the chance a few years ago to check out the studios and get hands-on time with the HP workstations when they were working on Kung Fu Panda, as well as Monsters vs. Aliens.
If you haven’t heard about DreamWorks’ latest film, Turbo follows the story of a snail who gains magical powers and is able to run at blistering speeds. He eventually enters into the Indy 500, and the rest of the story you’ll have to find out by watching the movie in theaters starting today.
HP workstations used for DreamWorks’ latest Turbo animated film is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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