"Puss in Boots" Comes Alive with Technology from HP Oct 26, 2011 – HP Corporate Communications
HP and DreamWorks collaborate to push artistic animation to new
heights
HP today announced that DreamWorks Animation
SKG Inc. selected HP technology to push the boundaries of digital
animation and produce the company’s most technically advanced film to
date, ”Puss in Boots,” launching in theaters Oct. 28.
As part of a technology relationship that began with HP in 2001, DreamWorks
deploys HP Converged Infrastructure as the technology
backbone for complex animation, helping shape the future of digital
filmmaking. To bring feature films to life, DreamWorks Animation utilizes
everything from HP desktop workstations to HP networking products to HP
digital rendering resources accessed via the cloud.
To create ”Puss in Boots,” artists used more than 200
high-performance HP Z800 Workstations, allowing the flawless
execution of exceedingly detailed and creative tasks. The workstations helped
design everything in the film – from the swashbuckling hero Puss, to
digital effects such as complex tornados and cloudscapes.
For ”Puss in Boots,” HP ProLiant BL460 blade technology,
geographically dispersed in five server render farms across the United States
and India, provided peak compute power at crucial stages of production. The
blade servers powered an unprecedented 117 terabytes of data and more than 60
million render hours.
“As with all of our films, ‘Puss In Boots’ required
powerful systems to support the digital demands of our creative teams,”
said Ed Leonard, chief technology officer, DreamWorks Animation SKG.
“Knowing that we have the support of our partners at HP allows us to
free our artists from technical limitations, letting them focus on creating
the most powerful 3-D CG experiences.”
To meet the massive data demands of the film, DreamWorks deployed HP Cloud Services, which eliminated the need for
an estimated multimillion dollar physical data center expansion. Eight
million of the total 63 million hours of rendering were rendered using HP
Cloud Services, which represented 45 percent of the studio’s overall
cloud computing needs.
“Our decade-long collaboration with DreamWorks has challenged HP to
develop technology that continually meets the intense, high-performance needs
of the world’s best digital animators,” said Doug Oathout, vice
president, Converged Infrastructure, HP. “HP effectively serves as an
infrastructure extension of a premiere Hollywood animation studio providing
cutting-edge technology to support some of the most creative minds in film
and animation.”
HP DreamColor technology was utilized in the film’s production process
to provide high-end color prints of the creative team’s visual
development work. This technology enabled designers to print accurate color
proofs of critical reference imagery such as character designs, environments
and key storytelling moments.
In addition to jointly developing the HP DreamColor technology in HP
printers, DreamWorks and HP also developed the billion-color HP DreamColor Monitor, which surpasses
performance of any other LCD display available, enabling artists to achieve
consistency, depth and richness of color.
HP Converged Infrastructure is a key foundation of an Instant-On
Enterprise. In a world of continuous connectivity, the Instant-On
Enterprise embeds technology in everything it does to serve customers,
employees, partners and citizens with whatever they need, instantly.
HP’s premier client event, HP DISCOVER,
takes place Nov. 29 - Dec. 1 in Vienna, Austria. The event showcases how
organizations can get started on their Instant-On Enterprise journeys.
