Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Multimedia, Software, How-tos
Starting your own Pixar
So, you want to start your own animation dynasty like Mr. Jobs? Well Pixar released RenderMan for Maya this week. RenderMan is the magic software developed in-house by Pixar to "draw" the frames of their movies. Having a bad renderer means slowness, and images that just aren't realistic enough. Maya is an industry-leading modeling and animation tool. Put them together, and you pretty much have the mother of all animation pipelines. Obviously there's a lot more that you'll need for all that... But I decided to hop on the Apple store and price a basic animation studio for you. Please note this does not include the price of talent. I wonder what Crispin Glover's rate is these days?Now mere animation and rendering tools alone will not suffice. You need to add music and voices too. Apple's Logic should do the trick. Plus, you'll need to edit this bad boy together. Naturally, Apple's Final Cut Pro would be my choice (although you could get the whole studio). On top of this, there is often a need to "composite" or layer rendered scenes. Even the best 3D suites cannot sometimes handle the complexity of enormous sets and animations. Or sometimes you just want to break things down to give you options when editing. Either way, a compositing app like, say, Shake, will let you render characters, backgrounds, effects, and whatever you want, separately, then smush them all together in the end. This, of course, requires additional time and effort. But it's what you do to make things perfect. And no one is arguing Pixar would settle for less than perfect, right? Prices after the jump.
So what's all this going to cost you? Warm up that credit card. Realize I'm pricing commercial software on the interweb in the US. A week from now this could all change, and Apple won't sell this stuff to Cuba. I also realize there are about a hundred million other apps you'd use at an animation studio. There's stuff like labeling apps (with hardware), special logging tools, a CMS, and don't forget the Office! But I'm just looking at core applications used by the primary animation department. So I didn't include the cost of 10,000 CD- and DVD-R's each year. And all of this is a license for just one CPU. If you wanted to work with a big crew, or create a render farm (a room of servers that do nothing but draw those frames at film res for months on end), well let's just say if you have to ask you can't afford it... Now for your bill, sir.
RenderMan alone goes for $995. Maya's full-blown mega-ultra-super edition, Unlimited, costs $6,999. Throw in the Platinum bundle (adds training stuff mostly) and you're looking at $7,599. Logic Pro will cost you a cool $999. Final Cut Pro is $999, but for only $300 more you get Soundtrack Pro, Motion, and DVD Studio. If you're going for self-distribution this is a great idea. Shake weighs in at $2,999!
Last but not least is a big ol' quad Mac to run this hotness on. While we're at it (Monopoly money and all), let's throw the works at it. After all, you're going to need a tip-top machine to render this masterpiece... So a fully-loaded quad with 30" Cinema HD Display is a whopping $20,233. Ask anyone who bought a SGI workstation in the 90's and they'll tell you this is a bargain.
Cost of good talent? Priceless. Cost of great story? Priceless. Cost of the animation studio outlined above? The lowest figure is just over $32,000. Again, this is an astounding figure. Back when I edited tape-to-tape a simple video editing and post room cost about ten times that. Now if you'll excuse me I have to get my deposit back on these bottles...
RenderMan alone goes for $995. Maya's full-blown mega-ultra-super edition, Unlimited, costs $6,999. Throw in the Platinum bundle (adds training stuff mostly) and you're looking at $7,599. Logic Pro will cost you a cool $999. Final Cut Pro is $999, but for only $300 more you get Soundtrack Pro, Motion, and DVD Studio. If you're going for self-distribution this is a great idea. Shake weighs in at $2,999!
Last but not least is a big ol' quad Mac to run this hotness on. While we're at it (Monopoly money and all), let's throw the works at it. After all, you're going to need a tip-top machine to render this masterpiece... So a fully-loaded quad with 30" Cinema HD Display is a whopping $20,233. Ask anyone who bought a SGI workstation in the 90's and they'll tell you this is a bargain.
Cost of good talent? Priceless. Cost of great story? Priceless. Cost of the animation studio outlined above? The lowest figure is just over $32,000. Again, this is an astounding figure. Back when I edited tape-to-tape a simple video editing and post room cost about ten times that. Now if you'll excuse me I have to get my deposit back on these bottles...
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Buzz said 5:23PM on 11-10-2005
Great system if you're going to output electronic, but not good enough for the local megaplex - you left out the cost of film output - those Arri laser film recorders are a slight bit pricey, but I think you can outsource at under $1,000/min
Although I do agree - back in the 80's it took tens of millions to even consider starting a studio - I can still remember a film at SIGGRAPH that got applause over the nearly endless list of servers (univ and gov) hooked together to render 3 minutes of the moon setting over a placid sea - and we were all so impressed
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Sean Flanagan said 5:31PM on 11-10-2005
I just finished a "real" movie with software currently on my Sawtooth G4 (read: old software mixed with iLife apps), donated labor and talent, and donated film equipment. Total price tag minus comestibles? $500, including the purchase of a brand-spanking-new LaCie 250GB FireWire drive. I'd say that's just as unreasonable an example as this write-up, but the other end of the spectrum, so to me it seems more realistic. If you added up all the donated products and services, it probably would come out somewhere in the ballpark of $15,000. And that to me is a lot easier to swallow than $32,000.
If you want, you can check out the trailer (just finished) at http://www.snubbingdavidcross.com . It didn't come out Hollywood-quality, but it's festival acceptable. And that's good enough for me, since we're not exactly looking to make any money. Thank God we didn't actually hire anyone like Crispin Glover to act! We would have increased our budget at least 10000% :-D
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Buzz said 3:02PM on 11-14-2005
Nice trailer Sean - when and where to see the pix?
(NYC downtown preference)
OTOH, not the sort of studio Victor's talking about - unless all those guys are CG, in which case - WOW!
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Sean D. said 6:19PM on 11-10-2005
I spend all day doing this stuff at work, and I can tell you that you can get away with cheaper hardware for that software. I personally feel that a 30" monitor would be too much screen space for those programs- I'm already stressed out on my 24"... and a dual processor or dual core AMD should suffice at a fraction of the cost of that G5 for an individual workstation. Let's not forget the dozens of computers for actually outputting the frames... or the talent needed to pull all this off (they should be the majority of your cost).
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Extensor said 7:07PM on 11-10-2005
NIce timing for this article. I am on day nine of my solo CGI cartoon project.
I'm using the free 3D Blender app for modeling, animation and compositing. You can also import dialogue and sync it up in real-time. A real time saver is dumping shaded animation right to mov files without rendering. I can edit together a rough cut with zero rendering time. Other apps i'm using are iMoveHD and Peak LE. After it is done I will plan on distributing it thru iTunes.
I am keeping a blog style project journal at http://extensor.spymac.com/project.html
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rob said 10:59PM on 11-10-2005
stop this annoying AD-SPAM. you have no idea what youre talking about which makes this news item totally useless. is apple paying you for crap like this?
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Nick said 11:41PM on 11-10-2005
Not bad, but you forgot about storage. Animations take up a ton, so through in a few terabytes while you are at it in the for of say, oh maybe an xserve, I think you had a few other Apple products in the post too right? Sorry, I forget.
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Joe Kirsch said 4:21AM on 11-11-2005
Thanks for the info...
I'm in school learning FCP but don't know a darn thing 'bout animation...was always wondering what that stuff would cost...now I know.
Thanks again.
Joe Kirsch
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Ian said 1:36PM on 11-11-2005
Wow rob you dont have to be so rude
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John Vargo said 10:36AM on 11-11-2005
Check out a project that an Amsterdam studio is doing using nothing but free, open source animation tools.
http://orange.blender.org/
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KirbyMeister said 4:24PM on 11-11-2005
This isnt an advert, it's just a post about starting an animation studio with recently-released software. Depending on what you use, you could get anywhere from $3000 [Alienware ALX with Blender/povray] to $100,000 or more [Bunch of MAC workstations and render farm boxes, plus adequate CPU licenses because software companies like to be paid for how much performance you get] and anything in between. This is just one possible pipeline, albeit a very popular one.
And $1,000 a minute for a film recorder, ouch.
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bobby joe adams said 6:15PM on 11-13-2005
uhh... jeeze Rob, sorry to see that this article offended you. Clearly, you are someone with an incredible amount of insight into the hardware and software requirements of digital animation production.
It was stupid of victor to have ever posted this article without consulting you first, and I am personally shocked and disgusted at his audacity.
perhaps you'd care to enlighten Victor and the rest of the unwashed-heathen scum posting comments here, by sharing some of your wisdom with us, instead of just posting an ignorant bitchy flame.
Or are you just an ignorant bitch?
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