Computers in the movies

I was there, see "Larry Luther" in programmer's credits.

We ended up with a Cray XMP.

Production was late, scenes were redone only if they were faulty. We had a lot of vectorization in the renderer, written in Fortran (Cray's only viable offering).

Hardware:

* Digital Equipment Corporation Vax (11-780) was used as the central hub. The Cray was used as a graphics rendering peripheral (2 million 36 bit words). Ramtek frame buffers were the display devices. Users communicated with the machines using ASCII terminals. Film recorders came from III.

The production pipeline was:

* Encoding started with Evans & Sutherland PS-300 vector display machines which communicated with our VAXs at 64KB-sec and had to be programmed with data flow techniques (very odd but someone thought theoretically elegant). Communication to machines was slow and unreliable.

* Motion choreography wasn't originally planned for!! Ken Dozier and I saw the hopelessness of that and quickly created a motion choreography program for the PS-300. This quickly proved the concept to the art director Ron Cobb who loved seeing and editing the motion before it was rendered (which took a long time). We eventually got IMI's UNIX based (System V) machines which communicated over ethernet and had a far more standard graphics architecture where you created a graphics buttembly program with a few well understood commands. The Prevue program remained split between the Vax supporting the user's interface and the IMI vector display.

* Technical directors were responsible for motion choreography and for lighting etc. They used Ramtek frame buffers 1280x1024x24 (2 buffers) which cost about $100,000 for displaying the pictures.