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Beta Sight: Autodesk Toxik 2007

Jan 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Phil Brennan Asylum Visual Effects

Compositing Software Streamlines the Visual Effects Pipeline

I've been involved with film and commercial visual effects now for 17 years, and I have been at Asylum Visual Effects since 1999 working on films such as Moulin Rouge, Minority Report, Black Hawk Down, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Asylum VFX was founded in 1999 in Santa Monica, Calif., and is an Academy Award-nominated effects facility. In my current role as creative director, I still work on feature film and commercial effects shots, but I also help initiate better, more efficient workflow scenarios to boost productivity and throughput on effects projects.To that end, we have been putting Autodesk's Toxik through its paces, and most recently have been testing it on the new HP xw8400 with the Intel Xeon quad-core processor. (See Jan Ozer's review of the HP xw8400 here.) We have been using Toxik on several productions inhouse, and its latest version, Toxik 2007, is a viable, robust production tool.

Autodesk bills Toxik as its collaborative digital compositing software for film production. The recently released Toxik 2007 delivers a range of new capabilities, such as a new Paint system that allows interactive painting of high-resolution, high-dynamic-range imagery (HDRI). There's also increased interoperability with other Autodesk systems, Master Keyer extension tools, and improved data management. The focus is collaborative workflow for multi-artist film studio and postproduction pipelines. Toxik allows users to work interactively and collaboratively with any form of visual media, regardless of bit depth or image size. Toxik is also notable for its integrated asset tracking and versioning capabilities that simplify tracking-shot and element iterations. Through these features, Toxik provides complete histories of shot progression from inception to final output.

At Asylum VFX, we are tapping Toxik for a number of these strengths. For example, we're making use of its integrated database to help streamline compositing throughout the facility — from CG pre-comps and cleanup work to full-blown finished composites. As Autodesk continues its development of Toxik, we hope in the near term to make Toxik an even bigger part of our pipeline. Toxik is extremely customizable through simple Python scripting, which has made it very easy to integrate with our render farm and inhouse databases.

With Toxik 2007, I've noticed a lot of improvements in the creative features and capabilities. Specifically, with the addition of Autodesk's Master Keyer extension tools, we can tap the same keying capabilities of Autodesk's Flame and Inferno within Toxik. The new Paint system offers unique capabilities such as interactive painting of HDRI images, which provide a much higher level of detail than traditional digital images.

We use Autodesk's Flame and Inferno heavily, so Toxik fits in seamlessly with our visual effects infrastructure. Toxik supports Autodesk Wiretap (Autodesk's API that's designed to provide access to media and metadata on a network), and it reads Flame and Inferno data sets. We are also working on using Wiretap to render files back into Flame and Inferno.

As a longtime compositor, I see a lot of great benefits in working with Toxik. Generally, compositing systems seem to fall into two distinct categories. First, desktop-based solutions, where files live remotely on the network within a facility, are typically quite flexible but also slower to perform. The second category includes dedicated systems such as Flame and Inferno, which require a fast local disk, but make for great interactivity and realtime results once everything is loaded into the machine. With Toxik, you get the best of both worlds: Files live remotely on the network but are automatically cached locally for realtime playback and interactivity. Combined with the program's innovative tiling and proxy mechanisms, Toxik delivers both the flexibility of the desktop solutions and the speed of the powerhouse systems. Couple this performance with the xw8400, and Toxik flies. We've had one of these workstations in for testing for a few weeks now, and it is extremely fast, showing just how well Toxik scales with increased CPU power. Most of Toxik's tools see an almost linear increase in performance from the extra CPU cores (there are eight in this case), making the quad-core workstation almost twice as fast at running Toxik as a similarly configured dual-core machine.

At Asylum VFX, our visual effects pipelines have to be very flexible. We adjust them depending on the need of a given commercial or film project. For example, on some shows, one artist is responsible for a shot from beginning to end, while on others, tasks might be divided to distribute rotoscoping, rig removal, color timing, modeling, lighting, textures, rendering, and compositing. Toxik is primarily being used by composite artists for film projects. Some recent films that Asylum VFX has worked on include Déjà Vu, Apocalypto, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. On the commercial front, we've recently done major campaigns for Sony PlayStation 3, Motorola, Lexus, Pontiac, Dodge, and more.

Visual effects facilities such as Asylum VFX are always looking for ways to deliver the highest-quality effects in the most cost- and time-effective manner. With each new project, clients want more work completed in less time, without ever compromising quality. For these demands, Toxik is a boon. Using its integrated database to streamline the organizational and data-management side of things leaves us much more time to concentrate on the creative aspect of shots. The artists have every element at their fingertips, and can spend all of their time employing Toxik's powerful tools, realtime playback, and amazing speed to do what they are good at — making the shots look great.

In our experience, Toxik combines the flexibility of other desktop compositing products, but also provides the interactivity and responsiveness of high-end systems such as Inferno and Flame. Overall, Toxik lets artists get through shots more quickly, experiment more readily, and ultimately come up with better-looking results faster. That's because Autodesk's Toxik running on the xw8400 workstation provides the ideal combination of flexibility, interactivity, and mind-blowingly fast performance.

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Phil Brennan is a creative director at Asylum Visual Effects in Santa Monica.

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