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Beta Sight: Frantic Films Software Deadline

May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Matt Estela Visual Effects Supervisor, Jackanory

Reliable render-queue tool allows for automated workflow.

Fans of the original BBC children's classic Jackanory, which aired from 1965 until going off the air in 1996, could catch the series during its highly rated two-episode revival in November 2006. Leading the charge for modernizing the show was director Nick Willing, who previously directed such effects-heavy productions as 2000's Jason and the Argonauts and the 2007 Sci Fi Channel miniseries Tin Man. His vision was to transform the show — which encouraged young people's interest in books by having renowned actors read from famous children's novels — into an interactive experience. The new Jackanory would transport viewers into fantasy literary worlds filled with lavishly animated landscapes and whimsical CG characters.

Willing brought me on board to be the show's visual-effects supervisor. At the time, I hadn't yet joined animation studio The House of Curves, of which I'm now a co-director, but I was a freelance 3D artist working for companies such as The Mill and Framestore CFC.

Willing came to me after several large U.K. post facilities turned down the project because they couldn't bring their costs down enough to fit Jackanory's budget. I recommended that instead of outsourcing all the visual effects and post to a third party, he bring it all inhouse. Doing so would mean building our own cost-efficient postproduction studio from the ground up and hiring our own dedicated Jackanory staff.

My first job was to get our post house up and running, and I only had 30 days to make it happen. We were lucky enough to secure a great studio space within the spacious BBC offices in London. After hiring about 20 staffers, we set to work outfitting our new facility with furniture, equipment, and workstations, and we hired a top-notch postproduction team.

I was very conscientious of our limited budget, so I initially opted for a free render-farm solution to incorporate into our production pipeline. I quickly found out that “free” comes at a price. Our renders were constantly crashing, and it brought down our test renders to a grinding halt. In a normal case scenario, I would have been able to handle these production hiccups on my own, but because we were working under such tight timelines, I was performing several jobs at once. I just didn't have time to be constantly monitoring the render farm — so I set out to find a solution that would perform reliably, right out of the box.

After reaching out to several post facilities for advice and fielding 15 or so recommendations, a local company suggested I try Deadline, the render-farm management system from Frantic Films Software. This studio had used Deadline on a Hollywood visual-effects movie, and the team members were very enthusiastic about how well the tool performed. Although Deadline was a little more expensive than some of the other options I had considered, my contact insisted that after testing out a slew of other competing products, I would quickly recuperate the nominal difference in cost.

In fact, Frantic Films developed Deadline as a solution to its problems with the render-queue tools being used at its own visual-effects facilities. Unable to find software that performed under the rigorous demands of back-to-back visual-effects jobs, Frantic Films' R&D department scripted its own tool and implemented it across its Los Angeles; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Winnipeg, Manitoba, facilities. The fact that Deadline was production-tested and fine-tuned on actual feature-film projects was a big selling point for me.

When we first installed the trial version, we ran into a few initial snags, but that was mostly because I was rushing things. These weren't problems that a quick phone call to Frantic Films support couldn't solve, however. The support staff was great — they took the time to walk me through setup and made tons of suggestions, and this was all before we had even committed to spending a penny.

Once we were sold, we installed Deadline across our Windows XP Professional-based render farm with HP workstations. The render farm was composed of 23 nodes, and it included 10 Intel Dual-Core Xeon processors for the farm itself, with an additional 13 workstations. Software packages sent through the render farm included Autodesk Maya 7.0 and Mental Images mental ray for Maya.

Every night, our visual-effects team was churning out 30 to 40 shots. We'd output a big job through the render farm and leave work for the day, and when we came back in the morning, we'd check the logs and see that everything rendered perfectly. The great thing about Deadline is that it is truly intelligent software. On occasion, we might have a machine run into an issue and crash. Deadline would catch that and quietly restart the computer, or flag that machine in the logs to alert us it needed help.

Deadline also helped us allocate our machines' bandwidth. If certain machines were performing better, they would be given more work, thus ensuring that our project stayed on schedule. All in all, the software was performing an impressive amount of behind-the-scenes housekeeping.

Each episode of Jackanory had an incredible amount of visual-effects shots. “The Magician of Samarkand,” narrated by actor Ben Kingsley, had between 400 and 500 shots, and “Muddle Earth,” narrated by stage actor John Sessions, boasted more than 400 shots as well. We spent months working around the clock, but it was all well worth it. The critical feedback on our show was amazing. Jackanory won a 2007 Televisual Bulldog Award in the children's category, and it was nominated in for a 2007 BAFTA Award — Britain's equivalent of the Emmys — in the Best Children's Drama category. Frantic Films' Deadline was crucial in making sure we met our deadlines and delivered an excellent product. I'd go so far as to say that had we not installed the software, we might never have finished both episodes on time.

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Matt Estela is co-director of The House of Curves, a studio, school, and freelance service based in the heart of London.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.