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MillimeterGrid Pipeline
Mar 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
When Toronto's DKP Effects began production on the initial six episodes of UPN's Game Over — the first-ever primetime CG animated network series — for production company Carsey-Werner, the company employed its proprietary, realtime production database/organizational system, theGrid (Graphical Realtime Information Display) for the first time on an episodic, broadcast project. According to Terry Dale, VP of technical production and development at DKP, the system made production of the initial episodes “far more efficient. We produced six, half-hour episodes in eight months, including 280 3D characters, using a crew of about 50 people.”
Dale and Alan Kennedy, supervising compositor at DKP, describe theGrid as a visual-oriented, user-friendly interface system that allows all participants and departments to simultaneously access and update data from the company's main production database, dubbed Overdoc.
“Basically, the system consists of the core database, and then modules that sit off that database and address different aspects of the production,” says Dale. “Each entry point for each module has a different display front-end to show the user visually what they are looking for, and users can create their own view nodes to suit their needs. The idea was to keep it as visual as possible, with lots of color-coding, thumbnails, and so on, so that with one glance, you can see what is going on in the area that interests you. It's built on Linux hardware, and interacts seamlessly with different types of file formats for the different packages we might use, like Maya for animation, Shake for compositing, Final Cut Pro for editing, and so on.”
The main benefit, adds Kennedy, is that the system “cuts down on the mundane tasks that are prone to human error and take away from creativity. For instance, in the compositing module (called compGRID), during production on this show, we had 2,700 shots at one point, and it would have taken one person four to five weeks to load them all in himself. We did it in about four minutes using the Grid.”
