As I mentioned before, one of the good things to come out of this last run was the upgrades we were finally allowed to get. Well, we just finished racking up the last render node. We now have 3.1 TB allocated for our production library (up from 1.5 TB which was almost full), 1 TB for rendered images (from 150 GB, MUCH better), our production library RAID is MUCH faster (from 10 MB/s to an avg. of 50 MB/s, NICE!), our entire production network is on a 8 Gbps backplane, we have gigabit to th...

Well, it didn't kill me. I guess that means I'm stronger? This last episode was rather simple from a technical standpoint (aside from 12 composite shots that each had 9 layers. And each of the 9 layers came out to around 50 megs for the Maya binary size, which is only a little above average... But when you are rendering 9 times to get one shot, you REALLY want that shot to get approved on the first pass...). The only real problem we had this last episode was one of IT nightmares... W...

One of the really weird things about my job is that I am the person who specifies what new hardware we buy. Which can be fun, but it also amounts to an ass-load of responsibility. Shining example: When we first start doing South Park, we were using SGI workstations, whch were at the time the best, and only, option for doing professional 3D animation. They were fine for a couple years, but as PC technology finally reached the point were you could take them seriously as a professional works...

We got the first 10 of our 30 additional render machines in Saturday. Dual Opteron 252s with 4G RAM and gigabit NICs for those who may be curious. Unfortunately, we couldn't really use them until today because Boxx forgot to give us the manuals for them. Oridnarily that would not be a problem, but since we had them pre-install and config Redhat 9 for us, that became a problem since the manual is where they tell you what their default root password is. Being impatient, I tried reinstalling...

Interesting day here at the 'park. Usually, when we are gearing up for a run of episodes, we'll put some time into an episode that won't make air until midway through the run. The thought being that with an episode half done, we'll be able to take a few days off and recharge for the last part of the run. This run's "breather" episode, E_905, got scrapped in favor of the episode we aired, The Losing Edge, also named E_905. We did get one day off just because we had been working on E_904 ti...

So, I'm finally giving the blog thing a shot. Figured it might help me keep things straight in my head as well as be interesting to some of the people in my industry. First things first. Introductions. My name is J. J. Franzen, and I am the Technology Supervisor for Comedy Central's South Park. As many know, while South Park is a rather simple-looking show, in reality it is one of the most demanding animated productions, in both terms of technology and personal effort, on the air today. ...