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 the desktop, and we have 120 CPUs in our render farm. That all adds up to some serious hardware for an animated TV show not known for its visuals... All that will change once we are able to release some footage from our Super Secret Summer Project. Plus, that project will be a great crucible to hammer out all the kinks in the upgrades before we get back in to production for the fall run. So, in theory, the next run will go MUCH smoother. No more 118 hours a week. I hope.
That really will depend on the Powers That Be. In the mean time, I'm going to enjoy a nice easy summer doing some neat and interesting work that does not require me staying at my desk for 15-18 hours a day 6 days a week. I may actually start working out again. Try to get back under 200 lbs. Wouldn't that be nice? Later,
J^2