Crack Creative (http://www.crackcreative.com) developed a new production technology called "Virtual Production" for Avatar back in 2005. It allows directors to shoot CG motion capture characters and settings interactively like an actually location.
Crack Creative (http://www.crackcreative.com) developed a new production technology called "Virtual Production" for Avatar back in 2005. It allows directors to shoot CG motion capture characters and settings interactively like an actual location.
The job of a distributer is by definition obsolete in the face of the internet. Most intelligent people I've met agree that fighting the ability to copy content has no future. Distributors may not be dead yet, but they are in the ER hooked up to monitors, with lawyers running around trying to defibrillate them with lawsuits.
For the most part they can't change either, because they are often under contract to provide content to certain channels and certain times. They can't just start offering a pay or advertising based torrent service. If they ever had that chance I think the window has closed.
In terms of producing movies, music or other kinds of content, the only real value that remains in the studio model is financing. That is, someone pays to make your movie based on how excited you can make them in 10 minutes. With distribution being replaced, there may yet be a business model in production financing. Maybe "get enough people on facebook to like your script, and we'll give you 60 million dollars to make it...." or "hey everyone vote up our spec album"
I actually still have my Black Book. The definitive tome of hard core graphics programming. I'd still recommend it to anyone looking to dig deeper into high performance programming (graphics or otherwise).
The job of a distributer is by definition obsolete in the face of the internet. Most intelligent people I've met agree that fighting the ability to copy content has no future. Distributors may not be dead yet, but they are in the ER hooked up to monitors, with lawyers running around trying to defibrillate them with lawsuits.
For the most part they can't change either, because they are often under contract to provide content to certain channels and certain times, so they can't just start offering a pay or advertising based torrent service.
In terms of producing movies, music or other kinds of content, the only real value that remains in the studio model is financing. That is, someone pays to make your movie based on how excited you can make them in 10 minutes. With distribution being replaced, there may yet be a business model in production financing. Maybe "get enough people on facebook to like your script, and we'll give you 60 million dollars to make it...."
FPS provides a robust set of interface tools to the amazon payments system. It enables a number of payment models that other services don't offer such as, subscription, aggregate (i.e. micropayment), marketplace/3 party (i.e. user to user transactions with optional commission), and the prices are competitive. You can even do user to user transfers with no fees. They also offer fraud protection.
It is not trivial to implement in an application but does seem to be very concise for the features it provides. The con for this flexibility naturally is increased complexity. They do offer a 'Simple Pay' solution if you don't need the extra features, but I've not used that.
During development you can tie you application to the FPS 'sandbox' which simulates the complete user experience as well as virtual payments and fees so that you can see exactly how things will work in production from various points of view with out actually moving money around.
I needed subscriptions, so I could not use the other popular solutions (when the decision was made), and therefore can't compare. However, I refuse to use paypal because they put 100% of the risk on the account holder, while at the same time not disclosing information about the purchaser to allow for fraud investigation, this is flat out unacceptable.
You only want to use it if you want a more robust payment then a 'buy now' button. In other words it's a lot to deal with if you only need that level of functionality. My app has a subscription model, and will be expanding out to a market at some point in the future. FPS handles all of those models. They also provide some good guarantees. Given some of the recent complaints about about google payments, and my own personal experiences with paypal I'm beginning to value these guarantees very highly.
However, my system is not fully implemented and deployed (hence no link yet), so I'm not ready to provide a full endorsement. I can only say that the experience so far on the development side has been very good, and the sandbox makes extensive testing before deployment very easy.
I will report back when I've deployed the system in production.
(I can't see any of the 11 comments so forgive me if post is redundant in some way)
Visual Effects production often needs lots of computing resources for rendering. This is a task that can be heavily parallelized. Usually this is done on a frame/per core basis, with memory being the limiting factor. Now I've started using EC2 recently which made me realize a different approach to rendering tasks.
Normally a facility has a fixed number of CPUs available to run jobs. So for example 100 cpus. Let's say the average number of frames to render is usually around 200. So if each frame takes an hour to render and your's is the only job on the queue then it will take 2 hours to see the complete shot. And it's much worse in the real world with many artists working on many shots. Whereas using a resource like EC2 you can always render your entire shot in 1 hour regardless of the number of frames. You're only limited by the time it takes 1 frame to render, and the cost is the same if you use 1 cpu or 200.
In other words one can trade depth for breadth. Now this may seem obvious to anyone familiar with EC2, but for me it means that tools like Tesla which where once in high demand for this type of work are now much less valuable. I would expect that it's price/performance is much better then EC2, but where is the cutoff? How many hours do you have to run that Tesla to come out ahead? And if you're running 1 Tesla for that many hours, might it not be worth a premium to get your answer sooner by running more massively parallel (but for less wall clock time) on an EC2 like service?
I suspect these types of tools becoming only relevant to real time applications (due to reduced latency vs. EC2), and or nonstop computing (assuming there's a big price/performance win).
Pace Camera (http://www.pacetech.com/) developed the 'fusion' 3d camera to film(HD) the live action parts http://www.nowpublic.com/3d_hd_fusion_camera_from_pace.