Bryan Rowland, Doug Stewart & Kelly Peterson: Shake Performs a Miracle
Surprised by the ease with which he adapted to Shake, Peterson says, “Shake is very flexible — not rigid like other applications. Artists can cater to their own style of working and focus on the artistic side of compositing.”
Intern Army
Rowland and Stewart hired a small group of interns from nearby Brigham Young University and Utah Valley State College and trained each one on a certain feature of Shake.
“Because of the way Shake is set up,” Stewart says, “it’s very easy to show people how to do something. You can teach someone one aspect of the program rather than spend days giving them a general sense of the interface.”
Stewart prefers Shake’s node-based structure for its ease of use, its fast interface, and because he can quickly apply one treatment to other shots.
Recalling the first weeks of the new operation, Stewart says, “We hired compositor Mark Loertscher and trained him in Shake so he could train the slew of interns. When a new intern arrived, Mark would spend about a half hour explaining a task — how to make rotoshapes or how to do some dust-busting — and that was it. Then we’d just check their work. It was very surprising how quickly they picked things up.”
Working in Shake
Stewart prefers Shake’s node-based structure because, he says, “it’s very easy to work with. It supports the same resolutions and color space that film works in and it provides a very fast interface. But what I like most about Shake is that, after we lay out a shot, integrate and color correct it, we can quickly apply the treatment to other shots and then make small tweaks.”
In some compositing applications, users stack up layers of media elements like pancakes and then place them in a timeline. In Shake, each piece of media appears as a separate node, like apples on a tree. Users can easily see and adjust the parameters of a node, delete or replace it, and later apply the results to another composite or effect.
“Its so much easier to take a setup that you already have and integrate that into a new background plate and a new element that matches the background plate,” Stewart says. “We created the CG smoke on a per-shot basis. But with the Shake node setup, once we apply the smoke to the key shot, we can easily apply the smoke across the board. Being able to easily transfer one effect to different shots really sped up the process.”
Render Wrangler
The other thing that sped things up, Stewart says, was being able to work in Shake’s command line. “Things render faster when there’s no interface attached to the file,” Stewart points out. “In the Terminal application on the Mac, you can execute a Shake file, and the Mac will render out the image sequence, apply all the effects we created, and pump those out to a final file that we can send to our digital intermediate.”
“Shake is very flexible — not rigid like other applications. Artists can cater to their own style of working and focus on the artistic side of compositing.”
One of the interns — the “render wrangler” — used Apple Remote Desktop and the Terminal application to process each shot on a rented render farm of 16 Power Mac G5s (see sidebar). “Rendering through the Terminal cuts to the chase,” says Stewart.
“A Landslide of Work”
Now that they’ve pulled a miracle off with Shake and the Macs, says Rowland, “we’re seeing a landslide of work, not only in visual effects, but also in motion graphics. Our higher-ups are really excited about it. They say, ‘This is incredible. They can actually do visual effects. And look at the money they saved us.’
“Now,” Rowland happily points out, “we’re getting our own building, Xsan, and all the resources we need to make this happen for the long term. And we’ll save the church a significant amount of money on future projects.
“The miracle is the Apple technology that made it practically plug and play for our team. It’s really amazing.”
