No. 1 computer used to make videos

Press, 7 February 1986, Page 24

No. 1 computer used to make videos

By

RICHARD de ATLEY,

Associated Press Los Angeles Mick Jagger dances and sings through a southwestern adobe house in the music video, “Hard Woman,” while a whimsical duo made of line images swirls about him. The house was created by a computer and detailed right down to the wood grain in the doorposts. The line figures who act out the song are also computer designs. In the movie, “2010,” the same computer created the multi-col-oured, surging clouds of the planet Jupiter. Art mimicked life in images drawn from the detailed pictures of Jovian whorls sent back to earth by the Voyager spacecraft. These effects are* some

of the creations of Digital Productions, the brainchild of a film-maker, John Whitney, and Gary Demos. They manage a team of 80 computer image specialists, film-, makers and technicians and the world’s most powerful computer, a Cray X-MP, that can make one billion computations a second.

Digital Productions won an Academy Award for science and engineering in 1985 for the "2010” clouds of Jupiter and for computer simulation of outer space dogfights in “The Last Starfighter.” Of the six Cray X-MPs in use, the computer operated by Digital was the only one not being used by the Government or the defence industry, Mr Whitney said.

The SUSI2 million ($22.8 million) Cray has 3400 circuit boards containing 200,000 microchips, with 107.8 km of wire connecting the circuits.

The cylindrical computer is about two metres tall and 1.55 metres in diameter, but weighs almost six tons because of the copper tubing snaking through the system to carry coolant for the circuit boards.

An average home computer has about four circuit boards and 80 microchips. The Cray is backed up by six other computers to provide the details and fluid motion to images that include the American Telephone and Telegraph logo, the C.B.S. Morning (with a grid

peeling away from the golden letters) and a series of commercials for Rockwell Incorporated. So far, Digital Productions has been producing its fanciful and detailed images for commercials, corporate logos and movie scenes.

Mr Whitney said his tool would soon have the power to put together any image, though creating a lifelike human face, capable of showing the full range of emotions, still eluded the computer. The computer ultimately would be able to show itself as a camera, he said in a recent interview. “It will mean there’s no subject matter that can’t be put into the computer and there is no story that could not be told Stand

there’s no fantasy that can’t be put on to the screen with a degree of truthfulness that would be awesome.”

The key to such sharper images are the polygons, or many-sided figures, that are combined to make the larger image. Whitney’s and Demos’ first programme, developed before they created Digital, was 50,000 polygons per image. At Digital, they have stepped up the polygons from 400,000 to 1.5 million polygons per image. Each point of a polygon is coded into the computer. That information is used to build the model of an object, such as a face, that can be manipulated. The more information that can be delivered in

the shortest time will produce the sharpest and most believable image, hence the need for the Cray super-computer.

Unrestrained moviemaking is part of Mr Whitney’s life. The son of the abstract film maker John Whitney senior and the artist Jacqueline Blum, he avoided college to learn the practical aspects of film making. At his father’s Motion Graphics Inc. he made a multi-screen, 17-minute film performance and light show in 1967 that was eventually shown at the Museum of Modern Art.

Mr Whitney first became interested in computer graphics using electronic, rather than mechanical, methods to project images in 1972

when he saw the technique employed in a film produced by the University of Utah. Digital Productions was founded in 1981 by Messrs Whitney and Demos, who had worked together at Information International Incorporated. They acquired the Cray X-MP, and began producing award-winning graphics. In 1984, they won a Clio award, the United States advertising industry’s top prize, for a commercial that took television viewers inside the workings of a Sony Walkman tape player. Digital also won a New York International Film and Television Gold Medal for creating the logo used by television W.T.B.S. in