• VFX pipeline – Render Wall management topics

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    1: Introduction Title: Managing a VFX Facility’s Render Wall

    • Briefly introduce the importance of managing a VFX facility’s render wall.
    • Highlight how efficient management contributes to project timelines and overall productivity.

     

    2: Daily Overview Title: Daily Management Routine

    • Monitor Queues: Begin each day by reviewing render queues to assess workload and priorities.
    • Resource Allocation: Allocate resources based on project demands and available hardware.
    • Job Prioritization: Set rendering priorities according to project deadlines and importance.
    • Queue Optimization: Adjust queue settings to maximize rendering efficiency.

     

    3: Resource Allocation Title: Efficient Resource Management

    • Hardware Utilization: Distribute rendering tasks across available machines for optimal resource usage.
    • Balance Workloads: Avoid overloading specific machines while others remain underutilized.
    • Consider Off-Peak Times: Schedule resource-intensive tasks during off-peak hours to enhance overall performance.

     

    4: Job Prioritization Title: Prioritizing Rendering Tasks

    • Deadline Sensitivity: Give higher priority to tasks with imminent deadlines to ensure timely delivery.
    • Critical Shots: Identify shots crucial to the project’s narrative or visual impact for prioritization.
    • Dependent Shots: Sequence shots that depend on others should be prioritized together.

     

    5: Queue Optimization and Reporting Title: Streamlining Render Queues

    • Dependency Management: Set up dependencies to ensure shots are rendered in the correct order.
    • Error Handling: Implement automated error detection and requeueing mechanisms.
    • Progress Tracking: Regularly monitor rendering progress and update stakeholders.
    • Data Management: Archive completed renders and remove redundant data to free up storage.
    • Reporting: Provide daily reports on rendering status, resource usage, and potential bottlenecks.

     

    6: Conclusion Title: Enhancing VFX Workflow

    • Effective management of a VFX facility’s render wall is essential for project success.
    • Daily monitoring, resource allocation, job prioritization, queue optimization, and reporting are key components.
    • A well-managed render wall ensures efficient production, timely delivery, and overall project success.
  • What the Boeing 737 MAX’s crashes can teach us about production business – the effects of commoditisation

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    newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-indonesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution

     

     

    Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software (or VFX?) —another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse.

     

    The beginning of the end was “Boeing’s 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, a dysfunctional firm with a dilapidated aircraft plant in Long Beach and a CEO (Harry Stonecipher) who liked to use what he called the “Hollywood model” for dealing with engineers: Hire them for a few months when project deadlines are nigh, fire them when you need to make numbers.” And all that came with it. “Stonecipher’s team had driven the last nail in the coffin of McDonnell’s flailing commercial jet business by trying to outsource everything but design, final assembly, and flight testing and sales.”

     

    It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that, especially in concert with computer software and oblivious regulators.

     

    There was something unsettlingly familiar when the world first learned of MCAS in November, about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death. It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees.

     

    Down in South Carolina, a nonunion Boeing assembly line that opened in 2011 had for years churned out scores of whistle-blower complaints and wrongful termination lawsuits packed with scenes wherein quality-control documents were regularly forged, employees who enforced standards were sabotaged, and planes were routinely delivered to airlines with loose screws, scratched windows, and random debris everywhere.

     

    Shockingly, another piece of the quality failure is Boeing securing investments from all airliners, starting with SouthWest above all, to guarantee Boeing’s production lines support in exchange for fair market prices and favorite treatments. Basically giving Boeing financial stability independently on the quality of their product. “Those partnerships were but one numbers-smoothing mechanism in a diversified tool kit Boeing had assembled over the previous generation for making its complex and volatile business more palatable to Wall Street.”

    (more…)