[yellowdog-announce] Y-Film Delivers Tools for Professional VFX Production Shops

[Announce List for all Terra Soft products (moderated)]

CELL IS COMING TO HOLLYWOOD!

RENO, Nevada - 13 November 2007 - From the show floor of Supercomputing 07, 
Terra Soft debuts Y-Film, a powerful suite of VFX management and productivity 
tools coupled with DNA's 3Delight RenderMan compliant render engine, Cluster 
Resources' Moab, and Terra Soft's Y-HPC cluster construction suite. Y-Film 
leverages two decades experience in the Hollywood VFX industry through the 
integration of a robust Asset Manager, a Workflow Pipeline, an Artist 
Productivity Tool suite, and an end-to-end Color Management System.

"Boutique studios are often founded by very talented artists and technicians 
who are hampered by a lack of time and funding to develop their own pipeline. 
They may be able to purchase a small renderfarm on the budget of their first 
breakthrough project, but without an automated system they waste valuable 
time producing renders, composites, slates, and movies through countless 
mouse clicks and key strokes. The talent they bring to their otherwise 
flexible studio is diminished by an error prone, manual effort for what could 
be an automated, routine task," offers Scott Frankel, Visual Effects 
Supervisor of Circle-S Studios and lead developer of the Y-Film Asset 
Management Suite.

Terra Soft and Frankel have integrated the Circle-S asset management and 
productivity tools with the cross-architecture, cross-platform Y-HPC cluster 
construction suite for an industry unique product offering. Coupled With 
plugins for Maya, mental ray, RenderMan, and Shake, Y-Film provides 
appliance-like simplicity to computer graphics.

Frankel concludes, "Born in the demanding environment of a boutique studio in 
an industry that does not accept late projects, Y-Film offers tools that are 
not an option, but a necessity for everyone involved in successful VFX 
production."

Following his work with with ILM and ESC, Frankel spent several years in code 
development for his VFX company Circle-S Studios. The result is an industry 
unique tool suite which ties the artist's workstation to the back-end 
renderfarm, providing asset management and task scheduling, integrated color 
management, a pipeline workflow system, and a suite of artist productivity 
tools.

"We anticipate an aggressive adoption of Y-Film in the VFX industry, by 
start-ups who desire a turn-key solution, by established boutiques who 
recognize the value in this level of automation, and by larger, top-tier 
players when Y-Film is coupled with near-future, advanced hardware offerings. 
In the mean time, we are excited by our already forming beta site deployment 
phase," states Kai Staats, CEO Terra Soft Solutions.

Y-Film streamlines the production of computer graphics imaging from Windows 
and OSX desktops to a high performance Linux render farm. Robust, scalable, 
and flexible, Y-Film offers a powerful set of features and benefits.

Features:
- Robust Asset Management.
- Automated Workflow Pipeline.
- Integration with the TORQUE resource manager.
- Artist Productivity Tool Suite.
- End-to-end Color Management System.
- Frame expression language for fine render control.
- Bundled with 3Delight, a RenderMan compliant render engine.
- Bundled with Moab cluster manager.

Benefits:
- Cross architecture: Power 32/64-bit, x86-64.
- Portable, powerful: Built upon Python.
- Efficient: Reduce needless errors in render workflow.
- Cross platform: Supports multiple Linux operating systems.
- Industry standard: Plug-ins integrate Autodesk's Maya, mental 
Images' "mental ray", and Apple's Shake.
- Ease of Deployment: Available as a stand-alone RPM or deployed cluster-wide 
via a Y-HPC node image.
- Built upon open source: Leverages SQL database engine.
- Robust, scalable: Supports massive, concurrent transactions.

Y-Film will include bundle options for DNA's 3Delight, a RenderMan compliant 
render engine, Cluster Resources' Moab Cluster Suite, and forthcoming 
workstation and compute engine standards. Under contract with Terra Soft, 
3Delight was recently ported to the Power architecture and Yellow Dog Linux 
with suppoort for IBM QS21 blades, Mercury Cell systems, and Sony's PS3 and 
forthcoming Cell Computing Board.

Y-Film is slated for release with the close of Q1 2008.


About Cluster Resources
Cluster Resources, Inc. (www.clusterresources.com) is a leading provider of 
workload and resource management software and services for cluster, grid and 
utility-based computing environments. With more than a decade of industry 
experience, Cluster Resources delivers products and services that enable 
organizations to understand, control, and fully optimize their compute 
resources. The company’s flagship Moab® software unifies the view and 
management of heterogeneous hardware and workload, provides exacting control 
over resources and the policies governing them, and delivers consistent 
90-99% CPU utilization.


About Scott Frankel
Scott Frankel is founding partner and Visual Effects Supervisor of Circle-S 
Studios and lead developer of the Y-Film Asset Management Tool Suite. Prior 
to Circle-S, Frankel was Digital Effects Supervisor for ESC Entertainment 
where he completed the final two Matrix films. For ten years prior, Frankel 
was the Compositing Supervisor for Industrial Light & Magic. In 2002 he was 
nominated by the Visual Effects Society for Best Compositing in a Motion 
Picture for Dreamwork's "Minority Report." Frankel is a member of the Academy 
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; and the Association for Computing 
Machinery, the Visual Effects Society, and Film Arts Foundation.


About Terra Soft Solutions, Inc.
As the recognized leader in Linux for Power since 1999, Terra Soft provides 
Yellow Dog Linux board support for Power architecture chip vendors and OEMs; 
turn-key, integrated solutions built upon IBM, Mercury, and Sony systems; and 
cross-architecture Linux applications for high performance computing, 
including Y-HPC Cluster Construction Suite and the Y-Film Asset Management 
System.

For more information, visit www.terrasoftsolutions.com


PLAYSTATION3 and PS3 are registered trademarks of Sony Computer Entertainment 
Inc. Power is a trademark of IBM. YDL, Y-HPC, and Y-Film are registered 
trademarks of Terra Soft Solutions. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus 
Torvalds. Additional product and company names mentioned may be trademarks 
and/or registered trademarks of their respective holders.