Presenting at NAB 2017, Axum Graphics CEO Gareth Morgan describes Axum's ground breaking content creation tool, Auteurist. This talk discusses how Auteurist uses AMD Radeon ProRender to render photo-realistic video on the cloud.
7. Language of Cinema
Auteurist…..
• Utilizes the language of cinema rather than 3D
jargon.
• Emphasizes storytelling
• Privileges it over the 3D expertise.
16. Rendered On The Cloud
• Inclusive tool with a purposeful low barrier to
entry
• Rendering on Radeon GPUs on the cloud
• Directly uploaded to streaming service
17. Rendered On The Cloud
Users
Video
Storage
Image
Storage
Geometry
Storage
Database
Streaming services
Web front end
Good afternoon my name is Gareth Morgan, I am CEO of Axum Graphics. And I will be presenting this talk on how we use Radeon Prorender on the cloud in our content creation tool Auteurist
Auteurist exists to democratize content creation for film makers, particularly those film makers interested in virtual reality and computer animation.
We want to open up computer animation to a whole new class of users who are currently excluded from the industry.
Currently, they are excluded because building 3D content is hard, the existing content creation tools are complex, and have a steep learning curve.
They are targeted to advanced users with 3D experience rather than storytellers.
Also, this type of software tends to be large native applications which need powerful hardware to support them.
If you’ve ever used any of these other content creation tools, you’ve probably encountered some of these terms; things like triangles, textures, normals, shaders, vertices, and splines.
We think these terms have nothing to do with film making, and in fact, form a barrier to storytelling.
Film makers have their own technical language with which to tell stories.
Terms such as: shows, shots, scenes, characters, props,, and sets
It is this language that you’ll find in Auteurist.
Many current 3D content creation tools expect film makers to understand 3D concepts that may not be a part of their glossary.
On a number of occasions since I’ve begun developing this tool, I’ve been talking to a writer, aspiring storyteller, or artist who as then reached into their bag to pull out concept art for an animated show they wanted to create.
But, they’ve been stopped from doing so by the skill set barrier. With the current content creation tools on the market, they don’t know where to begin to translate their idea into reality.
Auteurist is a bridge between these two worlds, being storytelling and content creation.
It makes storytellers’ ideas happen in computer animated film.
Auteurist does this by means of a very simple user interface that anyone can pick up and use.
There are no barriers to creating with Auteurist, as it addresses both skill set and technical barriers found in traditional content creation tools.
Auteurist is a powerful fully featured 3D content creation tool. But it runs 100% in browser on any device.
We think this really important as it removes another barrier to creating stories:
Requiring users to install a large package on a powerful computer excludes a great many storytellers from the community
With our tool, if you have access to a web browser on any device you have access to Auteurist.
Of course, the most important element of story through film is dialogue. With Auteurist, adding dialogue is easy.
You simply bring up your device camera. Any web cam will work: desktop, webcam, mobile phone camera, or tablet camera. You record the dialogue in camera, and Auteurist applies it directly to your character.
The first is photorealism. This is really important to Auteurist even if our users may not be 3D experts with a deep understanding how rendering works. High quality renders are important to them. They may not care about global illumination, physically based shading, and all these other terms, but they do care that their final movies look realistic.
If you take an make some content in real-time content creation tool and produce an image, and show it to them, they will recognise that it doesn’t look very good. They may not know the reasons for that (that is been produced by rasterizer, using shadow maps, etc) but they will care about he quality.
ProRender gives us the quality we need!
The next criteria is performance. This is really important for us, and is one that that ProRender really excels at. Our users may not have ever used a production render before, so they are not used to the kind of really long render times that professionals in the production rendering industry might be used to. Trying to explain that the job just kicked off might not finish for hours or even days is not going to wash.
Because of this we have target of averaging seconds per frame. This clinched it for ProRender, as a GPU renderer running on AMDs Radeon GPUs it is incredibily fast. In our measurements it was an order of magnitude faster than the CPU renderer we evaluated on the same job.
Another consideratino for us was 360 video. In Auteurist VR is a first class citizen. With the flick of a switch, you can choose between traditional video and 360 degree stereoscopic equirectanglular video.
We don’t favor one over the other. ProRender allows us to do this, as it supports 360 degree rendering out of the box.
The final consideration for us was the platforms we want to support. While the demo you see running today is running on cloud instances using the windows OS, we want the option to running on cloud instances that run other OSes. An ProRender as well supporting windows supports a couple of different CentOS linux versions, which are widely available, which is important for us.
As discussed, Auteurist is an inclusive tool. You don’t need to run it on a powerful PC with a big GPU
But that doesn’t mean there is not a GPU involved. ProRender is running in our renderer back-end in cloud. An inside those cloud node is a powerful Radeon GPU. So even though Auteurist can run on any device, including a mobile device it still takes advantage of the cutting edge GPU compute power of those Radeon GPUs.
This is also convenient for our users, as it means that your local computer is not getting bogged down by rendering.
As soon as one shot is done and rendering, you can immediately move on to build your next shot.
And as it’s all happening on the cloud , it is as easy as checking a box to upload the resulting video directly to a streaming service such as youtube or vimeo.
We are going to democratize filmmaking and computer animation
We’d love for you to help us do that
Sign up our alpha program now at axum dot graphics
Thank you
Any questions?
