PipelineFX and University of Hawaii Academy

[Stryker]

PipelineFX and the University of Hawaii Academy for Creative Media Unveil New Shared Animation Render Farm

Honolulu, HI – October 10, 2006 – PipelineFX, makers of Qube!™ software, the leading render farm management system for film production, game development, and digital media programs around the world, today announced that the University of Hawaii in partnership with PipelineFX has deployed a powerful animation render farm in support of digital media education programs across the island.

The project has been led by the University of Hawaii Academy for Creative Media (ACM) Founder and Chairman Chris Lee. Recently, Mr. Lee was the Executive Producer of Warner Brothers’ Superman Returns and is a producer on the upcoming film One Foot to Heaven ("Ji Quan Bu Ning"). Previously, Mr. Lee was the President of Motion Picture Production for TriStar Pictures and Columbia Pictures and has supervised and worked on such films as Jerry Maguire, Philadelphia, As Good As It Gets, and The Mask Of Zorro. “Since many programs across Oahu, including LCC, ACM and Waianae High School, will be sharing this resource, we expect the system to have a major impact on Hawaii’s digital media education and the length and quality of work that students are able to produce,” said Lee.

Housed at a Leeward Community College (LCC) data center, the new animation render farm is comprised of over 50 computers providing rendering power for Autodesk® Maya® 3D animations and AfterEffects® composites. The desktop machines are managed by Qube! as rendering machines when not used by students. What would normally take an individual computer 24 hours to process can now be accomplished by the animation render farm in less than one hour, which means that existing classroom computers can be used by more students.

The ACM and Waianae High School use the system remotely over the University’s wide-area network. Qube! provides a simple interface for the students to submit their jobs from anywhere on the network for processing on the powerful network, centralized system. The results are then transferred back over the inter-campus automatically.

Kaveh Kardan, ACM Chief Technologist said, “We have been working toward a more unified approach across all of the University of Hawaii campuses, leveraging talents and resources as we build a world-class creative media education program. Qube! software allows us to maximize all of our computing resources and share this really fast render farm between multiple programs.”
ACM offers a core curriculum in three tracks: Cinematic and Digital Production, Computer Animation & Game Design, and Critical Studies. More than just a "film school," ACM seeks to empower students to tell their own stories of Hawaii, the Pacific and Asia rather than have those stories told for them through a different cultural lens that is distant and often distorted. It is one of the few programs developing a unique program in Indigenous Filmmaking. ACM students have written, directed and produced over 300 short films and video games, many of which have been recognized in film festivals around the world.

“PipelineFX is thrilled to support such a leading-edge deployment of digital media resources for education programs in our home state,” said PipelineFX CEO Troy Brooks. “Rendering really is the bottleneck for many animation and graphics programs. This state-of-the-art render farm with seamless remote connectivity provides the number crunching power to increase the complexity and detail of local students’ work to a professional level.”

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About Qube! and PipelineFX: Qube! is the leading enterprise-class render farm management system for game development and film production. Qube!™ is highly customizable, extensively scalable, can be integrated into any production workflow, and is backed by 24 x 7 technical support. Qube! has custom pipelines for creative applications like Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk Maya®, NUKE™, SOFTIMAGE®|XSI®, Shake®, and many more. Qube!™ is IBM ServerProven®, and operates in Linux®, Windows® XP, 2000 and 2003, and Mac OS®X environments. PipelineFX, with headquarters in Honolulu, HI, was founded in 2002. Qube! is used by world-class studios around the world, including South Park Studios, Electronic Arts, Buena Vista Games, DKP, Reel FX, Guava Graphics, and Radical Entertainment. Qube! is used by schools around the world, including the School of Visual Arts in N.Y., Carleton School of Architecture, Full Sail, University of Advancing Technology, Pratt Institute, and University of Hawaii-Academy for Creative Media. For more information, please contact Troy Brooks, CEO of PipelineFX: troy@pipelinefx.com, Phone: 866-856-7823, 1000 Bishop Street, Suite 606, Honolulu, Hawaii, 96813, USA, info@pipelinefx.com, http://www.pipelinefx.com. For more information on the Academy for Creative Media, visit http://acm.hawaii.edu.