AMD’s Cinema 2.0 vision embraces the Movie industry, continuing and expanding their focus on bringing tools and support to leverage the graphics power now available.  This new generation of power has applications to movie directors, content creators, FX and more.  As presented by Rick Bergman (AMD Sr. VP and General Manager - Graphics Products Group) at the Cinema 2.0 launch, AMD has made it a top corporate objective to “create the ultimate visual experience”, and is working with Film and Game experts to bring this Cinema 2.0 vision to reality.

Working with Directors and FX studios for years to understand their creative process, AMD is determined to help the Artists realize their vision and is  committed to improving how people use technology for that creative process.  The goal is to remove the technology barriers between the director’s mind and the consumer and allow them to more quickly realize their artistic vision.

Robert Rodriguez

Robert Rodriguez, artist and director of Sin City, spoke of what Cinema 2.0 means to him.  He reinforced the idea that, as a director and artist, he wants technology that allows him to work "at the speed of thought". With Cinema 2.0, he sees this vision coming to fruition, bringing an immediacy to visualization in the digital world that hasn't been there before - incorporating digital effects, digital cameras.

Pre-Visualization With Cinema 2.0

From a pre-visualization perspective, this new generation of technology and tools allows studios to use high-quality assets to bring rapid digital representations of scenes to directors as they work in the new digital world of movie making.  In another video, Daniel Gregoire of Halon Studios spoke of what this technology has brought to his work doing pre-visualization for many prominent movie studios.

Halon Studios

Halon Studios

Cinema 2.0 brings the ability to speed the process of the art of pre-visualization, bringing higher quality representations of the desired scenes to the production faster than ever before.  It allows them to deliver a "more seamless process, in a shorter amount of time, with a better result, with many more iterative possibilities ..." to let them get to "... what is in their head."

Bringing Real-Time Rendering To The Masses

OTOY

OTOY

Jules Urbach, founder and CEO of JulesWorld LLC, spoke on using the power of today's graphics to render incredibly realistic scenes in real-time.  This fidelity in real-time graphics comes from Jules' history working with ATI hardware executing the RenderMan (R) pipeline.  He did his first experiments with this on the ATI 1900 video card and has been working on improving the accuracy and capabilities on newer generations of video cards ever since.  His company released several commercials for the TransFormers film, which were not only rendered in real-time, but they were directed in real-time as well.  They can now take the actual movie assets, for TransFormers from ILM, and render them in real-time with today's 4xxx series GPUs.  They were able to do this as well with the SpiderMan assets from Sony Entertainments SpiderMan3 movie.  They used advanced functionality of the GPU, such as the tessilator unit, to render the fine bits of the costume beveling and, impressively, were able to do the rendering in real time.  Jules sees this moving into the time where GPUs are powerful enough that ray-tracing and other highly calculation intensive rendering methods can be run in real-time with the power of this new generation of graphics.

It was fascinating to see what these people are doing every day with this technology. The previsualization of digital movie scenes presented by Halon was absolutely fascinating, and I can see how as a director who is working to put together their ideas for a scene, to be able to have higher fidelity previews of various scenarious, could really improve and accelerate that process. In watching Jules present, he clearly is deeply involved with and interested in the cutting edge technologies being offered by graphics hardware and it was easy to absorb his excitement when talking about what they are working on.