.. is this choice quote from Caroline Spelman who is quoted on BBC News saying: “I take a strong view on this, actually, that I don’t, living in this country, as a woman, want to be told what I can and can’t wear.”
Uh-oh! Gok Wan, Trinny & Susanna, and countless other style gurus – your days are numbered under the New Coalition! I don’t think Caroline Spelman will be inviting you round for cheese and biscuits!
We’re attempting to grow our own potatoes, not because the of irresponsible and pathetic Daily Mail causing panic buying due to the current Icelandic ash cloud scares, but because – why not? We’ve got the bags. The seed potatoes are in and covered with compost. It’s just been watered. Now we wait.
If this is successful, we’ll try it with other veg and hopefully have a veritable garden of nice things to eat. It has to be said that Sainsbury’s own vegetable offerings aren’t exactly up to scratch these days anyway..
The art of ethical energy efficient digital visual effects?
I’ve just been reading up on a few articles regarding the forthcoming James Cameron 3D spectacular, Avatar. What I’m trying to get my head around is just how environmentally friendly this film is given that one of the messages that it preaches is protecting the natural environment. One thing is for sure, there will have been a hell of a lot of CPU cores thrown at this project – split across a variety of different post-houses and as such, different rendering architectures.
One must consider how many servers (particularly physical dedicated servers) were used to render the film, which primarily features a 3D CG environment. Modern CPUs such as Intel’s Xeon and AMD’s Opterons now have considerable power saving features built-in to them to ensure that power consumption is kept to a minimum. A few years ago, this would have been fairly simplistic. CPU architectures from a few years ago would have limited control over power consumption in comparison to modern CPUs (for example, Intel’s Nehalem/Core i5/i7 architecture). And have any of the studios started to virtualise their rendering architecture?
Bigger VFX companies (who regularly buy workstations and rendering systems in bulk) would, I’d imagine, have arrangements to install early development processors which include better power saving technology than their previous offerings (for example, switching off unused cores/CPUs and ramping up as needed or reducing each core’s frequency and ramping up – all of which is now standard features of modern CPU architectures). My former employers eventually went down the Intel architecture route for the majority of it’s rendering due to power/wattage ratio of the new Xeons that were being introduced just after AMD had launched it’s newest Opteron system. AMD actually seem to perform less efficiently back then! Since leaving the world of HPC and VFX, I’ve not used AMD systems at all and as such, not quite sure how they now stack up against Intel’s newest Xeon architecture, based on Nehalem.
In terms of workstations, a lot of companies are buying dual CPU, multi-core workstations and using virtualisation to run Linux on one CPU and virtualised Windows on the other – in effect giving the artist two workstations but only using the power output of one. In some cases, companies such as Disney have been using the Wine project to allow Photoshop to run under Linux without the need for virtualisation (or buy expensive Microsoft licenses!)
Finally, monitor display technology has improved greatly over the past few years. Previous to 2005, artists had to rely on big, heavy CRT displays to ensure accurate colour reproduction. Calibrating them took time – especially if you had hundreds of workstations to calibrate. Therefore turning them off was not an option, nor allowing them to go into power saving mode. Thankfully LCD technology has improved to the extent that modern (albeit specialist) LCDs can come close to or match the colour reproduction of the older CRTs and take less time to calibrate.
So I look forward to reading or watching how the FX companies have built up their workstation and rendering architectures required to support such a massive film project, and hope that they’ve done their bit to keep power consumption down as much as possible to back up a film that’s about saving natural resources.
Bring back Michael Palin, all is forgiven! Not there was anything to forgive in the first place!
I recently began watching the BBC's new "travel" series, Around the World in 80 Days. But hang on, didn't that Michael Palin do all this back in the late 80s? Yes he did, but this is a new endeavour designed to bring in money for BBC's Children in Need appeal.
Where this program fails is in the direction and editing. The format concentrates almost entirely on the travellers and Children in Need, and glosses over the places they're visiting – which kind of misses the point when it comes to travelling in the first place. While Messrs Mack and Skinner ARE very entertaining, we barely have time to take in the places they're visiting or the people they meet along the way. Yes, they've got a strict time-scale to get the travelling done, but Michael Palin and his team managed to strike a good balance when they did it the first time around. The most we get to see is the Crown Prince & Princess of Serbia. Everything else is too much of a blur and utterly forgettable.
Unfortunately Around the World in 80 Days just comes across as an expensive exercise/advert in getting more money for Children in Need (a worthy charity, of course) whereas the budget for this show might have been better spent putting it directly into the CiN collection tin. This series is just not as inspiring as the one Michael Palin brought to us back in 1988.
As a follow up to my previous blog post regarding newspapers being wasteful giving away free DVDs and CDs, my boss and managing director of Memset Ltd., Kate Craig-Wood, has posted a blog entry that reveals just how much energy is used in producing CDs versus downloading.
I am beginning to get fed up with newspapers (especially the Daily Mail who seem more zealous than most to give away as much useless rubbish as possible) that give away free CD and DVDs whenever a film or television company, or music artist, decides to start heavily promoting their crap to all and sundry.
Warner Bros. are currently pushing Harry Potter and the Half-Price Blood (as some kids described it having overheard a conversation on a bus once) and the Daily Mail seem all too eager to give away preview CDs and DVDs of the film and video game at every opportunity. These discs aren't provided with the newspaper, but are available to pick up at certain retailers. Even so, I think this is a dreadful waste in terms of energy produced to make these things and the wastage of having something that has strictly limited usefulness.
Sure, they've tried more eco-friendly DVDs in the past. But as I wrote on a previous blog post, the Eco Disc wasn't playable on DVDs that feature a slot-drive mechanism. This results in wastage unless you know somebody with a DVD drive that can play it and has a particularly desire to watch tripe that the Daily Mail has been asked to distribute with their paper.
I am getting sick of "preview DVDs" and the ilk. I want newspapers to stop wasting unnecessary energy in producing these things and stick to reporting news. But it's not just the newspapers we should blame, but the film and TV studios as well as recording artists eager to push their material in the most wasteful way possible.
