S&M UNDERTAKE UPGRADE OF VISUAL EFFECTS TECHNOLOGIES

HIGH-END post production facility Smoke & Mirrors (S&M) are undertaking a radical upgrade of their front-line visual effects technologies and backroom infrastructure, to boost productivity and reinforce its position as world-class providers of creative visual effects and post production services.
Penny Verbe, a co-founder of S&M and the company’s Facility Director said: “We’re about to enter an exciting new era. Smoke broke the mould when it launched six years ago, and it’s about to evolve again. It was the world’s first boutique environment, enabling digital artists and clients to work collaborate on a more creative basis than ever before. This philosophy has been fundamental in making S&M synonymous with world-class work and will stay the same. However, with issues like productivity and workflow coming to the fore, and a new generation of home-grown talent to let loose on incoming work, other aspects of our business are changing fast.”
As part of an initial technology implementation, the company have purchased and installed five of the latest flame special affects compositing systems from Discreet, plus three Discreet effect systems on the SGI O2. The new Discreet, Octane 2-based, flames are among the first to be installed in London and offer a range of significant advances in functionality and speed. All of the flame systems are running on brand new Octane 2 hardware from SGI, providing radical improvements in operational efficiency and productivity. S&M has also become a beta-site for Discreet products.
S&M have also upgraded the backbone infrastructure that supports their new front-line systems. Along with implementing Discreet’s backdraft background loading facility, with 24-hours of PAL storage, the company has added extra disk-recording capability, additional VTRs and several powerful PC’s to run an array of image-processing tools from other leading software developers, such as 5D, RealViz and Nothing Real. S&M has been completely rewired too, to enable the rapid exchange of materials between digital artists across the S&M network. (CD)