A peek into Disney's high-tech world of feature animation

By John Gallant
Network World Fusion, 6/4/98

San Jose, Calif. - In what had to be the most animated keynote presentation of the year, business and technology executives from Walt Disney Feature Animation studios gave attendees at the ATM Year 98 conference a look not only at the ATM network that supports production of the company's animated, feature-length films but also a sneak preview of movies the rest of the world won't be seeing until later this year or next.

Conference-goers eyeballed clips from classic Disney films like "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Little Mermaid," as well as upcoming movies such as "Tarzan" and "Dinosaur," while Disney's top networking gurus described a private ATM network that supports 134 switches and 1,000 device connections, and enables designers, illustrators and other creative personnel in four studios to exchange more than a terabyte of "movie stuff" - drawings, animations and special effects - each day. The network links workers in Disney's two Burbank, Calif., studios to colleagues in Orlando, Fla., and Paris. It has supported the production of four feature films, including "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," which was the first film to be completely produced using the ATM net infrastructure.

According to Mark Kimball, an Academy Award-winning consulting engineer with Disney, the ATM net is the perfect complement to the Computer Animated Production System (CAPS) Disney technicians began using to create animated features in the late 1980s. CAPS allows animators and designers to craft images and animations on computer workstations and collaborate in putting together movies. Kimball said only ATM provides the capacity, scalability and quality-of-service (QoS) to support the incredible demands Disney staffers now put on the network. (A bit of trivia: Disney's first fully computer-generated film was "The Rescuers Down Under.") A typical movie involves some 1,500 separate animated or computer-generated scenes that each represent 500M bytes or more of compressed data.

Kimball and Systems Development Manager Ben Croy offered a wish list of items for ATM vendors to address, including:

Better network management tools for ATM networks.
Improved support in operating systems for high-speed networking. According to Croy, the Macintosh operating system can't exploit high-speed networks, so Disney doesn't hook up Macs to the ATM net.
Better testing of hardware and software in real production environments. Because vendors are often rushing software features to market and don't have the wherewithal to test hardware in an environment as complex as Disney's, the studio winds up working out too many bugs on its own. As Croy related, "ATM software isn't always ripe."
Faster standards support. Croy said Disney has pushed vendors to more quickly embrace such things as the Multi-Protocol over ATM and LAN Emulation standards, as well as key QoS specifications.
Faster WAN connections. Croy said Disney is interested in the ultra-high-capacity data networks being built or planned by such companies as Qwest Communications, Inc. and Level 3 Communications, Inc. Croy said these networks offer the hope of the higher capacity, lower cost links Disney needs to connect its studios in the U.S. and abroad.
Higher capacity backbone switches.

Dean Schiller, Disney's director of technology, said ATM has allowed the company to do things it had only dreamed of, although he acknowledged that Disney would jump off ATM if a better option came along. He said many potential customers are concerned about ATM's perceived higher cost compared to alternatives such as Gigabit Ethernet. But Schiller said they have the math all wrong. "Our workstations cost about $50,000, the software on them costs another $50,000, and the people in front of those workstations are expensive as well," he said. "When you look at what ATM lets them do, it is cheap. ATM lets you do amazing things. We've more than gotten our money's worth out of it."

Disney's Vice President of Technology Paul Yanover put the importance of ATM and computing technology in perspective for the ATM Year 98 audience. He quoted founder Walt Disney, who said that if the company ever stopped innovating in technology it would be time to write the studio's eulogy. Disney made that statement in 1941.