Part 1: 
Warren talks about the Delgo Project and working with FrameCycler

How did you first come into contact with IRIDAS?

Back in early 2001, Delgo co-director and co-writer, Jason Maurer, found IRIDAS on the Web and asked me to check them out. At the time, we wanted a package that could play our film resolution CGI images at 24 FPS without specialized hardware. FrameCycler was the first application with that capability and Fathom Studios was the first studio to beta test.

So you were the first FrameCycler beta-testers?

That’s right.

What did you think of it back then?

The initial product was promising, but what impressed us most was the responsiveness of the development team. In the course of our search for a playback system we discovered there were dozens of features we would need. IRIDAS was able to pack almost all of them into FrameCycler before it was released out of the initial beta cycle.

So you played a role in developing the product?

Well, I suppose we did. Sometimes it seemed like they were writing the software just for us. That’s how closely they work with their customers. It was a great relationship—we were able to help them add the features that other customers wanted and we saw the features we needed.

Is there a feature or tool in FrameCycler that you had a particular role in bringing about?

I think our most important contribution was our input on the command line support that allows artists to use scripts to transfer frames from any number of programs to FrameCycler—like the "FS_playblast" script that we created for Maya. IRIDAS also added features such as reverse play, timecode feedback toggles, frame number feedback in direct draw mode; a frame rate warning when it falls under the given rate, and a loading progress bar to show how many frames the application is loading—all drawn from our requests and feedback.

Where does FrameCycler fit into your pipeline today?

Delgo's artists use FrameCycler constantly during the day to check their work from Maya. We have a script that integrates FrameCycler into the playblast function from Maya so artists can scrub through their work interactively, at high resolution, during the animation process. They also use FrameCycler to view several shots back-to-back with the playlist function. This allows Delgo's artists to see how their shots flow together with those of other artists working on in the same sequence. This ensures proper continuity between shots without opening several scenes or having to open a compositing package to just to re-render a sequence of shots.

That must save a lot of time, as well.

The time savings are difficult to measure, but it is fair to say that the IRIDAS family of products, especially Sequence Publisher and FrameCycler, allow an independent studio like ours to undertake a project of this magnitude because it gives us the ability to program and automate tasks that previously required more time and more people.

Warren Grubb,
VFX Supervisor Fathom Studios

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Original photos courtesy of
 Fathom Studios

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