Starting your own Pixar
So, you want to start your own animation dynasty like Mr. Jobs? Well Pixar released RenderMan for Maya this week. RenderMan is the magic software developed in-house by Pixar to "draw" the frames of their movies. Having a bad renderer means slowness, and images that just aren't realistic enough. Maya is an industry-leading modeling and animation tool. Put them together, and you pretty much have the mother of all animation pipelines. Obviously there's a lot more that you'll need for all that... But I decided to hop on the Apple store and price a basic animation studio for you. Please note this does not include the price of talent. I wonder what Crispin Glover's rate is these days?
Now mere animation and rendering tools alone will not suffice. You need to add music and voices too. Apple's Logic should do the trick. Plus, you'll need to edit this bad boy together. Naturally, Apple's Final Cut Pro would be my choice (although you could get the whole studio). On top of this, there is often a need to "composite" or layer rendered scenes. Even the best 3D suites cannot sometimes handle the complexity of enormous sets and animations. Or sometimes you just want to break things down to give you options when editing. Either way, a compositing app like, say, Shake, will let you render characters, backgrounds, effects, and whatever you want, separately, then smush them all together in the end. This, of course, requires additional time and effort. But it's what you do to make things perfect. And no one is arguing Pixar would settle for less than perfect, right? Prices after the jump.
So what's all this going to cost you? Warm up that credit card. Realize I'm pricing commercial software on the interweb in the US. A week from now this could all change, and Apple won't sell this stuff to Cuba. I also realize there are about a hundred million other apps you'd use at an animation studio. There's stuff like labeling apps (with hardware), special logging tools, a CMS, and don't forget the Office! But I'm just looking at core applications used by the primary animation department. So I didn't include the cost of 10,000 CD- and DVD-R's each year. And all of this is a license for just one CPU. If you wanted to work with a big crew, or create a render farm (a room of servers that do nothing but draw those frames at film res for months on end), well let's just say if you have to ask you can't afford it... Now for your bill, sir.
RenderMan alone goes for $995. Maya's full-blown mega-ultra-super edition, Unlimited, costs $6,999. Throw in the Platinum bundle (adds training stuff mostly) and you're looking at $7,599. Logic Pro will cost you a cool $999. Final Cut Pro is $999, but for only $300 more you get Soundtrack Pro, Motion, and DVD Studio. If you're going for self-distribution this is a great idea. Shake weighs in at $2,999!
Last but not least is a big ol' quad Mac to run this hotness on. While we're at it (Monopoly money and all), let's throw the works at it. After all, you're going to need a tip-top machine to render this masterpiece... So a fully-loaded quad with 30" Cinema HD Display is a whopping $20,233. Ask anyone who bought a SGI workstation in the 90's and they'll tell you this is a bargain.
Cost of good talent? Priceless. Cost of great story? Priceless. Cost of the animation studio outlined above? The lowest figure is just over $32,000. Again, this is an astounding figure. Back when I edited tape-to-tape a simple video editing and post room cost about ten times that. Now if you'll excuse me I have to get my deposit back on these bottles...