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[ssontech]

OK, that isn't *exactly* what has happened, but that's the result anyway.

A quick recap: 64-bit support is what lets applications use more than a maximum of 3 GB or so of RAM. RAM is the fast kind of memory in your computer, and it lets applications such as SynthEyes buffer up large sequences of images for you to work on as quickly as possible. Without a 64-bit operating system, those 6 GB of RAM in your computer won't be nearly as helpful.

Windows has had 64-bit support for some years now; the 64-bit Windows version of SynthEyes has been around since 2005. The 64-bit Windows version is becoming increasingly popular, with customers running 4-8 GB machines on 64-bit XP or Vista.

The situation on OS X is more complex. In OS X 10.4 (Tiger), Apple touted their 64-bit capabilities, but there was a gigantic catch --- though parts of the operating system were 64-bit, the user's applications were only 32-bit. As a band-aid, Apple claimed that developers could *rewrite* substantial portions of their applications to separate them into a 32 bit user interface, and a 64-bit core to do the work. This is something like inviting you to a 3 month long visit for a root-canal at your dentist. And for SynthEyes, it was nonsensical as well, since it is the user interface that needs rapid interface to the large image store.

Last summer (2006) Apple announced that the next OS X 10.5 (Leopard) would offer a full 64-bit environment, including the Carbon environment used by most applications, especially high-performance and cross-platform ones. This offered the possibility that developers would be able to recompile their 32-bit apps, already 64-bit-ready from XP/Vista, onto 64-bit Leopard. This would show results with a few weeks of development and testing---a modest effort.

This summer, Apple reneged, saying it would no longer offer a 64-bit version of its Carbon environment. Instead, the only supported environment will be Apple's own proprietary Cocoa.

Apple says that developers wishing to offer 64-bit OS X applications must rewrite them completely in Apple's proprietary environment: developers should "invest where Apple is investing" (from an email from the Apple "developer evangelist"). Sure, why not rewrite and retest the entire application just because Apple says so? After all, Apple is the only game in town, right? Time and money do just grow on trees, right? We've got a year to kill, and no new features we can think of anyway. And doubtless those customers in the 64-bit niche of the niche that is OS X will be delighted to pay, say an extra $50 for the trouble. You'd think Apple was trying to make sure people ran only Apple apps on their machines.

So, to all you Mac Pro customers with 2, 4, or more unused GB of RAM in your machine, you can just smile and take it, you can get on the horn to the Apple developer relations folks,

... or you can go grab 64-bit Vista and SynthEyes, and get to work.

[FLGB]

Hi Russ!
I agree with you that Apple should do some efforts on the 64 bits support, the benefits of this technology are appreciable, but, actually how many VFX projects REALLY need 64bit applications? Only some big budget films for some extremely demanding shots.

I don't see an interest on working directly on 4k uncompressed files with syntheyes or any 3D tracking software. Using a jpeg sequence at half third or fourth resolution is fairly enough and produce excellent results for just hundreds of mega bytes of memory even for long sequences and it doesn't hurt the machine with unnecessary processings. So the 2Gb memory limit isn't an issue here.

I began working 3D and video on 32Mhz machines with 8Mb of ram and even if it was hard, it was possible to produce high quality images comparable to images produced today with multi Ghz Machines.
So the power of the machines we are using doesn't matter, only the talent does matter.
(If my memory is good, the judgment day sequence in terminator 2 was achieved on Quadra machines running at best a 40Mhz and 256Mb of ram).

Actually my machine has 4.5Gb of memory and it's really useful to work on several applications at the same time and is able to handle big projects without a single crash and never swaps.

And even for all the money in the world I will never work again on the windows environment. It's definitely not a good working environment.

[digitallysane]

[ssontech]

Linux does not support SynthEyes's perspective window or similar 3-D apps. See OpenGL on the WineHQ wiki for details. A proposed workaround might eventually cause only an acceptable performance loss.

Running on 64-bit Linux will require an x64 version of Wine. Note that this is not the same as running 32-bit WINE on a 64-bit OS. It looks like x64 apps are still considered far-out for WINE.

But---the x64 version of SynthEyes is getting increasingly popular, as people handle HD imagery. Machines with substantial amounts of RAM greatly accelerate workflow. I haven't looked at the numbers exactly, but anecdotally Windows x64 may become as large a fraction as OS X within a year or so.

[eoffermann]

[FLGB]

[eoffermann]

We don't downres an HD plate to 320x180 for the same reason we don't downres a 2k or 4k scan to half or a quarter res.

In the last year, I've worked on feature films like Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and National Treasure 2, commercials for Carlsberg, Rozerem, Nike, Toyota, Pontiac, Propel, AllState, Dr. Pepper, Nationwide, Rozerem and others... in shots for nearly all of these projects, after the track we project the original plate onto high-res geometry built from set surveys or master models from the car manufacturers. This is so that the live action elements can pick up appropriate lighting, shadows, reflections and so on from the cg that's inserted, and so that the cg can receive appropriate lighting, shadows, reflections and so on from the live action environment it's inserted into.

A fractional-resolution track won't do this properly - the geometry details will be off when the results are inevitably rendered and comped at full-res. The corners of buildings in the Propel "Stress Monster" commercial, the eyes of the beaver in the Rozerem spots, the mast and ship extensions on the shots of the ships in Pirates, the stadium insertions and field extensions in the Nike "Leave Nothing" spot... tracked at fractional resolutions, we would have never gotten the quality needed for these projects.

Six or seven years ago, when I tracked in Maya Live on an underpowered SGI, I too would be grateful for 512mb of ram. But standards for a feature film or high end commercial were lower then, and small errors that would have been ignored back in 2000 would lose you the contract with the same clients today.[/quote]

[FLGB]

Thanks a lot for your explainations! It seems that my knowledge is now out of date! I didn't work on big budget films for a long time and I didn't see this evolution and couldn't imagine it (especially in france, where there are less than ten people knowing what is manual tracking).

Now I work for my own and really like the confort of "old school" techniques like tracking on proxy footage or still using spotlights and shadow maps instead of radiosity techniques. Getting a 3D track in a few minutes and rendering huge 3D photoreal scenes in a matter of seconds is a total joy for me and gives excellent results for midrange ads and music videos.

I'll try to get hired on a big project to uptade my vision of things. On my mac workstation i'm like in heaven with everything I need to handle a complete post-production process but it's hard to realize that there is also a world outside that!

[kfinla]

All I can say is as a mac user I hope that the 64-bit version of syntheyes is just delayed, not scrapped by the last minute yanking of the 64 bit carbon libraries by apple.

I think generally most mac user would be willing to pay a small premium for the development trouble and functionality/performance gains.

p.s. I may be miss understanding something but would there ultimately just be a 64 bit version of mac software... would there only be need to support a 32 bit build to keep users below OS 10.5 and not on 64 bit hardware in the loop? Seems an inevitable task to move things to 64.

[ssontech]

For my health, I will not respond to this in more detail. I will not sacrifice a year because Apple asks for a total rewrite. It is not a "small premium." There will be no 64-bit version the way Apple intends, ever. If they do not provide a smooth migration path, there will be no migration. They are their own worst enemies sometimes, it is easy to argue this is why they are still at 5% share or whatever. You are right---64bit is inevitable---but Macs are not.

[ccherrett]

I have a 64 bit Linux environment running with wine installed. Wine is running Syntheyes.

That said I have full access to my 8 GB or RAM while running Syntheyes.

No need to run out and buy 64 bit Windows.

Hope that helps.

[eoffermann]

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about the SynthEyes performance under Wine?

Specifically, I've been trying it with high res meshes imported and 2k film plates and it seems sluggish (compared to Windows and MacOSX).

I'm inclined to blame the Wine implementation and think it'll get better. But I'm wondering what you've tested it with: Wine version, Linux variant, etc.

[ccherrett]

eoffermann:

I am running it on a

-quad core 2.4
-8GB of ram
-stripped sata drives
-Customed compiled 64bit Gentoo
-stripped down kernel
-wine-0.9.47 so I can access the Perspective View
-1280x720 HD footage

It runs almost real time for me. I am very happy with it. With all programs on my machine custom compiled to my specs the whole setup is awesome. I cannot speak for binary distro setups. They will be slower.

I hope that helps.

[ccherrett]

eoffermann:

With a mesh with 7k verts all is fine. I subsurf that mesh to 130000 verts and things are sluggish.

How complex was your mesh?

Thanks

[eoffermann]

Not sure, now - but in all likelihood, no less than 50,000 polys.

The models we typically are dealing with run into millions of polys. Think The Black Pearl from Pirates of the Caribbean or the City of Gold from National Treasure 2... I generally cleanse these on a per-shot basis of all geometry that doesn't need to be in the scene for tracking: but even after aggressive reduction we're often talking about hundreds of thousands in the poly count.