Crest Animation associates with CRL

Crest Animation associates with of India’s first 3D stereoscopic Animation feature

Relationship to enable the global ambitions of Indian Animation industry

Pune. 18th September, 2010. Crest Animation Studios, India’s completion of rendering of India’s first 3D stereoscopic animation feature film ‘Alpha and released on 17th September. This was completed in record time using ‘eka’ supercomputer at Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons. This is the first time an Indian studio has taken on the top global animation studios on their own turf by releasing the movie and Europe, and marks yet another milestone in Indian Animation industry.

With “Alpha & Omega” Crest Animation Studios becomes the first studio in India to have co-produced a full length 3D stereoscopic Animated feature film for the global CGI market. It is a momentous achievement for Crest as well as for the Indian Animation Industry. Crest feature film the global CGI markets would definitely look at India as and services

In conjunction to its own infrastructure, Crest used the high accelerate its rendering schedule by about 5 months. CRL’s supercomputer ‘eka’, which was used in this project, is one of the world’s fastest and most versatile supercomputers. It can perform more than 133 Trillion sustained calculations per second. ‘eka’ made it possible for Crest to reduce their render times per frame by about 50% and increase throughput by approximately 500% without proportional cost implications.

Mr A K Madhavan, CEO, Crest Animation Studios said, " Rendering of animation movie is a very compute intensive process. It also tends to be very time consuming and costly. With our own infrastructure, it looked tough to manage our release schedule for September 2010. With CRL’s infrastructure it was possible for plan for an early release during Cannes Film Festival in May 2010. Their strong expertise in delivering on demand high performance computing (HPC) and their dedicated support services proved to be a cost effective alternative to investing in additional infrastructure.”

Mr S Ramadorai, Chairman, CRL said, “CRL’s high High Performance Cloud provides one of the fastest rendering infrastructures available globally based business model where the customer only pays for what he uses. CRL has been able to quickly ramp up and down the infrastructure to best suit a customer’s immediate needs. With CRL, customers get to focus only on the creative part of the production process that which they do best – and leave computing worries to us.”

Dr Vipin Chaudhary, CEO, CRL said, “Using our On-Demand remote rendering cloud solution, infrastructure will no longer be a  constraint in the ability of Indian studios to think big and make their mark around the globe. Small and medium sized studios can now take much larger projects without worrying about investing in the costly rendering hardware solutions and maintaining them 24 x 7. Additionally the highly secure computing facility has implemented the best data security processes so that our customers experience complete peace of mind with regard to their data. Our scale of operations makes the computing cost much more affordable than in-house computer infrastructures.”

CRL has now started talking to studios in Europe and US. Going ahead, several Hollywood flicks would be powered by an Indian – for the first time, a machine – supercomputer ‘eka’.

About Crest Animation Studios Ltd.

Crest Animation Studios is a full-service studio specializing in the development and production of digital animated properties for theatrical, television, home entertainment and interactive distribution for the global entertainment industry. The Company is presently listed on the National Stock Exchange/Bombay Stock Exchange/Luxemburg Stock Exchange. Over the years Crest has successfully delivered over 300 high quality TV series, 12 Direct to Home Video and in the process has established itself as the undisputed leader in the Indian animation industry, and one of the leading CGI animation studios in the world.

About CRL

CRL is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd. CRL combines a unique combination of High Performance Computing (HPC) expertise, Advanced System Software expertise, Hardware capabilities and Domain expertise to provide Full Service Cloud solutions customers worldwide. CRL has been providing cloud solutions to various organizations in the Automotive, Aerospace, Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology, Exploration & Production, Media & Entertainment, Weather and Scientific sectors among many others. Cloud solutions at CRL range from on-demand application specific clouds and virtual private clouds at CRL’s data centers to private cloud solutions for the customer’s in-house infrastructure needs.

About High-Speed Rendering

3D rendering is the 3D Computer Graphic process of automatically converting 3D wire frame models into 2D images with 3D  photorealistic effects on a computer. Rendering is the final process of creating the actual 2D image or animation from the prepared  scene. Rendering may take from fractions of a second to days for a single image/frame. The rendering process is computationally  expensive, given the complex variety of physical processes being simulated. The output of the renderer is often used as only one small part of a completed motion-picture scene. Many layers of material may be rendered separately and integrated into the final shot. 3D rendering is a creative process that is similar to photography or cinematography, because you are lighting and staging scenes and producing images. Unlike regular photography, however, the scenes being photographed are imaginary, and everything appearing in 3D rendering needs to be created (or recreated) in the computer before it can be rendered. This is a lot of work, but allows for an almost infinite amount of creative control over what appears in the scene, and how it is depicted.

Media Contact for CRL:
Pushpendra Dhansoia, Vaishnavi, /

Media Contact for Crest Animation Studios Ltd:
Alpesh Nakrani, Paradigm Shift Public Relations,  /

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