Could animation get any better? Just wait.

Image by: Dream Works

If you haven’t checked out Techonomy 2011 conference online, do so.  There are some really cool interviews and articles about what’s happening all around us in technology innovation and how it’s shaping economic and cultural change. Forbes is a sponsor and is covering the show here.

One interview that immediately caught my eye was one between Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick and DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg covered here by Forbes.  The gist: Dream Works and Intel partner to leverage processor technology and software to increase the rendering speed for animation 50 to 70x what it is today. We’re talking about an improvement of 2 to 2.5 minutes of animation rendered per week!

2 to 2.5 minutes! That’s it? You might ask…

In the interview, Mr. Katzenberg talks about how animators today work a full week to produce what amounts to 3 seconds of animation!

“The holy grail is the ability to work in real time because of the complexity of imaging,” Katzenberg said in the interview. “With current technologies, animators work in low resolution, as if blind, relying on experience to imagine what the end product will look like. Animators create characters and drawings by day, and wait overnight for computational renderings that usually require further iterations.”

The ability to create in real-time at high resolutions will have a huge impact on storage capacity. Think about this, when Dream Works created its first 3D animated movie, Monsters vs. Aliens, it used 93TB worth of images and that is just storage of the final raw cut. Think about the amount of storage needed to create, render, edit, re-render, produce, etc. over the course of the making of the film. I won’t even guess at the magnitude, but we must be talking Petabytes of storage.

Now in working with Intel, not only will the process be faster, but even better quality, and more lifelike than ever. If we even thought that was possible. The animation capabilities today are incredible. Just think about how they will look in the next 4 years.

Of course, it takes more than faster, better rendering to make a great story. What’s your favorite animated movie ever?