CUSTOMER

INDUSTRY Broadcasting & media production

CHALLENGES Each project is tackled by Rockstar with the same rule-breaking spirit and energy. However, Rockstar don’t have the luxury of time.

SOLUTION The powerful twin punch of dual AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100 graphics cards, combined with HP Z840 workstations to power through content.

RESULTS Affordable hardware helps to ensure that Rockstar Films hits its clients tight deadlines without having to compromise.

AMD TECHNOLOGY AT A GLANCE AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 7100

AMD + ROCKSTAR CASE STUDY

AMD's versatile Radeon Pro WX 7100 graphics cards help production company Rockstar Films transfer the punk energy of its music videos to its work for the giants of the graphics industry.

TECHNOLOGY IS THENEW ROCK'N ROLL

Rockstar Films isn't your average video production company. From its headquarters in Norwich, UK, its eight-strong team beams out a steady stream of films, animations and motion graphics, ranging from tour visuals for Madonna to showreels for Pixar.

Each project, no matter whether it's a promo video for Iggy Azalea or a demo reel for RenderMan, is executed with the same high production values and in Rockstar's signature style: convention-defying, visually arresting, and infused with the energy of old-school punk rock.

To realize its creative ambitions, Rockstar relies on AMD's high-performance graphics hardware. On 3D projects, it uses HP's top-of-the-range, AMD-equipped Z840 workstations. On site, it uses HP's laptops and mobile workstations, all of them AMD-powered. And for video work, it turns to its secret weapon: the powerful twin punch of dual AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100 GPUs.

SHOOTING FOR THE STARS From the very earliest days, Rockstar's clients have been, quite literally, rock stars. Setting up in business in 1999, founder and creative director Eugene Riecansky originally specialized in band websites before becoming frustrated with the bandwidth limitations of the early World Wide Web.

“We made what was probably the first Sugababes website,” he recalls. “It was just over 1MB, and it took so long to download that we put a game of Space Invaders at the beginning just so that people had something to do.”

Branching out into moving images, Rockstar quickly scaled the heights of the music industry. Work for The Prodigy – a job that Rockstar landed by building a seven-foot missile containing a demo CD-ROM and leaving it inside songwriter Liam Howlett's house – led the company to the band's US label, Maverick Records, which was run by Madonna's manager, Guy Oseary.

“I didn't really know who he was at the time, but I'd been at a shoot in LA and he was there,” says Riecansky. “He asked me if we wanted to do stuff with Madonna, so I made a video for her, and then did her tour visuals.” He laughs. “It was pretty much downhill from there.”

ROCKSTAR ATTITUDE More recent Rockstar clients include CG industry giants Pixar and Autodesk, whose showreels and promotional videos the firm tackles with the same rule-breaking spirit as its music promos.

“We try to be different,” says Riecansky. “If everyone in the industry is running to the right, we'll run to the left. Everything we do has an old-school punk-y, do-it-yourself approach. If we need a piece of type to look grungy, rather than going online and finding a typewriter font, we'll print the text out on paper, fax it to ourselves, and rescan it. If we need camera shake, rather than downloading a plugin, we'll put tracking markers on the wall, film them, and create our own.”

“This is the fastest-exporting machine we've got. Because it has dual AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100 graphics cards in it, it rattles out an edit really fast.”

Eugene Riecansky, Creative director, Rockstar Films

©2018 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, Radeon, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Other product names used in this publication are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies. PID #18109422

AMD + ROCKSTAR STORY

This refusal to bow to convention results in corporate videos that look anything but corporate. “I don't know many other companies that would turn up to shoot a customer film with a projector and a strobe light,” admits Riecansky. “But if a product is presented in an engaging way, people are more likely to try it. It's like marketing a renderer: if the images created with it look great, people are more likely to use it.”

UNCONVENTIONAL COMPOSITING Nowhere are Rockstar's unusual working methods more obvious than in its video production pipeline. Rather than the more standard After Effects, the firm relies on Nuke and Premiere Pro, which it also uses like a compositing package, dialling in a look by building up layers of effects.

“Premiere is a great tool for us,” says Riecansky. “It's super-quick, and you can experiment in it quite freely. It's where our edits come alive.”

This experimental approach often pushes the software to its limits. For one recent film, Rockstar overlaid base footage of a car with two layers of lens flares, an adjustment layer, two layers of graphics, then a final adjustment layer over the top.“Some of those layers will themselves have three or four effects,” adds Riecansky. “For example, the lens flares have a blur, a flicker [created by Red Giant's MisFire plugin], a colour corrector, and a Video Copilot Twitch effect.”

While using Premiere Pro in this way gives Rockstar enormous creative flexibility, that flexibility comes at a cost. Rendering multiple layers of 4K footage places a heavy load on a workstation's graphics card, particularly when combined with computationally expensive effects like three-way colour correction. On one regular job, the strain proved too much for the firm's previous hardware.

“We have a music industry client for whom we do an edit in a day,” says Riecansky. “We get in to work at 9am and have to deliver it back to the States by late afternoon. One week, our old machines gave up the ghost. It was going to take 40 minutes just to export a two-minute sequence.”

Enter Rockstar’s dual AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100 GPU workstation. “We'd had the machine sitting around for a while, but we'd never really used it,” says Riecansky. “We thought, 'Well, let's try this,' and it just rattled the edit out. I think it exported in six minutes.”

The dual GPU system is now a key part of Rockstar's set-up. “Ever since then, we've used it and another AMD machine as our edit workstations,” says Riecansky. “It's our main edit box now, and it's brilliant. It's the fastest-exporting machine we've got.”

AFFORDABLE RENDERING AMD graphics also play a key role in Rockstar's 3D work. Although its pipeline is constantly evolving – as well as core tools Maya, Arnold and RenderMan, the firm uses a range of other software, from Cinema 4D to Flame – the one constant is a pair of HP Z840 professional workstations, each of which also features an AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100.

“We rendered an advert for a magazine the other day, which was an image 3K square, using a lot of subsurface scattering and mesh lights,” says Riecansky. “On one of our other machines, it took three hours, but on the Z840, it took 30 minutes. It was pretty amazing.”

With their 5.73 Tflops of peak single-precision floating-point performance, the Z840s' WX 7100 graphics cards are well suited to 3D toolsets that make use of the GPU for computation, like Maya's deformation system; while their 8GB of high-speed GDDR5 graphics memory means that even very complex scenes can be previewed smoothly in the viewport, without lagging or stuttering.

But for Rockstar, an equally important consideration is the WX 7100's price-to-performance ratio. “Price is very important to us, because we're a small company,” says Riecansky. “We're not like bigger studios, who buy 25 of everything at one go. We'll only buy a couple of machines at a time, so we have to make sure they're the right ones.”

CREATIVITY WITHOUT COMPROMISE AMD's powerful but affordable hardware helps to ensure that Rockstar Films hits its clients' tight deadlines without having to compromise the working methods that give the studio its creative edge.

Its AMD-powered HP Z840 workstations power through complex 3D projects, while the dual AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100 graphics cards rattle out even the most unconventional of edits.

“In the record industry, people always want things done by the end of the week, or they'll phone you on a Friday and want them done by Monday,” says Riecansky. “Because we

don't have the luxury of time, when we find something that works, we don't stray far from it. Our dual AMD system got us out of quite a few sticky exports in the past, so right now, we won't edit on any other machine

ABOUT ROCKSTAR Rockstar is a multi award winning film, visual effects and animation studio, delivering the very best in moving image and post production, whether it be for tour visuals, commercials, music videos, TVC's or online.

Rockstar constantly strike to create breathtaking and impactful moving images, that both meet their clients brief whilst adding in their award winning Rockstar attitude and style.

Rockstar clients include Madonna, Jim Carrey, Sleigh Bells, The Prodigy, Vivienne Westwood, Autodesk, Channel 4, BBC, MTV, Iggy Azalea, HIM and many otherse. Visit rock-star.co.uk

ABOUT AMD For more than 45 years AMD has driven innovation in high performance computing, graphics, and visualization technologies— the building blocks for gaming, immersive platforms, and the datacenter. Hundreds of millions of consumers, leading Fortune 500 businesses, and cutting-edge scientific research facilities around the world rely on AMD technology daily to improve how they live, work, and play. AMD employees around the world are focused on building great products that push the boundaries of what is possible. For more information about how AMD is enabling today and inspiring tomorrow, visit pro.radeon.com

“We try to be different. If everyone in the industry is

running to the right, we run to the left. Everything we do

has an old-school punk-y, do-it-yourself approach.”

Eugene Riecansky, Creative director, Rockstar Films