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Television Media

Interview w/ South Park Sysadmins 36

Posted by CmdrTaco from the interesting-stuff dept.
Darkfell wrote in to send us a great interview over at Ars with the South Park Sysadmins. Its pretty long, but its actually an excellent piece with lots of nuggets about the shows production, the hardware and software that gets used, and the video games they play. A quite excellent interview... highly recommended.
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Interview w/ South Park Sysadmins More

Interview w/ South Park Sysadmins

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  • Heh. My dual PII 550 Linux box renders 640x480 in about .25 seconds per frame. Only Win NT takes 2 minutes per frame. Thank God I don't have to work at a job and put up with those formalities.
  • Good grief. Every time I read an article on "South Park" I figure it's about the neighborhood in San Francisco (where I happen to live, and where Wired is based). It always turns out to be some kids cartoon (albeit with swearing) that was made to be a mass-market version of the Christmas Story animations.

    When I see "South Park SysAdmin", I immediately think it's about SysAdmins in San Francisco. Please be a little more concise next time, folks.
    --
    I noticed
  • When I was reading that, I couldn't believe all the equipment they use to produce that show. I haven't watched it in a long time, and I guess I'm ignorant, but from what I've seen SP looks like a competent animator could do an episode by hand in a short time.

    I wonder how many animators it took to produce those Warner borthers shorts (which look to me like they have 20 times the number of frames of south park).
  • SunExpert[1] online does exactly that, and the animated gifs are exremely distracting when you are trying to read text.


    [1] Server/Workstation Expert? Bah.
  • If you work for an Internet company in the Marina, you probably work in this building complex [amazing.com] - the same one I do. Periodic blackouts/brownouts, erratic elevators, no air conditioning on weekends, etc. Click the link for my gripe page. :-(

    However, it should be noted that South Park's folks don't work here - I'm about an inch from the beach (but on the other side, so no ocean view :-( ).

    D

    ----
  • Will somebody please tell me why anybody would care what hardware/software was used to make South Park??????

    I could do that kind of animation on my old 386. South park is not about computer effects, nor should it be.

    It is modern shakespeare:
    * very simple, non-flashy presentation
    * all kinds of dirty, lowbrow humor for the 'groundlings' to sit and drool all over themselves about
    * biting social commentary that more intelligent people will appreciate and laugh about
  • On of my all-time 'pissed off about the internet' is this "Read More..." shite. I'm quite capable of using a scrollbar to see the rest. Unless they don't want us printing it off and reading it on the way home.

    Oh, and what's a render wrangler? Someone who goes around looking for spare CPU cycles?
  • I doubt that - most of these pages have many images and javascript and other such nonsense. It's all about the (advertising) benjamins.


    If you don't like it. Do it better, yourself.

    Stop whining.

    As for the JavaScript/images... That is so a non-issue. Look at this ma... [click]... JavaScript off... [click]... Images off... [clickity click]... Junkbuster on...

  • Actually i thought it was an interesting interview, its a good behind-the-scenes look at how SP is made. BUt of course it only got linked to /. because the L-word is used, if they'd used NT or Solaris or whatever for sys-admin stuff it would never have got posted.

    Consumers For Christ Brazil
  • I work on a project called Condor [wisc.edu] that many people use to queue up things like renders.

    Its an oppertunistic batch queueing system. Meaning that it will run jobs on your machine when you are not there. In the lab I work in, I'll easially be able to get a month of CPU time out of the machines on people's desks that would otherwise go unused...
  • It sounds like the one guy worked in the f/X feel before he was hired, and the other guys all knew him....
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • It sounds like the reason they use all that crap is two fold, in theory, it should be *easyer* to just cut and paste premade objects and move them around with motion vectors

    also they want the felexiblity of changing things around later, if they feel like it...

    man, I'd *really* like to see the stuff they cut out...
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • I agree it seems like a *very* long time to render each frame. It seems like there doing a full *3d* ray traced graphics for each of those. (althoug flat geomnitry) I'd be willing to bet that they could do all of it in real time if they just used *2d* rendering, I mean it's all flat and the lightsource is always the same, right?

    I can render 640x480 faster than that on my p200mmx box in 3dsmax. geez
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • If this is employment.. I am in the wrong friggin place. Calgon, take me away.

    *sob*

    -fester(ing?)
  • if you don't want to get moderated down, make a clear, consise statement, and register for gods sake. Hiding behind AC is lame.

    Todd.

  • To make more money, they split up the articles so you have to load a new page - and a new ad - to keep reading

    Well, it doesn't take a genius to put an add/banner in the middle of a page.

    Breace.
  • If I had all that equipment, I think I'd use it (and the software) to make a cool 3D show.

    But that's just me.
  • I am really envious of these guys.. sure it sounds
    like they work hard but, they have fun at the same
    time! How the hell do people find these great gigs?
    I would love to work for a place like
    southpark or similar place. Anyone hiring? Senior
    Admin (solaris/linux/ultrix/irix). Dam there must
    be a cool job list out there somewhere! Working
    at the phone company (current job) is easy as cake
    but boring as all hell. I'll take hard over boring
    anyday.

    Malice95
  • ...because it's easier on modem users...

    I doubt that - most of these pages have many images and javascript and other such nonsense. It's all about the (advertising) benjamins.

  • Ars is one of the better sites (IMHO) when it comes to online content, especially among the hardware/gaming news/reviews sites. Sharky Extreme is horrendous when it comes to the "go to the next page to read more" nonsense. You're lucky if you get three paragraphs to a page. I believe that the reason for this is the operating model of these type of sites: advertising. They generate revenue from advertisers. To make more money, they split up the articles so you have to load a new page - and a new ad - to keep reading. If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate the correction.
  • For the admin machines, Linux is the system of choice as we need something very reliable for running the critical software like DNS, postgres SQL, mail, and so on. We use Apache for our intraweb server, although we run it on Jesus, our O2000 file server.

    What is the deal with this people don't they know the Jesus O4000 file server gives BETTER performance in tcp/ip applications like apache than the outdated Jesus O2000 file server?

    And didn't they know the Jesus O2000 file server shuts down and refuses at boot every sunday? due to a bug hard coded into the CPU.

    I will say one good thing about the Jesus O2000 file server, it can change C code into binary in no time flat using gcc and the open source extentions 'water2wine.so'

  • "Why, with over 5 million"- BLAM!

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