By Rieva Lesonsky
Have you ever wondered what kind of a computer a band with numerous Grammy awards, multiple Platinum records and a plethora of video music awards chooses to use when producing its latest on-screen performance? When you’re sitting on top of the music world like Linkin Park the choice wasn’t difficult—they partnered with Dell to take advantage of its powerful new Precision workstations with NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics.
The band’s new music video, “A Light That Never Comes,” was spearheaded by post-production company Ghost Town Media principal and creative director Brandon Parvini and video director Joe Hahn. “For this project (check out the behind the scenes video), we knew that we needed the right hardware and software to make it feasible,” Parvini says. In the new video Linkin Park members navigate a cyberpunk CG landscape and needed a lot of processing power and speed to render the special effects in seconds instead of hours.
To make the magic happen Ghost Town Media leaned on the Dell Precision T5610 and T7610 tower workstations connected to 30” and 24” Dell UltraSharp monitors, along with the Dell M6800 mobile workstation, supplemented by Microsoft Xbox Kinect for live 3D capture and Maxon Cinema 4D for modeling, animation and rendering.
“We’re a small company and need extreme efficiency to hit project deadlines,” says Parvini. “Dell helps us save a lot of time, not to mention money; otherwise, we’d probably need to outsource complex renderings to international vendors.”
Fortunately, they didn’t have to and neither does your business. Dell has launched an entirely new line of extremely powerful workstations, including the T5610 and T7610 mentioned above, plus the Precision T3610. Each of these models delivers extreme processing power through the NVIDIA Quadro graphics card and Intel Xeon processors. What’s also impressive is the power available in the super compact mobile workstations, the new Precision models M4800 and M6800. Both of these also include NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards, plus a choice of a fourth generation Intel Core i5 or i7 processor.
“Often times, rendering shots are like watching paint dry, but Dell workstations with professional GPUs have enabled us to work at a faster pace and gives us wings to be much more creative,” says Hahn.
When choosing a computer, it’s reassuring to know when rock legends such as Linkin Park with all the money and choice in the world to fulfill its creative vision, work with a company that also offers the same hardware to the masses. And that their production house, Ghost Town Media, utilizes Dell’s line of workstations because they offer better performance and affordability than the competitors.
Just because you can strum the strings of a guitar does not make you a musician or artist. It takes skill and practice. The same goes for computers. But the good news is when you use high-quality equipment, practice becomes more enjoyable. Now the only question is—what will you create with your new Dell workstation?
This is a paid post in conjunction with IDG and Dell.
