MPC's Damien Fagnou on Technology Infrastructure Considerations of Bringing "Alien: Covenant In Utero" 360-degree VR Experience to Market

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. - April 26, 2017 - PRLog -- ALIEN DAY —The producers of ALIEN: COVENANT have released "Alien: Covenant In Utero" a virtual reality experience, ahead of the movie's release. In a podcast interview for journalists (http://alien.technicolor.com/), MPC Chief Technology Officer, Damien Fagnou, says the tight production schedule to get the VR experience completed and released ahead of the movie would have been very difficult to achieve without the use of the Technicolor Production Network (TPN) and MPC's cloud-based rendering resources.

"We were able to leverage the Technicolor private network that connects all the global Technicolor locations, including those of MPC VR FILM, to build truly global teams working on the project, following the sun and meeting a really tight deadline while allocating the right resources in the right locations," he says.

Rendering the VR experience presented some particular challenges.

"The frames in a cinematic VR experience are about eight times the size of standard visual effects frames and require very long render times, about 100 hours for a single frame. So our two-minute VR experience with 30 frames per second would have taken about 50 years to render on a single processor.  MPC provided secure rendering in the cloud and we were able to increase capacity in our render farm in Montreal to render the Alien experience in a few days with four or five thousand computers and still deliver rendering power to all the other productions we are working on," says Fagnou.

Fagnou explains the rendering demands of VR will increase as the technology matures, but he is confident cloud rendering will be able to meet this demand.

"The very large rendering resolutions required by these VR experiences will only increase with better VR headsets and higher frame rates. By leveraging MPC's and Technicolor's leading secure rendering processes in the cloud we will be able to provide the levels of quality that our clients require, and that their audiences want to experience in their productions," he says.

To read the entire Q&A or listen to the podcast interview, visit:

http://thefuturetrust.technicolor.com/article/emerging-te...

Journalists and analysts are free to pull quotes from this Q&A feature with attribution in media and market reports. For more details and context, contact:

Lane Cooper
+1 323 817 7547
Lane.cooper@technicolor.com

Andre Rodriguez
+1 323 817 6716
andre.rodriguez@technicolor.com

Jayne Garfitt
Proactive PR
+44 7788 315587
jayne.garfitt@proactive-pr.com

Photo:
https://www.prlog.org/12636107/1