South Park: Made on a Mac

Love it or hate it, South Park is a phenomenon. I was surprised to learn today that the show is produced in a studio of Macs, using Final Cut Pro, Motion, Shake, Maya, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Qube, and Pro Tools. About Motion, they say “It’s really our special-effects tool. We’ve leaned on Motion for explosions and fire.” Neato.

South Park has an incredibly tight production schedule. “The schedule starts on a Thursday, six days prior to air,” says Agnone. “We get the script and then the machine starts to churn. Trey and Matt go into the booth and record the dialog, then the audio editors cut it.”

The Mac-based studio easily handles it. The studio includes a 120-processor render farm, more than 30 Mac workstations and almost 10 terabytes of Xserve RAID storage space. “We put together a back-end render farm that can handle a full-length film, no problem,” says Agnone.

Check out the full story by clicking here.

Similar Posts

  • Weekly Apple News Recap | 4/16-4/20

    Flashback Malware Drops After Fix Macs infected by the Flashback trojan have dropped to 30k Macs and counting. Read more here. Get Snow…

  • iTunes Still Rules

    Apple has announced that they’ve renewed contracts with four major record companies to sell individual songs through iTunes for 99 cents each. Some…

  • FaceTime Launches on Mac App Store

    In the midst of yesterday’s MacBook Pro updates, Apple quietly debuted version 1.0 of its previously beta FaceTime video calling software. The app—which…

  • Phone OS 3.1.3 Released

    Earlier this week, Apple released iPhone OS 3.1.3 for all versions of iPhone and iPod touch. This fixes several bugs and addressed a number of security issues:

    • Improves accuracy of reported battery level on iPhone 3GS
    • Resolves issue where third-party apps would not launch in some instances
    • Fixes bug that may cause an app to crash when using the Japanese Kana keyboard

    Click here for full details on the security updates in iPhone OS 3.1.3.

    Download the update via iTunes with your iPod touch or iPhone connected to your Mac or PC. It took me a total of five minutes to download and install the update.

  • If Apple makes this…

    … I will have to buy it. It’s the ultimate dream device! Read about it here. Chameleon Patent of 2004

  • iOS 5.1 Software Update Released

    Apple released OS 5.1 yesterday, which contains improvements and bug fixes. An overview from Apple: Japanese language support for Siri (availability may be…