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.

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