SGI's Tezro
To create new broadcast graphics throughout its coverage in Athens, NBC - for its fifth Olympic Games broadcast in a row - chose SGI visualization systems, including Silicon Graphics Tezro, a visual workstation.
For more than a year and a half, 3-D and graphic artists at NBC headquarters in New York City used SGI systems to create the interstitial content, including show opens and closes, intros/outros and a huge variety of graphic treatments, including the building of massive amounts of 3-D models for technical animations, to explain many events and detail the equipment used by the athletes.
NBC has used SGI IRIX OS-based workstations and servers for pre-build and on-site broadcast graphics creation since the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games.
The same SGI systems used to pre-build NBC's Olympics broadcast graphics are being used at the International Broadcast Center (IBC) in Athens, for use throughout NBC's coverage. The systems include:
- Two four-processor Silicon Graphics Tezro visual workstations running Discreet flame software, configured with SGI VPro V12 graphics and SGI DMediaPro DM2 and DMediaPro DM5 graphics options;
- Two two-processor Silicon Graphics Octane2 visual workstations, one Silicon Graphics Octane2 running Discreet flame and one running Alias Maya software;
- One four-processor SGI Onyx2 visualization system for rendering output from Discreet flame and Alias Maya;
- Four compact, two-processor SGI Origin 200 servers for Maya remote rendering, clustered together using SGI NUMAlink cables into two four-processor systems.
For more information, visit www.sgi.com.
