A Mac Pro prediction

[Shawn Miller]

[Chris Kenny] “…VFX shots haven’t gotten any cheaper to do, that’s an instance of expectations advancing faster than technical capabilities — and you deal with it, in this case, by just spending twice as much.”

Not necessarily, Chris. Compute and labor costs have gone down, so well planned VFX shots that have been done before are much cheaper to produce now. That’s why televison and low budget films can afford to do more VFX shots now, compared to just a few years ago. Where costs haven’t gone down is on the dev side. If a director wants to do something that’s never been done before (like much of the 3D capture in Avatar), or if they want to do something familiar but at much higher quality (like Tranformers 3), then costs will be much higher.

Shawn