Big, rich facilities have workflow problems too; they have to remodel workflow while midstream on projects…like Shrek. I don’t know why it surprised me to hear that over lunch in the HP booth. I already knew quite a bit about the ongoing build out of Dreamworks infrastructure; I’d just been to the facility a few months ago to see the extraordinary Halo conferencing system and listen to the power management guy tell adventure stories about heat management for billion-processor render farms. (it’s not really a billion–6000 I think). I knew they had to do the integration between the PDI facility in Redwood City and the Glendale facility while in production. So I never thought they had it easy over there; money can’t buy everything.

But something about hearing Dreamworks’ head of R&D Jeff Wike tell the technical story from beginning to end, clicked. As he and technical colleague Kat Swanbord laid it out, it was a modern saga from SGI to Linux to big data centers to remote collaboration to now 3D and color calibration. We forget the ’90s sometimes, but Dreamworks was built at the turn of the century on the crest of a remarkable transition from proprietary SGI-driven workflow to workstation-driven workflow. It also unfolds as an interesting business story about how HP took what was at the time considered consumer/commodity type technology and deployed it with the attention to detail and collaborative selling it took to win over Dreamworks (there was no mistaking the amount of won over-ness in that room). I think this was an important, even seminal investment–on Dreamworks part, certainly on HP’s in elevating the workstation to a creative platform that could go head-to-head with Dreamworks’ demands and those of the industry at large. I don’t think it’s overstating to say that this partnership helped drive digital creation and media in a way that would have inevitably happened but maybe not at this pace.

Now they’re on about 3D production pipelines, expanding the virtual conferencing/remote graphics facilities, and little things like uniform color across the facility. HP doesn’t pretend they knew how to do everything Dreamworks wanted along the way–in fact it’s a point of pride on both sides. And they appear to still be headed down the precarious and rewarding road to more innovation together. It was nice to see it’s still an adventure.