INVESTIGATING THE CLOUD SERVICES IN ANIMATION FIELD Dr. LAVANYA RAJENDRAN Assistant Professor, Department of Media Sciences, CEG, Anna University, Chennai, Tamilnadu, India. lavi_82@yahoo.com Abstract : The production of 2D and 3D animated films demands high end systems with massive computing resource. Handling massive computing resources requires high investment in infrastructure and maintenance, which is a major hindrance for the animation industry / animators who want to produce few minutes of film. The cloud services promises to deliver on-demand and scalable computing resources to the animation industry. In this paper, it is proposed to investigate the cloud services in animation. The research is designed in two case studies to analyze the scenarios in both traditional and through the cloud services. Keywords: multimedia, cloud, graphics and animation. 1. Introduction Cloud Computing has become increasingly affordable and dynamic scale up and scale down has become practical. Throughout the world, the concept of cloud has made its emergence and it is booming in every area. Major companies like Yahoo and Microsoft have already made most of their data and information already available in the cloud and many IT industries like IBM and TCS are making their foot prints in this field. Many industries are adopting ‘Storage as a Service’ for storing their numerous data and ‘Platform as a Service’ for running their applications. HP is offering a cloud based music and video services to Touchpad which has not managed yet by Apple (Dixon 2011). Apple is gearing up to launch a cloud based video service, focusing on delivering Video on Demand movies to connected TVs and Blu-ray players, and it is planning to expand the services to PCs by allowing subscribers to watch movies on Web browsers (Donohue et al 2011). The 8×8, Inc., provider of business communications and managed hosting solutions, now offers small and medium businesses (SMB), a set of affordable cloud based video conferencing services through private cloud that enable the organizations to benefit from visual collaboration (Vazquez 2011). Inspite of the cloud services offered in the IT, medical and various other sectors, the cloud providers have also developed an aspiration for the animation domain which requires lot of computational resources. This is particularly true when it comes to the Computer Graphics (CG) film production and visual effects which require massive amounts of computational resources, typically tens of millions of computing hours, during the normal course of a production. Delivering on-demand and scalable computing resources as a cloud service is a desirable asset in an industry known for ever increasing and variable demand. In addition to it, either for existing or new companies, estimating the cost of infrastructure is a key step towards a quantitative analysis of issues such as ROI (Return on Investment) and SLAs (Service Level Agreements). The organizations, which minimize the total operational cost and maximize the innovative investments, have higher revenue and profitability performance. By providing scalable infrastructure with multimedia computing resources and storage services in the cloud would be both cost effective and faster. 2. Animation Industry The global multi-billion dollar industry of 3D film animation is full of increasingly realistic texture, color, expression, and movement. Blockbuster movies like Shrek and its sequel have pushed the boundaries of animation technologies and given audiences of all ages a taste of what is possible when an animator's artistic energy meets up with powerful computer algorithms (HP 2004). Thus, the production of 2D and 3D animated films demands a lot of input hours to create the desired animated characters the rendering process also takes Dr. Lavanya Rajendran et al. / International Journal of Engineering Science and Technology (IJEST) ISSN : 0975-5462 Vol. 4 No.03 March 2012 818