Engineering and Production Consulting

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Research and Development

Digital Cinema Arts has an active research and development team building the production and pipeline tools for film production and teaching. They provide a foundation of high quality production tools used for creation of science data visualization and visual effects. Some aspects of the work we do is based on the ongoing research and development of new techniques for achieving dynamic physical simulations, accelerated and complex computational solutions, visualization of natural processes and systems and imaginative and new forms of music and audio synthesis.

Dynamic and Physical Simulations

When facilitating the simulation of physical phenomena such as fluids and gases or cloth and wire dynamics, the process and workflow often involve special considerations during design and implementation. In particular, these systems often process vast amounts of data, making it necessary to trace not only individual values and trends through an execution (cellular/automata data for example), but also gather higher-level information about how whole classes of data are processed, i.e, deformation, level set, density/pressure/temperature data. The data flow paths and code paths through a simulation system can be extremely complex and quite different for every variable in the system as well as for each algorithm expressed through the experiment. Our research and development has worked in many high performance computing environments where these kinds of performance requirements are required.

Bio-Tech and Medical Visualization

Medical research often involves the visualization of measurements and data that are unseen by the human eye. Using this data to form an image that conveys the condition and characteristics of the instrumentation data is essential for understanding the question posed in the experiment. Various forms of biological and organic processes can be simulated with algorithms derived from experimentation and applied in a virtual environment to run an experiment with additional dimensions of control and measurement. The tools we build for scientific visualization enables us to have a wide range of applications and approaches to any number of visualization tasks.

Space Sciences

Providing accurate information of data gathered from remote sensors and satellites gives investigating scientists visual representation and a deeper understanding of the experiment. Presenting the information accurately and with a visual ease to absorb its meaning helps to convey the intent of the investigator's experiment and hypothesis.

Geological and Topological

Determining the characteristics and modeling the behavior of geological structures and evolution usually involves enormous amounts of data from diverse sources that need to be conveyed to investigating scientists in forms that are easily understood. Considering the very long time spans that some natural processes take, using computer simulations and visualization techniques can be crucial in proposing a hypotheses for a phenomena that could never occur in one's lifetime. To assemble historic records and events from the past can be difficult to understand without an image or animation to convey the meaning of these findings.

Music and Audio

The creation of music using computer technology is entering a new age of inspiration and collaboration being expressed in new forms of sound and music never before imagined. The integration of procedural applications such as Houdini or Processing into the composer's toolkit enables new connections and avenues of experimentation and discovery. Digital Cinema Arts has been quite involved in the study of electronic and computer music and is always expanding on new techniques and applications of music and sonic synthesis.