HP Touts its Wares Involved in Making How to Train Your Dragon 2

In what has become customary, HP is once again reminding everyone the extent of its involvement in big animated feature film productions by DreamWorks.

How to Train Your Dragon 2, DreamWork’s 29^th animated film, started showing in theaters last Friday, and this week HP announced that the movie’s producers relied on a lot of its gear to make it happen, including HP workstations, blade servers and private cloud services.

The film used 130,000 individual computer-generated frames and 270 billion pixels. It took 90 million render hours, with servers processing an average of 500,000 render jobs per day.

DreamWorks used HP’s included Z800 Workstations and Z820 high-performance workstations, HP BladeSystem c7000, a mix of HP ProLiant server blades and scalable 3PAR StoreServ Storage. The team used cloud services from HP’s Utility Services portfolio, which includes a handful of Infrastructure- and Software-as-a-Service offerings.

HP and DreamWorks have built a bit of a history of collaboration on animated films. Most recent examples include Mr. Peabody & Sherman, Turbo and Rise of the Guardians.

The partnership extends beyond HP supplying products to the animation studio. It includes a lot of research-and-development work to improve on processes and technology in animation.

Some of the solutions that come out of this process, according to HP, cross over into other industries.

This joint “living laboratory” has helped create such things as billion-color HP DreamColor display. Today, the studio is adopting HP DreamColor Z27X for the most demanding workflows, enabling artists to view accurate color for future visual technologies, such as ultra-wide color gamut and 4K input.