Some supercomputer simulations could generate vast amounts of data representing the ways in which the phenomena being modelled evolved with time. Comprehension of the results could often be helped by being able to view them in motion picture form. But since the closure of the FR80 in 1984 there had been no high volume film output facility at the Atlas Centre. Facilities for producing colour output on video tape began to take shape in 1987 and were in continuous development throughout this period. The aim was to produce master tapes of broadcast quality which could be issued to users directly or from which copies could be made in whatever format was required. Over the period the price/performance of hardware on the market improved markedly, resulting in a dramatic reduction in the length of time it took to generate video sequences and a corresponding increase in the complexity of what could be attempted.
The original video facilities were targeted at the production of two-dimensional images. Images of three-dimensional scenes could be produced but only very slowly. Enhancements in 1993 enabled the rapid rendering of three-dimensional images to the extent that one particular application which had taken 70 hours of facility time to generate 30 seconds of video on the original facility could now be done in real time.
Some of the more notable videos produced were for the major oceanographic and atmospheric modelling projects running on the Cray supercomputers. These caught the attention of broadcasters; sequences were used by the BBC and Granada TV and one was incorporated into an Open University course on oceanography.
By 1994, with the advent of SuperJANET connections at up to 34 Mbits/s and affordable desktop video conferencing and display technologies, it became possible to ship compressed video sequences over the network so that users could do some of their own editing. A related development at around the same time, and benefitting from the same expertise, was the establishment of a central video control centre for RAL at the Atlas Centre to handle the growing demands for video-conferencing across the network.
The development and exploitation of these facilities can be followed in more detail in the newsletter articles accessible in the literature section.
