Ted Schilowitz — the RED camera company’s first employee, who ran the business under the moniker “leader of the rebellion”– now wants to change the way Hollywood thinks about computing at a time when it needs to manage large files including 4K.
He serves as president of Silverdraft, which in 2011 rolled out a digital studio housed in a 53-foot van that was equipped with a proprietary supercomputer. (Schilowitz is also a consultant for digital cinema technology company Barco and 20th Century Fox, for which he uses the titles “futurist” and “consigliere,” working for Fox’s president of post Ted Gagliano.)
Seeing potential in Silverdraft’s computing technology — which Schilowitz claims can turn rendering “hours into minutes” — he tapped this development to create products for Hollywood under the Silverdraft brand Devil & Demon Strategy, which will exhibit for the first time at the NAB Show, April 5-10 in Las Vegas.
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“The idea is to simplify what was hard and democratize technology,” Schilowitz told The Hollywood Reporter, sounding very much like he did when he would explain the strategy for RED. “With more pixels, more computing power is needed.”
The company reported that its storage technology is called Devil, and it offers up to 400 cores of computing power inside a “mini frig,” ranging in price from $75,000-$100,000. The company’s computer technology is dubbed Demon and is currently in use for YouTube Nation.
These technologies are aimed at VFX, animation, postproduction or any area “that needs really fast computing, that needs a better approach to desktop computers,” said Schilowitz.
The Silverdraft mobile unit remains available for rental, rebranded as “Devil’s Playground.”
E-mail: Carolyn.Giardina@THR.com
Twitter: @CGinLA
