NVIDIA GPUs Go On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

James Bond’s weapon of choice is a Walther PPK—“less of a random killing machine, more of a personal statement,” as described by Q in the new movie Skyfall. For filmmakers of EFILM, the arsenal was NVIDIA’s GPUs.

In a guest blog post at NVIDIA’s site,  EFILM’s vice president Joachim Zell wrote, “Every day after shooting Skyfall, director of photography Roger Deakins would view the day’s work—with full-stereo sound—on a big screen my company, EFILM, had set up in London. It immediately gave us insurance that everything was right.”

The instant preview was made possible by On-set Dailies (OSD) software from Colorfront, which uses CUDA to render footage on GPUs. Previously, Zell had to rely on colleagues manning a room full of workstations to do most of the heavy lifting.

“Now OSD allows me to put an HP z820 workstation or a MacBook Pro into a flight case and I can follow a production around the world, reducing the cycle time between shooting and reviewing,” said Zell. He called the current mode of editing “a post-production facility in a box.”

Parallel processing power of GPUs play a critical role in running compute-intense simulation and rendering software that supports CUDA. Though originally conceived as graphics-boosting devices, GPUs have migrated to the general-purpose computing realm.

Skyfall opens tomorrow in U.S. theaters.