{"id":19687,"date":"2023-10-31T09:56:54","date_gmt":"2023-10-31T16:56:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pugetsystems.com\/?post_type=case_study&p=19687"},"modified":"2025-05-06T11:58:56","modified_gmt":"2025-05-06T18:58:56","slug":"case-study-with-ross-shain","status":"publish","type":"case_study","link":"https:\/\/www.pugetsystems.com\/featured\/case-study-with-ross-shain\/","title":{"rendered":"Case Study with Ross Shain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Background<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Ross Shain<\/a> is an Academy & Emmy award-winning product designer and VFX software leader best known for helping deliver Mocha Pro<\/a>\u2019s planar motion tracking tools to artists around the world. A veteran of the post-production industry, Ross has been a creative technology evangelist for over 20 years, working with industry-leading companies such as Avid<\/a>, Parallax, SoftImage, Imagineer Systems, and Boris FX<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ross Shain and others at the Academy Awards<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n
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Throughout his career, Ross has primarily focused on the intersection of design, technology, and product marketing \u2013 bridging the gap between software developers and creative artists to improve the tools of the trade. He has designed user interfaces, created training programs, and played a key role in partnerships across the Media & Entertainment industry. We recently caught up to talk about his career in visual effects technology and how recent explorations into generative AI and Unreal Engine inspired the need for a powerful new workstation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of the nice things about my career for me has been bouncing back and forth between creative and tech. I\u2019m very hands-on with software and always looking for ways that plug-ins or ancillary applications can contribute to a host application\u2019s workflow. In this sense, I\u2019ve probably used almost every available editing, compositing, and graphics tool over the last 20 years.\u201d, states Shain. \u201cOn any given day, I could be opening up After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop, Mocha, Silhouette, Flame, NUKE, Media Composer, Resolve, Fusion, Cinema 4D, and other plugins and apps. Lately I\u2019ve been focusing more on creative projects, so having a fast and reliable computer is obviously a necessity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A veteran of the post-production industry, Ross has been a creative technology evangelist for over 20 years, working with industry-leading companies such as Avid, Parallax, SoftImage, Imagineer Systems, and Boris FX.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n Kevin Bourke<\/cite>\n <\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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A New Workstation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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For many years Ross traveled frequently, visiting VFX studios and speaking at trade shows with a Dell Precision laptop as his main computer. More recently, developments in real-time game engines and generative AI made him decide to move back to a dedicated workstation with a more powerful GPU.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI’ve gone back and forth between Mac and PC for many years, but have been mostly on PC for work due to the GPU requirements of so many pro video applications. I love the Dell Precision line and thought I could do all my work on the laptop for a few years \u2013 but recently realized that I needed a workstation with a higher-end NVIDIA graphics card to specifically get better performance out of Unreal Engine and Stable Diffusion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Looking for a Content Creation Workstation?<\/h4>\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t

We build computers tailor-made for your workflow. <\/p>\n\t\t\t

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Don’t know where to start?
We can help!<\/h4>\n\t\t\t

Get in touch with our technical consultants today.<\/p>\n\t\t\t

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Technical Challenges<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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In the last year there have been new technology developments making inroads to the standard tools used in Media & Entertainment,  namely, real-time game engine technologies for virtual production and the explosion of generative AI. As a creative technologist, Shain has been interested in both areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cUnreal Engine is amazingly powerful and I\u2019ve been exploring to see if creatives could take advantage of its real-time ray tracing capabilities to deliver renders for film and television. One of the coolest tools I use in Unreal is a plug-in called MetaShoot<\/a> that really simplifies the lighting and rendering process. While visualization in Unreal is mostly real-time, actually rendering final pixels at highest quality to file can be quite slow. My system from Puget with the NVIDIA RTX 4090 card tears through the Unreal renders.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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