what is computer used for special effects in movies ?

Answer 1

It's NEVER a "single" computer.

While a few high-end PCs are used to give the commands, the effects themselves are "rendered" in a setting known as "render farm", where hundreds if not thousands of PCs are networked together to process the huge demands of high resolution rendering needed for movie special effects.

If you ever get the book that details the production of "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within", they'll show you the server farm used for it as well as all the other Square Enix games.

The render farm themselves can be a variety of computers. Industrial Light and Magic, the granddaddy of computer special effects, have used SGI server clusters, servers based on Compaq/Digital's Alpha processors, AMD Athlons, and Intel Pentium 4's, and often, all at the same time (albeit on different projects)

Shrek was controlled from Windows PCs though rendering was done on SGI machines. Not sure about Shrek 2 or 3, probably on Intel machines nowadays. In 2002 ILM bought a couple hundred Dells for their render farm, as reported by CNET.

Answer 2

In recent times I am sure that PC'a are used to some extent, However I know for a fact that all of the Starwars was done on Mac's. For many years the only computers that were capable of the Grapics was Mac. Almost all of the High end programming was done on Mac's as well. For many years the only programs available to render special affects were done exclusivly with Apple Computers. Like I said now a days PC's have come along in there software development as far as special effects are concerned and are used more and more. But still the purists still use Apple because of the Quality and Clarity of the finished Product.
Don

Answer 3

if you mean what kind of computer do people use to make special effects for movie usually alot of people use macs

Answer 4

macintosh