Presto is the

proprietary software Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and i ...

developed and used in-house by

Pixar Animation Studios Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, Californ ...

in the animation of its features and short films. Presto is not available for sale and is only used by Pixar. As a result, little is known outside Pixar about the detailed workings of this software. Pixar's older proprietary animation software menv (pronounced as "men-vee") — known more commonly by the press as Marionette — was superseded by Presto at some point prior to the 2012 release of '' Brave'', the first feature film animated in Presto. Pixar claims that Presto is designed to be intuitive and familiar to animators who have traditional

cel animation Traditional animation (or classical animation, cel animation, or hand-drawn animation) is an animation technique in which each frame is drawn by hand. The technique was the dominant form of animation in cinema until computer animation. Proc ...

experience. The logo for Presto was designed by Parakeet, a design studio based in Portland, Oregon. Presto was named after the 2008 animated short of the same name, which itself is about the titular magician character. Pixar chooses to use a proprietary system instead of the commercial products available and used by other companies because it can edit the software code to meet its own specific needs. One example of this editing is shown in extra features of ''

The Incredibles ''The Incredibles'' is a 2004 American computer-animated superhero film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. Written and directed by Brad Bird, it stars the voices of Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah ...

'' DVD; it is explained that previous versions of Marionette were not able to stretch models in the ways needed to correctly animate Elastigirl, so the in-house Marionette development team created a new version that included this feature. In 2018,

Patrick Stewart Sir Patrick Stewart (born 13 July 1940) is an English actor who has a career spanning seven decades in various stage productions, television, film and video games. He has been nominated for Olivier, Tony, Golden Globe, Emmy, and Screen Actors ...

presented Academy Technical Achievement Awards to Rob Jensen for the foundational design and continued development, to Thomas Hahn for the animation toolset, and to George ElKoura, Adam Woodbury and Dirk Van Gelder for the high-performance execution engine of the Presto Animation System. The

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, often pronounced ; also known as simply the Academy or the Motion Picture Academy) is a professional honorary organization with the stated goal of advancing the arts and sciences of motio ...

award announcement stated "Presto allows artists to work interactively in scene context with full-resolution geometric models and sophisticated rig controls, and has significantly increased the productivity of character animators at Pixar."

References

Sources

* {{Pixar Animation Studios Animation software Pixar Custom software projects