Walt Disney Animation Studios

Qt helped Walt Disney reduce development time spent on its cross-platform feature film production application.

Walt Disney Animation Studios is a key element of The Walt Disney Company, and the oldest existing animation studio in the world.

The Challenge

When developers at Walt Disney Animation Studios set out to replace their feature film production application, they had multiple objectives in mind. They wanted support for a variety of platforms, including SGI, Mac OS X and Linux, a strong scripting interface and support for quick GUI prototyping. In addition, the team wanted to ensure it had the ability to define a large, complex GUI with many tools and features.

The Solution

In the Qt Application Framework, the Walt Disney Animation Studios found a solution that would meet all of its criteria. Qt enabled developers to write a single source that runs natively on multiple targets. Additionally, it provided a simple API that made development easy and intuitive. Application developers were able to save time creating graphical elements that were easily replicated and coding ended up being twice as fast as programming in C++ and Motif alone. Qt also provided a full set of widgets to create user interfaces. The team was able to spend more time improving software features so that it could deliver new applications and components faster than ever before.

The Value

The dramatically reduced compilation times not only saved in production costs, they allowed developers to devote more cycles to developing. This enabled the team to create a more feature-rich product and increased customer satisfaction.

“Qt forms a solid GUI base for our application so we can focus more on the ‘business logic’ of the software. This frees us up from having to fight with the GUI toolkit and cross platform issues to accomplish the requirements set forth by customers.” Joe Longson, Senior Development Software Engineer, Walt Disney Animation Studios