Wired's LOTR III Tech Breakdown 419
rjjm writes "Interesting little logistics piece in Wired about the technology WETA used for for The Return of the King." Ya know, now that the Matrix hype vanished into nowhere, I'm glad the LotR hype is gearing up. I think this one will earn it.
Re:Nitpick (Score:5, Informative)
Temperature of equipment rooms: 76 degrees
Fahrenheit Weight of air conditioners needed to maintain that temperature: 1/2 ton
The Fahrenheit went there.
Re:Wow, average of 2 hours per frame (Score:3, Informative)
That must be "2 processor-hours". With 1400 CG shots and 240 frames per shot minimum, that is at least 336k frames, and 672k hours of rendering. They would have had to start rendering in 1926. If you assume processor-hours, though, it drops to a much more reasonable 210 hours of total rendering time.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Will it really be good? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nothing New Here (Score:3, Informative)
If you'd seen the featurettes on The Two Towers, you'd know that they didn't start working on the CG for TTT until Spring following the release of The Fellowship of the Ring (including entirely redoing all the work they had already completed on Gollum). That being said, they probably didn't finish the CG work long ago, and Jackson will likely be tinkering with the editing until a week before release.
As a data center manager (here comes the math)... (Score:3, Informative)
A blade chassis full of dual PIII's [dell.com] similar to what they showed in the "render wall" photo will, in my experience, pull 300 to 600 watts of power depending on CPU load and configuration - the maximum power use is 850 W. At least a third of that is turned into heat.
This puts the minimum heat load at around ((1600 servers / 6 servers per chassis) * 150 watts average heat output) = approx. 40,000 watts.
While I've never heard of "farenheit weight" before, "tons refrigeration" is pretty common in the air conditioning world - 40,000 watts heat load = 136,500 BTU/hr = 10 tons of refrigeration (in UK units, 11 in US) [engnetglobal.com]. It's amazing how well that 1/2 ton air conditioner is operating!
Re:The Mystery of Tom Bombadil Solved! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:LOTR Hype (Score:3, Informative)
The Rangers of the North... are the remenants of the people of Gondor, from like, way back in the day. If you want to get really into it, they're a group of a more sturdy, higher class of Men, and their bloodlines run fairly pure back to before men even came to Middle Earth. So, like, they're described as tall, grim, dirty, good fighters, etc. And they live longer than regular men.
It's revealed that Aragorn (who is refered to as Strider) is the heir appearant to the throne of Gondor. Remember Boromir, the dude that got killed in episode 1? Yeah, his dad is the "Steward" of Gondor, meaning that he's not actually king, but he's like, holding down the fort while the king is away, which has been for like a thousand years or something.
So, the true king has been hanging out with his kinfolk, the Rangers, until such time as this and that prophecy can be resolved, and then the heir can take back the throne. It's been like that so long that few people in Gondor even know the king's bloodline still exists.
Anyway, the paths (not pass) of the dead... Back in ep.1 when they went into the enchanted forest, Galadriel (cate blanchett) in the book makes mention of something to the effect of "if you're in a hurry, aragorn, remember the paths of the dead". As it turns out, in book 3, Aragorn is hanging out by Edoras (the horse people - the guy who was possessed by Saramaun before gandalf hooked him up), and he discovers that he has to get to gondor, like, yesterday. He remembers what the chick said, and realizes that, even though it means certain death, it's a shortcut.
So, he goes up a hill behind Edoras, and he enters this valley, known as the path of the dead (or mabey paths of the dead, plural). Gimli and Legolas are with him, as are his ranger folk. It's really creepy, and Gimli is freaked the hell out, even though it's like partly underground and he's a dwarf.
As it turns out, the ghostly inhabitants of the Paths of the Dead are the spirits of men who deserted Gondor WAAAY back in the day, the first time they fought Sauron (remember the arguement to the first movie? Cut the ring from Sauron's finger?). These guys deserted and went over to the other side, and ever since then, they've been cursed to wander this valley for a thousand years, until they can fulfill their oath of service to gondor, which they do in the climactic battle fought in front of the gates of Gondor.
As for why you'll be dissapointed, I honestly don't think you'll be dissapointed. I loved the 1st and 2nd movies so far, and I've only seen the theatrical releases. And I'm a huge fan of the books (read the lord of the rings probably 20-25 times, all the way through, read the silmarillion, the hobbit, and even took a college class on fantasy novels, which included a study of Tolkien's work). I mean, it comes as no surprise that no one can, in 9 hours over 3 movies, represent over 2000 pages of very complex, intricate text.
But there are some things that I like in the books that are being left out. For example, since you'll never read the books - Saruman has a resolution (a lot of people bitch about this, you may have seen it). In the books, after he is stripped of his power by Gandalf, he is imprisoned in his tower by treebeard and the rest of the ents to sit and steam out all his problems, and notice that everything he had built around him (all of his orcs and contraptions) have come to naught. Well, after a while, he gets loose, and makes his way back to the shire, and wreaks havoc among the inhabitants, destroying, pulling down trees, and all this stuff, and there's a battle of hobbits vs. invaders (it's really short). Then Sam marries Rosie Cotton (whom you see in ep. 1, but aren't introduced to - the girl that sam couldn't dance with). They have a daughter, and then like more kids, and sam is mayer of hobbiton, and all that, and frodo is all sad all the time.
All the elves are leaving middle earth because their time was the 2nd age (from the fall of saur
Re:Specs? (Score:2, Informative)
not really
>Is this on the whole farm? If so, that's 76 years. If that's on a single processor, then the farm should be able to render the whole movie in 160 hours -- and you hardly need such a big farm. Must be rendering a frame uses several processors?
what usually happens is that certian groups are allocated resources based on the scene, or part of scene, they are working on. let's say i'm working on one shot, i will most likely need to render several passes before my final render. so you can't think of this render farm as just doing one render to make the movie. each animator will need to do tons of renders before they even get close the final output.
>> STORAGE Near online: 72 terabytes
>What would this be? Robot DVD archive or something?
nah not DVD. 1 DVD=4.7 gigs. more likely a SAN of somesort. Online storage is data storage attached directly to the workstation (editing machine/compositing station/cgi workstation). so near line would most likely be storage that every workstation has access to, but does not work off of daily.
> IT staff: 35 & Visual f/x staff: 420
>Are these people temps or do they have full-time jobs? Must be a real challenge to find that many people with experience in this sort of thing. I imagine they do alot of training? Anyone know?
i don't work for WETA, or any film post house for that matter, but i do work for a smaller visual effects house. most of the engineers i work with were trained on SGI's back in the day. now most work is done on Linux so alot of that training is transferable. you would be supprised by the amount of people with experience in CGI/Compositing/IT hacking out there that would kill to get a chance to work on LOTR
WIRED's "Render wall" pic (Score:3, Informative)
The article says "Meet the real star of Lord of the Rings - a 1,600-box server farm." but they dont' have a single picture of the actual boxes. If you want to see a brief glimpse at some of the renderfarm, you can see it at the beginning of the VFX section on disc 4 of the Two Towers extended edition.
I'm really curious if Wired thinks they actually rendered the movies using shelves of DLT tapes. Do they have 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports on them???
On that subject the stats seem to imply also that they have 10gigabit ethernet everywhere, which is a retarded waste of money if that were in fact the case. I imagine that interconnects between their core switches would be 10 gigabit ethernet, but anything beyond gig-E to each node would have a hard time being utilized.
-K
Re:Nothing New Here (Score:4, Informative)
"...Jackson will likely be tinkering with the editing until a week before release."
Close. He worked on it till the last minute, which was in the first week of November. There were in fact some final changes he wanted that didn't make it into the film. It had to shipped for transfers.
The Grey Havens (Score:3, Informative)
The soundtrack titles have already been released and "The Grey Havens" is the last instrumental piece before the credit music. So we can exect the bittersweet sadness of the books ending. I do kind of hope they preserve the last scene of the book though:
[Sam] drew a deep breath. 'Well, I'm back,' he said.
WETA Supercomputes! (Score:4, Informative)
Karma whoring is bad! (Score:3, Informative)
Those kids... they think their internet is better then mine
Re:Nothing New Here (Score:5, Informative)
Forced perspective with a moving camera depends on moving parts of the scenery in sync with the camera. The scene with Gandalf and Frodo at the table in Bag End is a good example of this - no post production tricks at all.
Also, tricks where you film one person on a blue-screen, record the camera moves, replay the same camera move somewhere else (possibly with a scale transform) and combine the images. The post-production combining is completely trivial, but the technique is enabled by being able to track exactly where the camera is during the shot and replaying the same moves later.
Re: earning it's hype (Score:3, Informative)
So is Faramir. The House of Stewards was one of the noblest families of the South Kingdom of Gondor (which is why they were chosen to be the Stewards of the Kings)
Re: earning it's hype (Score:1, Informative)
Actually I got that Aragorn would be tempted by the ring, he knew it, so he made the decision to leave it with Frodo. The movie did this fairly good justice for a 2 minute scene.
The Grey Havens and Into The West (Score:2, Informative)