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WETA Digital Operations Mgr. Talks Special Effects
Xoanon (from TheOneRing.net) writes "I was recently privileged enough to view a lecture by Milton Ngan. As far as IT stuff goes, Milton has a pretty good job. You see, he is the Digital Operations Manager at Weta Digital. He is basically the architect for all the technical side of things at Weta. Last night he came and gave a 1 hour lecture at Victoria University outlining the hurdles and obstacles that needed to be overcome to produce the stunning 3D graphics lying in each of the Lord of the Rings movies. The lecture itself was full of lots of facts about Weta, the IT side of things and it also included some very cool behind the scenes shots of The Two Towers. The following is a detailed report from the event, where Ngan gave us an amazing behind-the-scenes look at WETAs infrastructure, their mainframes and various workstations. There is also a TON of info in regards to the special effects process, and news about MASSIVE. Take a look."
What I find interesting is that they want to convert all those procs over to 64-bit... times must be good to afford that! (Of course they are, what am I talking about...) Still, I like the fact that they're all running linux (well 220 of 300 commodity-grade workstations are anyway... or something like that...), that's pretty cool. To weta: you guys rock. Just do a better job on the blue-screening of the ents next time :) :)
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Well, I'm no film geek, but I took that "fake" look to mean that it was a magic staff projecting magical illumination, not a MagLite.