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Weta Prepares to Render LOTR: ROTK
Dee Arsmith writes "Peter Jackson's special-effects company Weta Digital has just taken delivery of 588 IBM blade servers, each with two 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors. Seven racks of IBM blade servers have been added to Weta's existing 15-rack server cluster to make up the largest Intel-based high- performance computer site in the world with more than 2000 linked processors. The cluster will be used to render the frames drawn by the animators to complete the final installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King."
Is this... could this... could this be the mythical Beowulf Cluster talked of in Slashdot posts of yore? Could such a beast truly exist?
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
Could delay release maybe. Get it right WETA! :)
One rack to cluster 'em,
One rack to render them all,
and in the darkness draw them.
-------
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
is this article trying to tell us how little 'real' scenes we're going to see from the third episode?
you dont recommend the TWIN towers eh? I'm not sure who would.
-Silmarildur
Sure it sounds like a lot of processing power, but have a serious think about how much rendering is involved here. The article says at least 1200 special effects shots, I'd say way more than that. The animators probably want to draw each scene more than once.
:)
So although it seems like a lot of power, I'd still be wanting more. But then who wouldn't?
Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try. -- Homer J. Simpson
ok, my "render math" isn't the greatest, but I can NOT imagine that the system he had before was THAT bad? What do you really gain by adding that much MORE horsepower? Is that the difference between a frame being rendered in 45sec vs 50sec? I understand that every little bit counts, but a LOT of these movies was done live action. Unless that little Gollum thing is in every scene, why does he need more? (ok, I know, I always want faster, better too....I'm just saying)
My
That cluster is going to have some SERIOUS power. Hello SETI? I'm surprised that a movie company has a more powerful computer than the guvment'.
Figures.
"New Line understands Peter's vision and understands it is bound by technology, so it makes sure technology is not a bottleneck," Houston said. "In the big scheme, a few million dollars for a couple of thousand processors will pay dividends."
nice... good to see that attitude more pervasive than in the past.
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
Damn. Why can't New Line underwrite my company? Better yet, why can't they underwrite me? I'm sure I could put a couple thousand processors to good use.
And what exactly would I use them for? Why, I'd install Gentoo on them, of course. With those suckers, it'll only take hours rather than days to install KDE!
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
CG is no less of a story telling medium than live action, if anything, the most expressive and engrossing character thus far in the movies has been Gollum. As a LOTR nut, I have full respect for the balance between Jackson's sometimes mindlessly entertaining cinema and Tolkien's often dense literature.
-Silmarildur
It may be able to render Return of the King but I doubt it will be able to deliver 10 fps for DooM 3. Time to upgrade some more, weta!
Tim Allen: "THIS is what every home handy man needs!" *grunt* arh arh arh arh arh
Try hooking up 588 486's.
Give us more close in shots! We don't like being God when we're watching a movie! We want to see a piece of the action. Well, I know I do. I mean the army of people cloned into infinity is cool and all, but it gets old after a while.
I wonder what use these machines will be put to next, maybe they could all be set to run Folding@home =))
It seems to me that the last two star wars movies have had far more digital effects (to their disadvantage) then the last two LOTRs put together. It seems odd that WETAs setup would have to be even larger then that for this movie.
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
Where are the machines they used for LOTR:TT? Are the special effect demands going to be so much greater that they need this monster?
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
I might be wrong here and ruin my carma but come on guys! This is not worth a slashdot story. Get it together!
Personally though I can't wait for ROTK to come out.... drool. And those servers are sweet.
fellowship of the ring, no "s" in ring, the TWO towers, not twin. I will actually read what you say next time, as long as you can actually get the damn names right.
I think after the movie they should use this type of processing power for something to help the benefit of society (e.g figure out cancer cures etc..) or to promote open source.. it would sure help.. Distrubted computing DOES work.
If you look at top500.org, you see that the current top Intel-based cluster is #5, the one with 2304 procs in LLNL.
The article says their cluster has 'more than 2000 processors'. So presumably they mean 'more than 2304'?
Can I play Mount Doom on it afterwards? Please, pretty please?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
.. power units, fans, floppy drives, switches ...
floppy drives? They are living in a dream world with pixes, leprechauns and eskimos
I hope you can forgive the slight oversight on my spelling.
The trilogy is called Lord of the Rings with an 's', so I misspelled FOTR with an 's'.
As for the Twin/Two towers, I hope you can see the simple slip up in spelling as the WTC attack is still so fresh on our country's conscience. As an interesting aside, a Google search for "The Twin Towers" reveals the LOTR website as the fourth link.
For every second of rendered footage you would save yourself two and a half minutes of render time.
(OK, the real reason is that they want to play Quake on the thing, but need two supercomputers to make it a fair game.)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
OK /. How far away is a system like this from real-time photorealistic rendering? I've always wondered why somebody didn't throw enough hardware together to render film-quality CG at 30 frames/sec. What are the technical limitations preventing this?
See for instance http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,56778,0
Q: What platforms does Massive run on? A: Massive runs under Linux and Irix.
Many interesting details at http://www.massivesoftware.com/
... one of Weta's biggest problems was the lack of space, which prompted the move to blade servers - slim units containing processors and memory which slide into a separate chassis containing power units, fans, floppy drives, switches and connections to the other servers.
Why not use a cluster of Cappuccinos then? They fit neatly into the previous description, don't they?
See...
1- Cluster of Cappuccinos
2- ?????
3- Time trip to Soviet Russia (where Cappuccinos cluster you)
4- PROFIT!!!
Now seriously, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!!!
I think I'll go to sleep.
This is not my opinion. Actually, it's not even an opinion. And I'm nowhere to be seen near it
When will they get their letter?
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Well, when you level "serious questions" like that without bothering to get your facts correct, your "serious questions" look like garden-variety trolls.
But to answer your questions, yes, the loose ends are tied up. ROTK will probably not require any more CG work than the previous two did. There will likely be at least one very large battle, probably more. And if you didn't find sufficient story in the first two movies to keep you going, you A) should probably read the books, since it sounds like you'd benefit more from reading anyway, and B) are hopeless and should skip the last movie.
Here are some nerdy technical details to (hopefully) satisfy the rest of us :-)
RLX (formerly known as Rocket Logic) was the first company to introduce blade servers. Headquartered in Woodlands, just north of Houston and the old Compaq. I think they intially got a lot of smart engineers from Compaq, but they're probably laid off by now. They had the misfortune of starting their business amidst the tech slump. The other big companies (Dell, IBM, HP) have been quick to spoof RLX and steal some of its thunder. Guess it helps that you have services and other technology to sell to a customer. After all, buying things from one company can be simpler than having multiple suppliers with different contracts, etc.
How unfortunate it is that the first-to-market is sometimes never the market leader.
When I was a boy, we did our rendering calculations by hand. A pencil, lots of paper, and we liked it! These kids today and their fancy calculating machines.... bah, humbug.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
I got my own impersonator. Hooray for our side.
I have been pwned because my
After ROTK gets mastered, there'll be one hell of a lot of processing power laying idle.
"Your conviction was brought to you by WETA Productions, proud suppliers of counter-encryption solutions to the law enforcement community"
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Does Tolkien ever get around to tying all these loose ends together?
Yes.
hour after hour of battle scenes again?
Yes. Or rather, at least two fairly large ones, the latter being the penultimate hopeless battle.
What percentage of the movie can be easily projected to be CG
Probably same ratio as seen in TTT.
[can Jackson] tear himself away from the computerized stuff long enough to actually tell a story
The "real" story has many details that necessarily get lost in a fast-moving screen. You can't really grok LOTR without being infected by the books first.
Serious questions ...
I'm a fan of the books who found the movies to be suprisingly faithful in spirit to them, to the highest degree that can be expected for a screen version.
Yeah, there I was thimnking I had an enjoyable few hours. You're right, it was such an awful movie.
Nothing happened, the special effects were shite, the acting was unconvincing (did anyone really believe there was two of those little weird guys, you couldn't get two guys that ugly).
All in all a complete waste of $10.00 for 6 hours of mindless entertainment. I really should be doing something more worthwhile. What do you suggest.
I'd hate to get the electric bill... how much cooling does this cluster need?
"Do you think that Jackson can tear himself away from the computerized stuff long enough to actually tell a story in this one?"
Wow, take some Premsyn dude.
"Derp de derp."
The article mentioned that the battle with Shelob was one of the two fights requiring a lot of CGI, which is...interesting. And reminded me of two things:
;-)
1. At my next-to-last job, we had a server named Shelob, complete with a little name sticker on the outside. Now, instead of outside the server, Shelob's going to be inside it.
2. When I talked to Sauron (aka Sala Baker after he accepted the Hugo for The Fellowship of the Rings at last year's worldcon, I asked about Shelob and he assured me that Shelob was going to be "really cool."
3. Of course, I didn't realize at that point that Shelob had been pushed back into The Return of the King; if it hadn't, 2002 would have been a banner year for giant spider films, since Eight Legged Freaks also came out that year. I understand why they moved the scene, but it makes me think that The Return of the King will probably show very little, if any, of the scourging of the Shire. Which is something of a shame, because I rather like John Clute's theory that the scourging of the Shire represents a diminished recapitulation of Sauron's fall, in the same way Sauron's own fall is a diminished recapitulation of Morgoth's. Oh well...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
The BIGGEST battles are coming in Return of the Kind. Remember the intro to Fellowship? Imagine that going on for 2 of the 3 hours we see in the theater!
What he had for the last two movies simply is NOT enough to get it all done in time! He HAD to get more!
The problem I have is that the movies are pretty but not really enjoyable. It may be because I haven't read the books, but I came away from both episodes thinking about how great the CG was and how little the story interested me.
Maybe there's more to the books than can be contained in the movies, but I felt throughout the first two installments that if Jackson had left out a lot of the grand sweeping views of Middle Earth and focused instead on developing the characters and truly adapting the story to the big screen, that it could have been much more enjoyable.
I wish I could say that after watching the movies I want to go off and read the original books, but so far the movies have been about a whole lot of nothing in particular.
I have been pwned because my
You can select using a button on the front of each blade which of the 14 blades in the BladeCenter chassis has ownership of the 'MediaTray'.
Of course this switching can also be done remotely over Ethernet using the management interface (which also provides power, reset, remote video and much, much more).
From the OS viewpoint the Floppy and CD-ROM drive are USB devices, so switching the MediaTray to another blade server actually causes a USB disconnect/connect.
If you want to see what they look like: http://ibm.com/servers/eserver/bladecenter/
Nothing happened, the special effects were shite, the acting was unconvincing
Of those three things, two actually were satisfying. Namely, the special effects and the acting.
As for nothing happening, I think I can sum up FOTR in a couple sentences for you.
"Frodo gets a Ring that is really bad and must be destroyed in some special volcano which is really hard to get to. After that, lots of fighting."
I will call a spade a spade and say that yes, nothing happened.
I have been pwned because my
I would just like to know why 588 computers? Why not an even 600, or did the person who ordered them read the memo wrong, it was supposed to be 500 but with those slashes through the zeros and all...
I understand why they moved the scene, but it makes me think that The Return of the King will probably show very little, if any, of the scourging of the Shire.
How many times does this need to be repeated? In just about every interview with Peter Jackson, cast, and crew since 1999, they have said the Scouring will not be in the movie. It's in the DVD audio commentaries, endless magazine articles, and web postings. They paid homage to it in the Mirror of Galadriel. This has been stated countless times.
For the last time, there will be no Scouring in the Return of the King!
"Sufferin' succotash."
I took the Premsyn and all I got were these lousy breasts.
I have been pwned because my
In terms of number of processors, ASCI Red at Sandia has had > 9000 Intel pentium pro (and them pentium II Xeon) procesors since the late 1990s.
It's still # 15 on the top 500 list
So what are they going to do with all of these servers when the movie's done?
It's kind of funny that the main factor in Weta Digital's decision on the Blade servers was the space they took up, not the cost. Apparently Weta is running out of room.
Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows 95 on my PC, I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows 95 CD. To my surprise he threw it into my micro-wave oven and turned on the oven. Instantly I got very upset, because the CD had become precious to me, but he said: 'Do not worry, it is unharmed.' After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: 'Take a close look at it.' To my surprise the CD was quite cold to hold and it seemed to be heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, an inscription finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:
0 E510CC98D444AA08E1324
12413AEB2ED4FA5E6F7D78E78BEDE8209450920F923A40EE1
'I cannot understand the fiery letters,' I said.
'No but I can,' he said. 'The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says:'
One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
ref
588 servers, each with 2 CPUs, in seven racks.
That's 84 servers and 168 CPUs to a rack. Now blades are supposed to be more space efficient than regular rackmount servers.
Rackable sells short 1U dual-proc systems - so short you can fit 2 back-to-back in a standard 4-post cabinet, so they can fit 176 2.8 GHz Xeons in a standard cabinet.
Doesn't make the blade servers sound too impresssive...
.. considering JRR Tolkien's history with Beowulf.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
You are probably right. I think you would be bored by the books. You'd find lots of descriptions of the land, it history, and the mythic races that roamed it, including extraordinarily detailed histories and fictional languages.
now let's imagine a beowolf cluster of these babies.
I haven't read the books
That's too bad. Amazon.com readers picked these books as the best fiction of the 20th century. To really enjoy the movie you have to know the books.
Does Tolkien ever get around to tying all these loose ends together?
He ties all the loose ends together, and then in the appendices adds in enough backstory to support another 10 books.
Do you think that Jackson can tear himself away from the computerized stuff long enough to actually tell a story in this one?
I don't think that it is possible to tell the LOTR story in less than about 20-30 hours of movies. When I saw that somebody was going to try I shuddered. There is a lot of stuff getting mutilated or left out in these movies.
On the other hand I do not believe that it is possible to do any better on film than Jackson is doing. What he is doing is far beyond what I thought would happen.
Which is not to detract from it's importance as a ground breaker and basis for most modern fantasy. But it's hardly the best fantasy around, either (for a given value of best, naturally).
Yeah. Here's some summaries of other equally shitty pieces of literature:
Romeo and Juliet: "Romeo and Juliet love each other, but their families hate each other, so they kill themselves."
Les Miserables: "A criminal escapes, and an inspector tries to recapture him."
And one that our readers may be more familiar with, Cryptonomicon: "An internet start-up tries to make it big with help from an employee's dead father."
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
and truly adapting the story to the big screen
Someone who hasn't read the books really has no place offering suggestions to a director about how to adapt a story. Go read the books if you don't understand the movie.
Twelve fingers or one, its how you play. ~Gattaca (Vincent)
I watched FOTR on DVD, so I got a chance to get all the commentary about how Tolkein created the entire world of Middle Earth with its many intricacies and it was pretty interesting (and ultimately the reason I went to see TTT). But what I get out of the LOTR movies isn't a story, but rather a lot of pretty scenery and battle scenes.
I really felt that the FOTR and TTT stories were not really worthy stories for such a grand setting. I'm not the only one I know who feels this way about LOTR. Several of my friends who have read The Hobbit describe it as everything that LOTR should have been, funny, exciting, and rich. I don't know one way or the other and wouldn't presume to make judgements about a book I haven't read, but I know that the movies were disappointing and didn't pique my interest in the original sources at all.
Aside from the Hobbit which I've planned on picking up and reading soon, I guess Tolkein's only other Middle Earth work is the Silmarillon (sp?). What is your opinion of it?
I have been pwned because my
Here's my dream for a sequel to TITANIC; it's also a love story, and could also pave the way for an awesome TITANIC 3:
Start like the first movie, panning around underwater, until you find Jack's dead, bloated corpse. Play some heart-rending music, pan around, whatever. Then, just like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the corpse WAKES UP.
He rises up and starts walking. Then feel free to add whatever adventures or misadventures with sharks, undead pirates, giant squids, whatever, etc., etc. As much fun as that is, it is secondary to our main focus.
However, as the movie goes on, Jack's appearance should get more and more gruesome, with decomposing bits of flesh that fall off or get eaten, barnacles, sea weed, whatever. By the end he should appear to be part zombie, part skeleton, with some debris thrown in for good measure. However, he should also be totally grotesque in appearance, and therefore still be recognizable as Leonardo DiCaprio.
Finally, our (anti-)hero gets close to his goal. He looks up, and sees a ring falling through the water. He grabs the ring, floats/swims upward, looks up at the old woman leaning over and staring down, and says in his best boyish Leo voice "Hey, you dropped this!"
She then has a heart attack, falls into the water, and dies. And they're finally together, forever! Cue triumphant romantic music.
THE END
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Someone who hasn't read the books really has no place offering suggestions to a director about how to adapt a story.
As someone who enjoys movies, I think I can say with confidence that long, repetitive, overly loud, and storyless are things that should be edited out of the movie adaptation of any book.
Go read the books if you don't understand the movie.
If the movie doesn't stand on its own, it is not the fault of the audience.
I have been pwned because my
Watching the LOTR moview requires some background from the books in order to fully appreciate what is going on in various scenes.
One comparison would be having to stop and explain the concept of god in the movie Bruce Almighty. A large number of people in the U.S.A. are familiar with the concept of god. This means the makers of a movie that have god as a participant would rely on the background people have learned over their lives. They would not need to explain what god is.
In the LOTR movies there is a vast cosmology that in some basic ways differes from our current world. If you know nothing of this cosmology then the movies may or may not be appealing to you based on the limited comprehesion and incorrect assumptions you will make due to you not possessing the needed background information.
IMHO Tolkien was a master story teller by the time he got about halfway through the two towers. The first part of the written story drags a little but once you get further into it it moves quite well. For those who like charactor development the FOTR is great charactor building information.
If you do not like to read the printed page I would recommend getting an unabridged audio tape set of the LOTR and listening to it. You could borrow such a set from a library without too much searching. www.recordedbooks.com has an unabridged reading of the complete LOTR broken into the three books. I quite enjoyed listening to the FOTR while driving back and forth to work.
That is my two pence worth. YMMV.
dzimmerm
Jumping to correct solutions slowly is better than jumping to incorrect solutions quickly.
In my day, we had to use rocks, or fingers and toes, and we liked it! I don't know about this fancy schmancy pen and paper stuff, it will be the downfall of thinking.
Linux. You know you want it.
Yeah that's the gist of it, but there are a couple of side stories that should (or may not) be of interest:
What part of 'Lots of fighting' does any of the above fit in? Or is everything irrelevant because 'they will all die from all that fighting?' Or is it irrelevant because it's got nothing to do with Frodo and his Ring, and is therefore merely 2 hours of 'filler fluff'?
Maybe it is because you didn't read the books, but I was convinced in terms of book to movie translation, this is as good as it's gonna get. This is probably the most complete view of Middle Earth that we'll ever probably see. I'm watching the movies not to discover that Sam is the true hero (Score: -1 Spoiler), but rather to see what Middle Earth would look like.
It's all about a visualization of the book, not having the book read to me. Most people who have read the books will enjoy the movies most, they already know what happens; they want to see how close PJ's visuals may match their imagination. That's the real thrill here, not the cliff's notes synopsis a 3 hour movie is capable of.
There have been several stories about these huge clusters used to speed up rendering. Do any consumer level home video apps support offloading to other hosts?
The available tools are becoming extremely powerful. iMovie and Final Cut on MacOS are great. There are several good Windows options too. But, the conversion from MiniDV to MEPG2 for DVD takes several hours.
How long before they include an agent to load on other hosts, to distribute processing? It seems like this would be pretty easy to implement. Is anyone doing it?
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't remove it from the book, but if I were making a movie, I would remove it also.
To be honest, after saving the entire world, anything else is anticlimactic. So, for a movie, it's easy to remove all that stuff and still leave a good story.
. power units, fans, floppy drives, switches ... floppy drives?
;-)
Ever tried putting a swap file on a floppy drive?
Ok, so I get REALLY bored sometimes.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
They screwed up the number of blades though....
Thank you. Matrix Reloaded was perhaps the worst movie I've seen in years.....At times i felt like I was back in my Philosophy class, with all the meaningless drivel they kept spouting out.
If they wanted to make a action/kung-fu flick then they should have gotten actors that are actually convincing at it. I've seen orange belts with better skills.
The Silmarillion reads like you would expect "A Concise History of Everything" to read. Its huge in scale, but not really developed into a story at all. I'm pretty sure it is just backstory that Tolkein wrote for the other books, edited together into a larger work after his death.
Hear, hear! Said the Hobbit
Hear WHAT?! Said the Dwarf
Yay me!
Google has many times more Intel CPUs than that.
The things that's most amusing about Romeo and Juliet is that they have become the symbol of love...yet all they really had was basically a teenage crush, with maybe some good old lust thrown in. How did they ever become such major symbols?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...when the Big Hollywood Movie Studio who is backing such a huge undertaking comes forward and says "yes, we are the ones who will be funding and distributing this movie."
Until then, there's ADV Films, which is a small niche video/DVD company out of Texas, there's Gainax which is a small niche animation studio out of Tokyo, and there's Weta. I don't think that adds up to the hundreds of millions making a live-action Eva movie that doesn't look like Godzilla vs. Rodan will require.
I want to hear which of the biggies will do it. News Corp/Fox? Paramount/Viacom? AOL Time Warner? Columbia/Tri-Star/Sony? MGM? Disney? Universal? Out with it, dammit! If there isn't a Big Frickin' Movie Studio in this picture, this is going to be in the Vapor Queue with Duke Nukem Forever and the rebirth of the Amiga.
I'm from Hollywood. I know these things.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Fortune had this for LOTR:
"some guys take a long vacation and throw a ring in a volcano"
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
588 blades
x 2CPUs each
== 1176 physical CPU's
x 2cpus/cpu (hyperthreading on the xenons)
== 2352 hyperthreaded cpu's
x 2.8GHz
== 6585.6GHz
~6.6THz
well... thats a just a bit of rendering power, wonder whats gona happen once they are done with them. Which also makes me wonder, what happended to that somewhat famous renderfarm for toystory? Seems whenever a movie requiring horsepower like this comes out, they just buy new equipment since the stuff used on the last movie is probably obsolete already... ohwell
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
http://saveie6.com/
Yes. Or rather, at least two fairly large ones, the latter being the penultimate hopeless battle.
If the penultimate battle is the latter of the two, then the ultimate one (which would come after the latter) isn't shown.
But your comment is confusing. There's only *one* large battle in RotK, Pelennor Fields. The Black Gate was a diversion tactic and the Scouring is just a skirmish. The Scouring would be neat in a movie, but I hear Jackson has omitted it -- hope that's not true.
>Hang on! Oh, the water's cold. Hang on! I'll never let got. She lets go.
I kept wondering why they didn't make a cozy raft by tying a bunch of life-jacketed stiffs together. They seemed to have plenty of time.
Man, I wouldn't mind having just one of their workstations, let alone a 2000-processor cluster for rendering a battle for Middle-Earth. Is it too late to place my bets for Gandalf and the boys?
Yes. Or rather, at least two fairly large ones, the latter being the penultimate hopeless battle.
Yikes! Looks like either a "-1, Misuse of big word in vain attempt to sound smart", or a "-1, Incorrect referral to source text in vain attempt to sound authoritative".
Sorry, sparky, better luck next time.
funny, i was watching dogma as i read this post. btw. i think it is a great movie. if you give it a chance, most of the ideas, even if fiction, make sense.
It is. The Silmarillion was not intended, by JRR Tolkien, as a book in an of itself. However the Silmarillion, and lots and lots of his other working notes, stories etc have been published after his death after editing by his son Christopher.
Some of the things in the film do not take place within th emain body of the three books. The Arwen/Aragorn romance is in an appendix to the third book but Tolkien says the only reason it was left out of the main text was that he couldn't figure out how to interweave it in. With films and intercutting Mr. Jackson has managed that.
Similarly the wounding of Theodred (part of TTT) is included in the story of the Rohirrim in battle with Saruman's forces at the Fords of Isen in the collection, IIRC, "Unfinished Tales".
ed
Did I out myself as a Tolkien geek?
That or they can lease it out to needy sites that appear on Slashdot.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
There is a lot of stuff getting mutilated or left out in these movies.
:) (Ring not affecting him for example.)
What I really missed was Tom Bombadil and the Dark Forest.
I believe it was Tolkien himself who said 'every great book needs an Enigma'.
After reading the series for the first time, I was dissapointed we don't hear anything about Tom. It left me with a itchy feeling and I had to skim the books throught immediately to see if I missed something. I felt he is BOUND to do something important during the books because I sensed such great power in him
Bot Assisted Blogging
Is it me, or does the phrase, "The cluster will be used to render the frames drawn by the animators..." bother anybody else? If the frames were "drawn," why would you need to render them? ;)
This is 3D CG. There is no drawing involved in the frames that need to be rendered.
Normally, I avoid being anal, but I couldn't leave this one alone.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
As for hardware, I guess they get a seriously good deal. Not only are they busing in *serious* bulk but a lot of vendors would like to be associated with the production (and maybe a credit line).
See my journal, I write things there
is amazing considering the size of the country NZ is. 4million odd people, and its CG power is dayum neer equal to lucas worx etc.
one little country that owns you all.
First to everest.
First to Fly (richard peirce)
First to give women the vote.
First to tell the USA to stick there nukes.
who would have thought a little country could do so much!
Actually, we don't have as many sheep as we used to - from memory it's dropped from somewhere around 60 million down to only about 40 million. Australia and China have more sheep per capita now (according to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, which is almost as good as google, but it's only on twice a week).
With our population just passing 4 million (people) that's only 10 sheep per person. We've all had to cut back on lamb roasts...
> ...the largest Intel-based high- performance computer site in the world...
Outside the NSA, maybe.
I don't undestand what's the big deal about the book. I dug up the books after I watched FOTR. They are terribly boring. I picked them up 3, 4 times and was bored to death every time.
To really enjoy the movie you have to know the books.
No, no and definitely no. I haven't read the Rings trilogy, and I absolutely love the movies. And I won't read the fscking books until after all three have been released, so that there's no chance I'll turn into a fscking whiny little maggot like so many rabid fans of the books have after having seen the movies.
I don't think that it is possible to tell the LOTR story in less than about 20-30 hours of movies.
I'm only guessing on this since I haven't read the books, but I'd have to agree with you.
On the other hand I do not believe that it is possible to do any better on film than Jackson is doing.
HEAR HEAR! I heartily agree; and I might also add that I am so FSCKING sick of hearing morons say things like "Waaaah! PJ changed the story! How dare he!" Just shut the fuck up and enjoy the ride; Jackson's doing it a million times better than what a dork like Joel Schumacher (for example) would have. And thank Holy Christ that no wrai^H^H^H^H suit forced him to pick Akiva bloody Goldsman to do the screenplay.
Just wondering how long this process will take - I mean, it's June now, surely the rendering will need to be done by September? How long does it take to edit a 3 hour movie and get it out by christmas?
I'd say the rig they had was enough, but they fluffed up on the timing and need to get this stuff done in a _real_ hurry.
Maybe that OneRing.net April fools joke wasn't...
Slow down, that's way to much acronymization!
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Well, when you're talking about a 2.5 minute CGI shot, you have 24 frames/second (minimum) X 60 seconds/minute X 2.5 minutes = 3600 frames to render. 3600 frames X 5 minutes/frame savings = 18000 minutes or 300 hours in total saved by reducing a frame render from 50 minutes to 45.
He asked what the difference between 45sec/frame and 50 sec/frame was. Not between 45 min/frame and 50 min/frame. So we're looking at 5 hours, not 300.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Back when I was a lad: I used to get up in the morning at 10 o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of Sulfuric acid from a I love MS cup, work twenty nine hours a day down in the Rendering farms and pay Peter Jackson for permission to come to work and when we came home our dad and our mother would install Windows 95 on our four thousand 386's and then dance about on our keyboards emoting LOL.
Try telling that to kids today.. and they won't believe you.
Read Errant Story.
MY EYES!!! MY EYES!!!
Good lord man, I clicked your link at 7:00AM!! I think my day (and possibly my life) is scarred!
and is going to NZ to work on LOTR in a couple of weeks, so I guess this will be her platform.
I work for a top-rated investment bank. We have far more servers than this in our linux compute farm and it is growing daily.
"New Line understands Peter's vision and understands it is bound by technology, so it makes sure technology is not a bottleneck," Houston said. "In the big scheme, a few million dollars for a couple of thousand processors will pay dividends."
In so many of the things that we do the payoff for the use of new technology is not always obvious to everyone. It must be nice to work in an industry where the relationship between the latest technology and the payoff is so easily defined.
> FOTR and TTT stories were not really worthy stories for such a grand setting.
Taken in isolation, that could be a reasonable view. But the stories in these movies are events at the very tailpipe of a many-ages history that Tolkien crafted. The total story is much bigger than the slice you saw. With a fuller awareness of the gravity of that history in mind, the setting takes its place. That is not to say that you'd find his invented ancient world leading up to this story very entertaining either.
I haven't read the Silmarillion. I assume the reason it does not enjoy the same popularity of the others is that its content is even heavier on the lore/history/language stuff; I will test that assumption sometime.
Seriously, this is exactly what Final Cut Pro needs. I was hoping it would be in 4 ... maybe next time.
...
:-)
I spent most of this spring editing a half-hour movie, with lots of nested-nested-nested composites and filters and such. I spent a lot of time in a computer lab watching one G4 tick away, while the other two next to me sat idle. Damn.
So what we really need for Final Cut Pro is a plugin that will package a single frame, with all its render settings, and send it to any other instances of FCP on the network to be rendered. There are a lot of people, including me, who would pay a lot of money for software like that
I suspect that Final Cut's architecture simply doesn't allow a third party to do something like this. It's worth asking, though
With all the plot changes in the last movie, I was assuming they were going to call it something else, so they could avoid paying royalties to whoever owners the copyright on the books.
Peace, or Not?
... spare cycles before rendering began have been applied to the SETI @ Home project.
One week into this endeavor, alien life was successfully created (and beautifully rendered).
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Wasn't "Clerks" made for $22K?
There are immense opportunities for people with a little money and a good idea: the problem comes when you have people with a lot of money and no ideas (Titanic)...
-David Barak
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
Maybe they'll form their own SETI Group after finishing up on RotK. They'd fly past everyone else within 24 hours!
"The first film had about 400 special effects shots. The second had 800 and this film will have at least as many as the first two combined."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
But then Tolkien was a little bit uncomfortable with the world-creating industry embodied in his own works as well. The root of Melkor's evil in the Silmarillion is his desire to create his own world (when really all he can do is warp the existing one--changing elves into orcs). The conflict between Tolkien's utter devotion to his desire for unreal worlds and his willingness to look at the dark side of that desire makes for both interesting reading and interesting viewing. (It's a particularly relevant theme for geeks, I think.)
MY EARS!!! MY EARS!!!
That is so very, very wrong. What the HELL was Nimoy thinking, and why did anyone let him do it?!?!
Just wondering... what are they doing to the Ents? I kinda liked them as looking like Jim Henson muppet critters.
erm... *coughs* not a car. it's a cottage, with smoke coming from the chimney. if you check, in two distinct shots, the "car" hasn't moved.
"split the clouds and divide the sea and show those evil guys how nasty the Tiki gods can be."
Considering how badly they mangled the plot of the Two Towers, is it even possible for them to do anything decent with the Return of the King? I doubt it, and don't intend to waste any time on the flick.
High Tech rendering and flashy effects can't make up for the mangled plot. I still wish I'd never seen their grotesque of the Two Towers, and still hope to forget it. (It will happen eventually, but as I read the book shortly before the flick came out, it will be awhile [a year or two] before I can enjoyably read it again.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
it's 3600 frames x 5 seconds/frame = 18000 Seconds = 300 minutes = 5 hours. But still, 5 hour savings on a 2.5 minute render is a big deal...
MY EYES!!! MY EYES!!! (Yes, Redundant)
MY EARS!!! MY EARS!!!
AAARRRGGGHHH!!!!!!!!!
(body collapses in a pond of ooze, like Mr. Kelly on X-MEN)
The funniest is that there was only the 'MY EYES!!! MY EYES!!!' when i replied, and when I went back to the article that "MY EARS!!! MY EARS!!!" was there, and my post was the third. life is full of misteries...
killing aragorn: OK, i'm a little puzzled by that decision myself, to be honest. it seems like its sole purpose was for the audience to see that the relationship w/ arwen was fated not to be and is now legitimately able to become involved w/ eowyn. this could have been done otherwise (e.g., flashback or something), i agree. and it sorta cheapens gandalf's descent into the pit.
i am hoping very much that the reason for this will become apparent in ROTK. i'll have to concede this one...for now.
faramir: the men of gondor are clearly suspicious if we consider what happens w/ denethor and how boromir's lust for the ring accentuated his natural suspicion. faramir is in the middle of what he is essentially a warzone, and suddenly, these halflings show up w/ gollum in his country. frodo is clearly not giving him the full story. gollum is clearly bad news, and of course the ring is calling to him, just as it called to his brother. i think his suspiciousness and general "being a jerk-ness" is perfectly justified there. it also lowers the audience's expectations for faramir, which of course he will then go on to exceed in ROTK.
the army of elves: tolkien clearly doesn't want the wizards to be shaping the political reality, so when gandalf shows up, even he shouldn't be able to turn the tide of saruman's orcs. therefore, something else needs to happen there. the dwarves, as has been established, care nothing for other people, per elrond. other humans are too caught up in what they're doing, which only leaves the elves to pick up that slack.
the diverting the ring thing, i'm not sure i know what you're talking about, to be honest. can you clarify?
ed
Sorry, but your wrong. There really was something in the background with a bright glare moving from left to right. The cottage wasn't it. The mistake was edited out of the DVD version, so to see it you'll have to find a screener/camcorder rip and watch it.
I wouldn't call them "shitty", but you are right, storywise these works aren't really any less dull (can't speak for Cryptnomicon, haven't read it); but then no one really said that the story was the selling point there.
sic transit gloria mundi
The shot of the propellors starting in the harbor was also wrong as the turbine would not have been run till later, but this was never corrected.
In the movie numerous shots were flipped so the propellors turned both directions in them, or had the blade tilt backwards.
Somebody mentioned the funnels. The rear funnel was fake (at the time people thought more funnels == better ship) and this was known and incorporated into the CG smoke. Due to it blowing directly backwards it would appear to come from that funnel anyway (as it was intended to appear by the original ship designers).
Gandalf Bilbo Baggins (Frodo takes it to RIVENDELL. Some FRIENDS come with him. They are attacked by black riders a LOT, and it is SCARY.)
Elrond
(They do some travelling. Some more FRIENDS come with him. Gandalf DIES in the mines of Moria, but will later be RESURRECTED in GLORIFIED form having triumphed over EVIL, an obvious literary ALLUSION to that movie where the guy comes back as a DOG.)Boromir
Frodo BoromirTHE END
Peter Jackson has admitted that it was actually a car and was left in the original print in the (vain) hope that "no-one would notice".
! !!
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA
I don't think he quite understood how fanatical LOTR fans can be...
The car was removed from subsequent prints.
I went to see LOTR:FOTR three times in the theater. First two showings the car was there. Third showing (with bonus LOTR:TTT trailer at the end), no car.
Because that's all that most people think love is.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
OK /. How far away is a system like this from real-time photorealistic
rendering?
I agree with other posters, who say that film resolution is a few times higher resolution than typical gamer's setup.
There are other barriers. Much of visual effects rendering involves sophisticated per-pixel programs called shaders. These often are processed in Rendermn [pixar.com]. These shaders perform generalized floating point operations, if-then-else structures, etc.
Newer generations of graphics cards are implementing floating point pixels and enough processing generality, that this kind of shading can be done on the graphics card
Before we get too excited about a scene running in/near realtime, remember that there can be a need for 100s of MB of data for 1 second of footage. Plus, lots of processing is done before rendering -- simulation of forces, cloth, hair/fur, smoke/fire, etc. Also, the composite process is performed after rendering to combine many layers (100+ for "hero" shots, like far-away harbor scenes in Pearl Harbor).
In the past few Siggraph [siggraph.org] conferences have shown prototypes of Nvidia hardware rendering movie scenes. Two years ago was a multi-character shot from Final Fantasy. Last year was a battle scene from LOTR. In each, lots of precomputing determined the geometry. While rendering, many many passes were made and the result was about a 5hz update rate.
(IMHO neither looked just like the movie -- perhaps the rendered images were adjusted in the composite phase, or they ran out of time for the demo).
The floating point operations occur so much faster on a GPU (Graphics) than a CPU, that speed-ups compared to software rendering of ~100x were not uncommon.
So, there are lots of precomputed items to rendering a scene in "realtime". And these scenes are optimized for just what you see -- nothing extra to slow down the process. There's less detail for smaller things than close things.
Do you want to fly around and explore a scene from a movie? Well, that might work -- but you won't see much detail.
Those that work on movies do not want to work in realtime -- they push their systems to the limit to maximize what they can do. Jurassic Park had scenes that took hours for one processor to render each frame. So do today's movies. Maybe with 1000s of processors, you can push it to 10+ hours per frame.
Dude I laughed for 10 minutes at your post. Bravo.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
It hurts! It stings!
I drank what? -- Socrates
I will never again complain about goatse.cx again.
Actually, both sides are right. For filmed footage, the director usually watches all or most of it after the day's shooting. This will include the raw blue/green screen and motion control shots. This is to ensure that they can still grab missing shots or retake shots before they strike the set and move on to the next. Setting up a pickup shot a month later is a serious pain in the ass. Trust me.
However, when it comes to F/X shots, there are a number of steps involved and the director has better things to do than hover over competent people doing what they do best. For those, it makes sense to have the director view "dailies" of any given shot in its current stage, once or twice a week: to sign off on maquettes, models, texturing, rough blocking (I forget what it's called), fine motion, lighting, compositing, and etc. And not necessarily in that order. Anyway, it's not likely that there's going to be enough on any given day for the director to see. Someday, I hope to have such problems. Until then I'm sticking with the movie magic I can afford.
Moekandu
"Hi there!" - Big Time, Peter Gabriel
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I would be anxiously awaiting your script, sakusha. Since you are adept at observing the fact that most people are dullards, I would assume that you believe you are not one of them?
.
Very well then. .
Let's see you put your money where your mouth is. I'm challenging you to write a "truly creative" screenplay. By "truly creative", please feel free to use you're own definition, as you will need to submit it with your script.
However, while many sequences of sounds or notes humans do not consider music, I would like to see a story, not merely a unique collection of words. I don't care what it's about. Or its genre, or "target audience", or whatever.
I suppose it's up to you as to whether you want to write a "good" and creative script, or merely a creative script. But, please be aware that the judges are likely to mark you down for shameless incomprehensibility. Be creative, not clever.
Please let me know how much time you think you will need.
Moekandu
moekandu@cox.net
"The object is not to bring your enemy to his knees, but his senses." - Ghandi
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
No matter how I word it, the intent of my statement remains the same. Since I made the comment I don't feel like it was necessary to say, "I personally".
You obviously got the point.
BTW: I am still a huge fan of the original. The second just didn't do it for me.
The first 200 pages are the hardest, and then it starts flowing really easily. In FoTR the hard bit is all the party preparation & whatnot. It gets interesting when Gandalf finds that the ring of Bilbo is the One Ring. Then there is another hard bit at Rivendell -- all the talks. As soon as the company is on its way, it gets reallly good.
Now when you are finished you can go back to the early hardgoing stuff, it fills a lot of the details and is enjoyable then. At some point you get so engrossed in the series that you start reading the appendixes too!
What do you mean it's really good. They get in the stupid forest meeting the stupid Tom with his
stupid poems.
Absolutely true. However these is a shot of Sam with his daughter Elanor, so they will have to have sometime in the Shire at the end of the film so Sam can marry Rosie, who he hardly talks to in Fellowship, and have baby hobbits
A fairly LARGE diversionary tactic surely? Sauron had a huge number of troops there, and Aragorn had quite a few on his side too. Also no Scouring, not even a skirmish.
If the movie doesn't stand on its own, it is not the fault of the audience. I think the movie has stood on it's own, judging by; a) The Box Office b) The Awards, Oscars and others (loads of these) c) Critical reviews, almost all good to ecstatic d) Ratings on Movie web sites, for example IMDB rates Fellowship at #5 and Two Towers at #12 in their top 250 Movie List Any one or two of these things may be a blip, but all combined? I don't think so. There are some people who don't like the film but for anything you you can think of will always find someone who doesn't like it. I think you are just one of this small minority for these films, thats all.
You said in one of your postings that you wished Peter Jackson had focused more on developing the characters. Well the books do that, so maybe you would like them if you read them, who knows? As for the Silmarillion (yes, correct spelling), if I were you I would read the LotR, then some of the appendices at the back of the RotK first. If you like the appendices you may well like the Silmarillion, if not save your money. As for the Hobbit, this is actually a childrens book, though many adults like it as well (I do),so the style is very different. Starts off as a comedy and ends up with 'Twilight of the Gods'.