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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."
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
Adding more machines makes a big difference... it means that you get to do more takes on a shot.
Adding more horsepower, assuming the file I/O is fast and the machine doesn't swap... its close to being linear.
So a 20% improvement means that you get done 20% faster... or, more likely in the biz, thats 20% more wish-fixes that get done... or... even more likely... that means more complex shots.
-Tim
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
The limit Weta are working against is time. They have a deadline. The faster their render farm, the less likely a problem - realising a scene is wrong, servers crashing, hardware failing - is to cause them to slip.
Likewise, I imagine Weta's biggest expense is staff & contractors. If they have to work nights and weekends to get work done because they're waiting on hardware, that's a big cost, probably a lot bigger than the cost of adding servers to the farm.
Finally, there's the possibility of doing more complex and detailed rendering and compositing with a bigger farm, especially for the extended editions of the DVDs - for example, they're doing a huge amount extra for the Two Towers DVD, since they're adding lots more to the Ents.
It's not only the increase ni speed but actually having more processors. In the basic PRMan setup you send one frame to each CPU. So if before they had 1000 processors they could send, theoretically 1000 frames at the same time, though of course some would render faster than others. Now instead is they doubled their capacity they can now send 2000 frames concurrently (again theoretical).
LOR: ROTK has even more VFX shots than the previous film so it does make sense increasing capacity. Things can be rendered overnight so they are ready for dailies next day. They might also use some of these also for compositing as WQeta Digital uses Shake which also has a batch renderer for Linux.
Well, they "understand" that the last two movies made huge bank to the tune of more than three times what they cost to make. I don't think they'd have much "understanding of his vision" if they'd tanked.
It all still comes down to the bottom line. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Not sure -- but probably not.
It's more likely that they want to do more COMPLEX shots in the same amount of time it used to take to do a simpler version of the same shot.
Think about it this way -- it took the same amount of time to create Toy Story as it did to create Monsters, Inc. (roughly).
But, Toy Story doesn't spend a whole lot of time dealing with difficult to render stuff like fur. Sully walks into the scene on the other hand, watch the rendering have to keep pace with all that hair.
The trick isn't really to get it to photorealistic real-time, anyhow, for what Hollywood needs. The trick is to balance the following things:
1. Renderable in a decent time frame (e.g. a couple hours to render a 10-minute or so scene). The main point here is to get it rendering quick enough that (a) you can fix bugs and (b) you can fix bugs in time to meet the deadlines.
2. Ramp the quality as high as it can go.
In all honesty, Hollywood won't give us realtime photorealistic rendering. That's being left to the gaming computer companies so we have to wait another 5-10 years.
Why? Hollywood just doesn't need it. They can render the scene or tape it from live actors, either way they have to go in and someone has to play editor to fit all the pieces together anyways.
.. considering JRR Tolkien's history with Beowulf.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
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)
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.
Bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit.
I've worked with Academy Award winning animators and effects people, and their #1 continual complaint is that their clients have no imagination. They whine that they get asked to do the same effects over and over, because the director saw some effect somewhere else and wants to copy it.
If there really was one gram of creativity anywhere in the movie world, Jackson would write an original script instead of adapting an existing work. Creativity is such boring work, it's easier to copy.
Directors shouldn't watch most of the cuts... they have people between them and the artists for that reason. If a director spent all their time in dailies watching... they would not have time to do all that they need to do.
Fresh eyes are always good for proofing... its amazing what somebody new picks up the first 2 times through a shot.
-Tim
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Yes, 5 seconds per frame IS a big deal. I do some rendering and it takes FOREVER to render just 1 second of DV quality (720*480 at 29.97 FPS) footage. Last time I did a big render, it took about 55 seconds per frame, so that's almost half an hour for a single second of video. If I was able to shave 5 seconds per frame off, that translates to 2.5 minutes per second of rendered video. It doesn't sound like much, but every little bit helps when you're rendering 45 seconds of video.
Unfortunately, Maya's good renderer doesn't use my graphics hardware. It's really too bad because I have a GeForce 4 Ti 4400 and I'm sure that it would speed up my renderings a lot.
Of course, Weta's old cluster is a lot better than anything I'm ever going to be working with, but they also render at obscene resolutions to keep things like Gollum looking smooth and crisp. I wonder how fast their new cluster renders.
This is all true. I agree.
But you also have to see that they filmed 3 movies for 2/3 of what Titanic cost to make.
But you're right, they paid a lot of attention to get things right. But they had a reason that Cameron didn't.
LOTR has a HUGE fanbase. The fans would be all OVER this director and crew if something wasn't right. Some things are changed as it is and they got a lot of flak from it. The Titanic, while popular, didn't have legeons of fans nitpicking over every detail to see if it was right or not. Not on the scale of LOTR.
But I agree with you about the feel of the actors that feel the authenticity on the set.
I guess I just didn't "get" Titanic. But that's ok, it's only my opinion...which is harmless.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
First time I hear this, and it's a real disappointment.
I always felt the brilliance of the trilogy was in how Tolkien managed to slow down the pace and return the reader into the real world at the end.
Also, I found it fascinating how the 4 hobbits barely draw a sweat liberating the shire, it reminds me of Neo's final fight with Agent Smith at the end of the Matrix I - one gets the impression that Frodo is half asleep during the "scouring of the shire" because its such a trivial event compared to what they just went through.
Speaking of funding...The relativly small 100 million they spent on something like K19 would yeild my mom over 500 hour-long documentries. She works at national geographic. Infomercials have higher budgets then her films.
As many film school thesis projects have demonstrated, some brilliant, stunning things can be done with less then 50000 dollars
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Those things might not be seen in the movie but they're still important and worth big money because of exhibits. I remember going to the Lord of the Rings exhibit in Toronto before TTT came out and getting to scrutinze up close the witch-king's gauntlets, the Sting dagger, Eowyn's dress, the elven jewellry and weapons, and practically every costume, armour, weapon, prop, etc. And there were huge line-ups paying something like $12 per person to see all this.
Sure, you don't see it in the movie but it pays back big-time for exhibits.
Creativity is such boring work...
Real creativity is risky. It's less risky to copy a proven winner. Make a creative flop, get the blame. Copy a proven formula and you're likely to profit. And that's at the bottom of all this, isn't it.
Tolkien said he intended nothing more than to tell a tale that he hoped others would find entertaining. I am persuaded his love for his craft was greater than his hope of profiting greatly from the sharing of it. He must have expected that it would also bore many people...
They paid homage to it in the Mirror of Galadriel.
Kind of strange that Rudy(samwise) was a slave in that little "homage". As I recall in the book, the hobbits kicked ass and took names when they returned to the shire. The slaves were the other hobbits that they liberated from sauraman.
I for one am still not 100% convinced that the scouring will be completely left out of ROTK.
Its inclusion would be one hell of a well kept secret, and a really cool surprise.
But how are they connected? 100/1000 Mbps Ethernet? Weta's cluster might be bigger, but without high speed interconnects (e.g., Myrinet) is is just a pile of CPU's, not a supercomputer.
I don't question your other points, but I do question the size factor.
> Movie quality shots are rendered at many times
> that resolution, which greatly increases the
> number of pixels that have to be rendered.
This isn't true for any movie I'm familiar with. In fact, I'd be highly surprised if LOTR was rendered at anything much higher than 2k resolution.
There's usually not much point to higher resolution when rendering CG for film, because jitter, grain, dust, and all the other artifacts of analog film obscure any gains you might get by doing so. Even in digital projection, a pixel at 2k by 2k res projects to something like a single inch on a typical movie screen. This might sound big, but from where you're sitting, it really isn't.
Dude, directors watch dailies at the end of every day. Jackson spent three to four hours watching dailies at the end of every shooting day, as LOTR had seven units filming. The director is the only person with the complete film in his or her head. Implying that s/he wouldn't be involved with the process in the most intimate way is ludicrous.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Here are some differences
1/ With those blades, you'll about 7 cables (2 network (redundant) + 4 power (redundant) + 1 management processor network) for 14 blades (1/2 cable for 1 blade with total redundancy).
With your server, you'll have 2 cables, without dedundancy (and 5 cables with power/network redundancy and a management processor).
For 588 servers, you'll have 294 cables instead of 1176 (or 2940).
2/ With blades, a server is hotplug : no cables to remove/replug
(Blades are also easier to manage than standard servers)
They may be short systems but the total depth of the rack is quite a bit bigger from memory.
Normal people worry me!
True, but so does Titanic (the ship, not the movie). Perhaps you've never heard of the Titanic Historical Society, but it's been around since the Sixties. Titanic enthusiasts are every bit as rabid as LOTR ones. I know, I fit into both camps. I went to see the movie to see the re-creation of the ship. I didn't give a flying you-know-what about the story.
At any rate, I understand the "not getting it" part. I have trouble explaining to people that neither X-Files nor Buffy interested me at all. Such is life, I suppose.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch