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Wired's LOTR III Tech Breakdown
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.
Temperature of equipment rooms: 76 degrees
Fahrenheit Weight of air conditioners needed to maintain that temperature: 1/2 ton
The Fahrenheit went there.
"With their hardware, from the article: "Average time to render one frame: 2 hours" I guess that means slashdot nerds won't be able to make LOTR quality CG for sometime?"
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.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Well yes and no.
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.
... I wonder how they came up with the numbers here.
A blade chassis full of dual PIII's 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). It's amazing how well that 1/2 ton air conditioner is operating!
Pavlov's Dog ate the bell, and now he's barking at Schroedinger's cat all the time... -Me
If you look at the print edition of that WIRED tidbit, you can look closely at the picture to see that it's actually shelves of DLT or more likely SuperDLT tapes with bar codes on them, part of their reported .5 petabytes of tape backup.
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
"...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.
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.