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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.
Ya know, now that the Matrix hype vanished into nowhere,
I don't think that it just vanished... it turned into something.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Most likely ROTK will not live up to the hype until the extended edition comes out.
And I speak from the experience of two extended editions of the other two films that are both superior to the theatrical releases
I was hoping it was an article on certain effects and how they were accomplished.
:(
Not a tiny list of vital stats. (that didn't seem to impress me somehow)
Blogzine.net
Fortress of Insanity
clifgriffin > blog
Temperature of equipment rooms: 76 degrees
... 76C, 76F or 76K? :)
...
Well that's specific
If it's farenhite, then that's quite cool. If it's celcius then holy crap that's hot.
If it's kelvin then I think we've found the new overclocking kings
1,600 Servers............. $640,000
10GB network.............. $378,000
35 IT staffers............ $140/hr
420 Visual f/x staffers... $9,800,000.28
Seeing Gollum bite Frodo's finger off with "Photorealism"... Priceless!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
trixie technoglogy, we hates it...
The saddest thing is that we will need that much power just to run Windows2009 and Doom5
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
That sounds like a call for distributed computing and an LOTR rendering client on each PC. One million slashdot readers willing, we *will* render the Scouring of the Shire...
"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.
Saruman is cut from the THEATRICAL release of RoTK. He's right there in the Extended Edition.
I for one enjoyed TTT ALOT. Sure, there were deviations from the book, but they were necessary to keep the story going. You cannot make the movie 1:1 identical with the book.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Agreed. The Two Towers was probably the most disappointing film I've seen in the last 10 years,
;)
So...I take it you didn't see Matrix Revolutions
Tom Bombadil and the Witch-king of Angmar are the same person.
1. We never hear of Tom at all during the whole of the First Age. The Nine Rings aren't forged until the Second Age. QED.
2. You never see the two of them together.
3. In the first part of Fellowship of the Ring, the Nazgul are sent to the Shire to look for the wandering Baggins. Interestingly, Tom says to Frodo at the dinner-table: "...I was waiting for you. We heard news of you, and learned that you were wandering... But Tom had an errand there, that he dared not hinder" (Fellowship p.137 hardback, note the fear Tom has of his master, Sauron!).
4. In Tom's questioning of the Hobbits, JRRT notes that "there was a glint in his eyes when he heard of the Riders." (Fellowship p. 144) I think he was concerned that his double-life might have been noticed. Interestingly, Tom immediately changes the subject of conversation! Furthermore, the One Ring had no effect on Tom - which seems consistent with Tolkien's observations about how the Nazgul would have handled the same priceless object (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, #246): "They were... in no way deceived as to the real lordship of the Ring."
5. It's also interesting to note that Tom could see Frodo clearly while Frodo was wearing the Ring (Fellowship p. 144 hardback) - just as the Witch-king could see Frodo clearly while he was wearing the Ring at Weathertop! (Fellowship p. 208 hardback)
6. Perhaps most damning, however, is the incident with the Barrow-wights (Fellowship pp. 151-155), where Tom - with nothing more than a few simple words (p. 154) - commands the Barrow-wight to leave. And it does, without argument. Why would the Wight be so completely under Tom's control? Because in his alternate guise as the Witch-king of Angmar, Tom ordered the Wight to inhabit the barrow in the first place! Turning to Return of the King, Appendix A, p. 321, "evil spirits out of Angmar... entered into the deserted mounds and dwelt there." Obviously the Witch-king was reponsible for sending the wights there; just as obviously, the Witch-king (disguised as Tom) would be capable of ordering them to leave! (This is related to another passage, which has since been brought to my attention. On Fellowship page 158 hardback, Tom is guiding the Hobbits back towards the Road when he gazes towards the borders of Cardolan. "Tom said that it had once been the boundary of a kingdom, but a very long time ago. He seemed to remember something sad about it, and would not say much." Since Tom, as the Witch-king, was the one who destroyed the kingdom of Cardolan, it's little wonder that he wouldn't say much about his involvement. Perhaps his remembering "something sad" reveals some remorse at being the instrument of Cardolan's destruction...?)
...Yep: I think we have an airtight case here. :)
...It's worth noting that, after the Witch-king was dead, Gandalf said he was "going to have a long talk with Bombadil" (Return of the King, p. 275). Curiously, he never tells anyone about the meeting later... and he's right there at the Grey Havens at the end of the book, undelayed it seems by long conversation. I think we can therefore theorize that Gandalf made it to the Old Forest, but that Tom (once the so-called "Witch-king" had died) was nowhere to be found!
...Of course, all this brings up the curiosity of motive. What would make the Witch-King of Angmar sport such a double identity? I suppose that the Witch-king, once of proud Numenorean ancestry, felt trapped by the guise of evil which Sauron had tricked him into, and in the fullness of time forged this alternate identity for himself so that he could occasionally feel happy, helpful, noble, and more at one with himself and his lineage. The situation is perhaps analagous to a crossdresser who, feeling trapped in a man's body, would occasionally assume the identity of a woman. It therefore makes sense that the Witch-king's other identity would be so peculiarly enigmatic, and perhaps sheds light on JRRT's observation
Firstly there is no sign of the Rangers of the North in the trailer even though there is a scene that obviously shows them entering the pass of the dead.
As a representative of the 95% of people who will see this movie that have not or will never read the books, who the hell are the Rangers of the North, what is the pass of the dead, and why are your firstly and secondly reasons that I will be dissapointed by this film?
For those people who think that ROTK is only about F/X.
/Soren
I can't remember the amounts but around the time #1 came out they talked about the fact that in a normal picture they shoot about twice or three times more material and then cut it down to what you see.
I LOTR they shot about ten times as much. That is for every minute of finished movie they've shot 10 minutes of film.
So sure there is a lot of CGI going on, but there is still plenty of old fashioned moviemaking involved.
But off course with gollum and a giant orc army (what 100.000 orcs?) they have to rely on CGI.
there was a /. article where weta pledged to open source its maya to renderman gate called "liquid".
it's been quite a while ago, and i still don't find it anywhere. did they lie?
The hype surronding the LOTR: ROTK is a different Hype than that of the Matrix. Everyone has read LOTR many times over and everyone knows that Peter Jackson just has to follow the storyline of the book and people will be generally happy. Your comparison to the Matrix hype was not a good one.
The Hype surrounding The Matrix was that of unknowing. The story was in a form that this was a first time for everyone. I have to admit I was one of the few that thourghly enjoyed all three episodes and admired them for there story and cinematics. For lord of the rings I already know the story is good, I am just here for the cinematics.
My new title at the office is "Vice-President of Everything Else"
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.
When drafting your headlines, please consider that some of the older residents around here have high blood pressure and a low tolerance for extreme panic.
When I read the headline "Wired's LOTR III Tech Breakdown", my first thought was "Aw, crap! ROTK has been delayed because their servers crashed! ARRRRRRRRGH!"
Now I have to go to the restroom to clean up.
A better, LESS INFLAMMATORY headline would have been something like "Wired Breaks Down the Tech Behind ROTK".
My underwears (and my cardiologist) thank you for your consideration.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Nazgul: Describe Sauron for me. ...and he's tall...
Saruman: Well, he's dark...
Nazgul: And?
Saruman:
Nazgul: Does he look like a bitch?
Saruman: What?
*thud* *scream*
Nazgul: DOES HE LOOK LIKE A BITCH!?
Saruman: No!
Nazgul: Then why'd ya try to fuck him like a bitch?
Can you please stop handing out Karma to that unfortunately large body of people who don't yet realize that books and movies are not the same media, and that you can't expect the same story to work equally well on both.
I don't know how it's possible that they haven't yet learned this basic fact, as it's been discussed to complete death by everyone and their grandmother for the past 10-20 years.
Tolkein was not a holy saint. His work is not the Bible. In some places his story telling is actually subpar. Peter Jackson has(for the most part) done a truly excellent job of culling the important elements into a theatrical release that the public can enjoy. His idea of releasing a very different version on DVD for the book fans is sheer genius. He recognizes that you can't please everyone with one version. Why can't you? It's not a hard concept to grasp really.
And if you really have issues with the job Jackson has done, suggest someone else who would have done better. Peter is the perfect choice IMO, as he doesn't have the ego that big producers do, an ego that would have turned LOTR in "Spielberg's LOTR".
... 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.
There's the old saying, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
I once heard an interesting tweak on that, and perhaps more true than the original. "Power attracts the corruptible."
Perhaps Faramir really IS as pure as all that. Perhaps he never sought any greatness or position, only to do his best for his people. In that case, any station he has would be purely as a result of people under him pushing him up. Perhaps those of higher station yet were either born to it, or sought it, the latter implying that they are likely corruptible.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Gather round, for the true reason parts were cut from the book to the movie. You see, I read each book to my son before the movie comes out. At approximately 30 minutes a night, it takes a month plus to read *one* of the three books. That's 15 hours per book. Now I grant that a few pages of "majestic mountain description" can be cut down to a flight over some real ones in the movie, but on the other hand, some of the action takes longer on screen than in text (especially describing the inner state of a character, which in film must be *shown* not spoken).
Personally, I don't have the bladder control for a fifteen hour movie. Yes, now you know the real reason for cutting the film to three hours (four for those in the comfort on their own homes). Bladder control. Simple really.
Sig under construction since 1998.
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.
I think you meant: Windows 2009 Personal-and-Home-for-Middle-class-Income-Families Edition..... and Doom3.