Slashdot Mirror
Rings Digital Dailies Circled Globe via iPod
KD writes "During the making of the 'Rings' trilogy, Jackson and his crew upped the ante on Apple's innovative iPod storage technology, using it for filmmaking sessions during production on The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Media was transferred from Weta to Pinewood Studios in London. There Jackson then viewed the QuickTime files on an Apple Cinema Display, tied to his G4 laptop, which drew directly from his iPod. The director's setup was mirrored in New Zealand, and crew could step through shots with the help of their iPods, with Jackson's guidance piped in over a videoconferencing system. During the course of two movies and four months, 'Rings' iPods stored and served up nearly one-half terabyte of digitized footage from 'Towers' and 'King.'"
Which goes to show how rediculously versatile the iPods are in relation to almost anything. A task that important, for which they weren't designed, and STILL they're used, and STILL they perform amazingly well. Impressive. pb_boi
not meaning to troll or anything, but surely anyone who cares about this kind of trivia (like me) would have known about it months ago when watching the TT DVD documentaries?
are the slashdot editors trying to have a competition of who can post the oldest story?
This could have well been the first time that scores of nerds would have wanted to copy something _off_ an ipod and onto the internet for their own entertainment.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Someone uses a portable large (10-20GB) USB harddrive to transfer data. Okay, so it was non-Microsoft. This would have been news if it had been new hardware/software/protocols, but honestly. Is this worthy of Slashdot?
If you watch The Two Towers Extended Edition commentary, you'll find that one of the crew was chased through the streets of London in the early hours of the morning one day by people who wanted to rob him. Fortunately he managed to get away and the iPod in his pocket with the entire film on didnt get leaked :)
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Kudos to the fact it was indeed the iPod, but it would be cheaper to use a generic portable hard drive, since this is movie footage and not soundtrack data. The iPod wasn't used for what it was designed for.
The laptop needn't have been a G4 either, and they stuck in iSight as well. What they SHOULD be telling us is whether these things were purchased at RRP, at big discount, or given away for free by Apple...
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
If the ipods were really going to have battery problems, surely somebody would have noticed during all these transfers.
Anyway, chalk up one more iPod award...
Assisted in obtaining The Return of the King 11 Oscar nominations
All of that data transfer... and none of it got released to the public by "accident?" We should be ashamed at ourselves.
Davak
I think this is absolutely amazing. Yes, we all knew you could do stuff like this, but you'd never think of it until you read stuff like this. Not only is it a great MP3 player (I've owned three as well as MiniDisc players, it's hands down the best I've used), it's an amazingly fast firewire drive (although I find that formated for windows it's not as fast, perhaps HFS+ is a better file system then most think?) and I've noticed that while I use my iPod for storing papers, projects and movies to watch at friends houses, it screams. I think after hearing this those 40GB iPods are going to be the new pro-video clip bin. Sure, you won't fit an entire three hour epic movie's worth of footage in DV format on it, but it's good for fleshing out whole scenes. Plus it's widely supported for Windows and Mac so no worries (and Linux can mount them as a simple firewire drive if I stand correct...) Neat stuff. Hopefully we'll get video iPods this year, to combat those foreboding MS portable media players...
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!
I watched Two Towers extras where the fellow who was doing the transportation of iPods to Jackson's hotel told that he was almost robbed by two thugs following him one day.
:)
Thankfully the guy was pretty quick sprinter, so the dailies (and I even seem to recall that they exceptionally had the whole version on iPod that day) narrowly escaped the London underworld.
As a funny sidenote, I don't think any beautiful women offered to plug their earpiece into iPod while waiting traffic lights, too bad for them.
http://codeandlife.com
I wonder why Apple hasn't made more of this in their advertising. It seems that having possibly the highest-profile series of movies in many years put together using your gear would be worth telling people about.
If the article is accurate, it's a great example of working globally that a lot of Apple's potential customers might want to hear about.
It'd certainly attract more positive interest than those ridiculous "HP Invent" advertisements - they're just laughable. Every time I see a new one, I think "What the hell am I looking at?" which I suspect isn't the message HP wants to be getting across.
During the course of two movies and four months, 'Rings' iPods stored and served up nearly one-half terabyte of digitized footage from 'Towers' and 'King.'"
What's a half terabyte? 500 gig. 75 days. Sounds like a college student with a heavy download habit.
1. how do you watch a commentary?
2. whether they wan't to rob him or not was not proven,
Absolutely. Sounds like a waste of money to me when all you're doing is moving data around. Then again, one of the main criticisms of the iPod is that it is style over substance (short battery life, poor sound quality, overpriced), rather like certain films I could think of...
What does that cost, compared to tape?
After spending time frustrated at the battery life of my ipod, I read this bit of sentence...
..
Just as Frodo exists basically to transport that precious ring to where it needs to go,
and thought about how many times I've wanted to send my ipod to the same firey doom..
ahh but I couldn't do that to the little guy..
This article seems to read like one big advertisement. It mentions no less than four specific Apple technologies that are really nothing special and could be replaced by other cheaper technologies. I understand that it may be cool because it's on an iPod, but honestly, do you need to mention the Apple Cinema Display??
*sighs as his karma falls*
joshua
Im getting to the point where Im so suspicious of Apples advertising tactics that I think this whole thread may be ad. I think this is a direct result of the more subtle (or not) approaches (outlined in this thread) marketing departments use in their struggle to increase brand awareness.
serenity now!
We actually use broadband to transfer our digital daily "rough-cuts" as they're known in the industry.
We use these guys' to software to help us manage it.
It's amazing how many TBytes flow back and forth. And admittingly in the current reality, it's not a smooth process. Funny thing is, the hard-drive sizes change so rapidly, but the system planning isn't based on this. No one has gone said... You know, this system will be so cheap to build because in about a year, you'll be able to walk across the street and buy a Terabyte hard-drive at Best buy for about $400. Why not just plan on a cheap server farm of about 20 pc's each with about 3x1TB of disk space.
Throughput hasn't been too big an issue, it's dealing with all the anomalies of the formats and simple things such as. MPEg vs. JPEG vs. PAL
pipe - transitive verb [...] 1b. To convey as if by pipes, especially to transmit by wire or cable: piped music into the store.
reference
I don't know exactly which iPod models they usedm but I assume at least 10GB. The article mentions that they all have one, so that's at least 100GB. conclusion : they used their pods 5 times. Not all that spectacular,
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
I wish I could store large files on my iPod. But every time it's in the middle of a large transfer, I get buffer error or something. I hear it has something to do with FireWire (IEEE 1394) compatibility. I'm not sure there is anything I can do about it at this point. I've already ran the built in harddisk checking utility on the unit and it checks out fine. I guess I will have to wait for an update from Apple and hope it addresses this issue. Untill then, I guess I will just have to keep the files under 20MB or something.
Anyone else have this issue on slashdot?
Life is not for the lazy.
the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with iPods.
Sorry. I do know what they meant. It's just I got the image into my head of Peter Jackson speaking with a terribly high pitched voice. :-D
Now I'm getting the picture of all the actors doing the same. Saruman tries his evil laugh, but it comes out as a giggle.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
IIRC they looked like criminals. They started walking after him. When he tried running away from them, they started running as well, trying to catch him.
What do you suggest they were planning to do? Give him some flowers?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I guess someone just finished watching 4th DVD of the set :>
you forgot:
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
If you compare the price of an IPod to a 200 GB hard drive, it seems to me that for storing video footage it's the most stupid solution ever. An exteral USB or Firewire case and a couple of 200 GB drives would have been:
- cheaper
- faster (I don't think the IPod comes even close to a 7200 RPM drive)
- able to store a lot more data
Or here's another random thought: if they're sending data all the way across the globe, exactly what's the unprecedented advantage of sending an iPod instead of a DVD-R? No, seriously.
Of course, seein' the usual "even a fart smells sweet if it's got the Apple logo" crowd on Slashdot, maybe it's worthy of Slashdot after all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Just goes to show you what enforced DRM and EULA's will do. Hardware and software manufacturers should always let us utilize their products the way we need to, not the way they want us to. You start throwing DRM into the mix and that limits the usefulness of the product. Go iPod!
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Criminals are easily identifiable on sight? That must make it damn easy for the police, how come they don't just arrest them all?
Walking in the street is a pretty normal thing to do, I do it a lot. Does that mean I want to rob everyone who happens to be in front of me?
Maybe they figured he saw some criminals (who are easily identifiable by sight) and hence they ran away from said criminals (they didn't want to risk turning around to see for themselves and hence slowing down) as well.
Oh Lordy dearie! Next in line: IPods get enlisted into the drive to Mars. On a more serious note, I'm sick and tired of the Apple PR machine. Kudos to whoever's behind it, but please, stop it already. I'm sure that by this time *everybody* knows the IPod is the next best thing after the mouse.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Recent industry comment on some sites sees now-distributor-free Pixar Inc teaming up with Apple to offer digital video distribution.
While this may not be the case, its small stories like this that make me suspect that apple does have a future in the movie industry that goes beyond Final Cut and iMovie
Apple is getting in with the consumer of media products as well as the producer, and that has to be a good thing for them.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Excellent post. The consensus on Apple's Discussion boards is that the iPod should not be used as an external drive because of the heat output. In particular, the LiON battery is easily damaged by heat. The drive and electronics may survive, but battery life will suffer greatly. Did your LiON battery survive?
In my experience my iPod became very hot during extended r/w usage -- it was lying metal side down on an insulating surface. Others have described video distortion due to the heat output.
I suspect if one keeps it metal side down on a conducting surface (a tile counter for example) it will do fine. In the cradle is probably okay, especially if one is not overly concerned about battery life.
When mine was very hot, I've been known to rest it on a sealed freezer "ice" pack until it was comfortable to the touch; obviously "cold" to the touch would be a bad idea.
John Faughnan
jfaughnan@spamcop.net
Yes, it will in fact store three hours worth of DV quality video. One hour DV is just under 13GB and so three hours is just under 39GB - which will fit on a 40GB iPod. Which is really cool.
Would it not be cool to be able to hook your DV camcorder to the iPod and record direct to HD? (probably not possible, but it would be cool, would it not?)
Yes, it's good for that, too.
And, as mentioned before, in the documentary TT DVD one guy talks about being chased by ruffians containing (if memory serves) a full-length almost-done version of TT.
there is no spoon
Of course one shouldn't arrest people based solely on the way they look. But quite often crimilans and thugs do have a certain look to them.
If you start following someone (not merely walking in to same direction) in an otherwise empty street, the person in front of you might start to think that you are about to rob him. And why would you be following him in the first place?
Uh-huh. And I'm the Queen of the Jungle and I have 7 pairs of boobs.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
They really know what the artist needs. Apple has become the art supply store for the world. Being able to take any work no matter what medium and help with its creation is truly a wonderful thing. I am not a big apple supporter but its hard to argue with the impact apple has from Pixar animation to Lord of the rings. Every musician, film maker, and digital artist has an apple for a reason.
Trix are for kids!
I still wish there was software you could install on the iPOD to make it act as a video drive. Hook it up directly to a miniDV camera via firewire and record video to it, rather than tape (or both)
The Digital Couture Collection
It's not like many other films can do this. Who else could get a budget big enough to buy that many Apple products!
Criminals wear black masks and carry sacks with dollar signs on them, duh.
It was an interview with the guy in one of the bonus features, rather than part of the commentary. The story (as I recall it) went something like, he was walking down the street with the ipod in his pocket and passed two guys walking in the opposite direction. The two guys then turned around and started following him. He walked faster, they walked faster. He started running, they started running after him. From there on he basically sprinted until he got to the motel, losing them somewhere along the way.
Sure, it's possible that they might not have wanted to rob him, but given the fact that he was walking through a major city in the middle of the night carrying some extremely valuable material, you really can't blame the guy for a) considering it as a distinct possibility, and b) not hanging around to find out for sure before he bolted.
The reason iPods wer eused is because the "last mile" cabling to Jackson's apartment, where he was working on the film's music, didn't exist. Nobody could afford to wait so they just started sending runners from the end of their secure digital pipe a mile or so away. AFAIK the iPods were not used to go all around the world.
:)
Why use iPods? Small, inconspicuous, ready-to-go off the shelf, reliable. Nobody's going to raise an eyebrow if you go jogging by every day with an iPod. A guy walking through a residential section with a briefcase housing a firewire HD bay might (1)provoke people to beat him b/c he's a solicitor or (2)invite more coordinated mugging.
Do you remember when Slashdot became a pay site? One of there announcements was that they would start taking paid articles while staying true to the community. All the play Apple gets around here may be just that, but the world will never know. Like "The Giver" said... "You may lie."
Anyway: good for Apple. I'm glad MS, and even Linux, is not the only game in town. Choice is wonderful. I chose to buy an iPod and iBook last week - first time I've ever bought Apple stuff in my life.
wenn they were filming ther 20GB ipod was the larges avalible, and maybe the 30GB for the last film. Lets see 20-30 gigs for $500 or 200+ Gigs on a firewire HD that was actually designed for that kind of access. Seems like a waste to me
Didn't you see the spot about that on TTT extended edition dvd??? you insensitive clod!!!!
I work professionally with both platforms, and I think Apple appeals to creative types for stylistic and emotional reasons, not because it's always the best/cheapest product or technology for the job. Most of our creative types have weak computer skills and little technology "confidence" and tend to seek Apple solutions because the tiny computer skill they do have is with Macs. Since "everyone else" does this same thing, you get a herd mentality, coupled with fear and willful ignorance.
It's not that there aren't good reasons for desiring Apple stuff from a technology perspective, but I have seen few creatives able to do this.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Firewire. If they were doing this with USB, TTT wouldn't have even come out yet.
well said.
So, while I can certainly appreciate portable mass storage, what was the benefit of using an iPod instead of a regular USB or FireWire drive? It was plugged into a computer so the battery isn't a factor, he was using it for movies so it wasn't the MP3/AAC playback. Basically he paid twice as much for half the storage (compared to a 2.5" 80GB USB drive), but gets a lot of points from the Apple crowd for using one of their products.
As for the thing about him being chased around afraid robbers would get his draft copy of the movie, it sounds like the real story here is not the technology he used, but the technology he didn't use: encryption.
Physical security. Half the planet would have loved to steal the dailies from LoTR and more than a few were possibly actively looking to get their hands on them.
- The iPod is smaller than most dedicated external drives and thus easier to conceal and transport.
- The iPod looks like, well, an iPod and might not raise suspicions that they are actually storing the dailies, if word does not get out.
While an iPod in itself is a huge thief magnate, it inspires more casual theft from lax owners than attracting the eye of a more determined, professional thief.
I mean, who would get suspicious of a bunch of movie types walking around with iPods?
Anonymous Joe
I mean, you could do that with almost any portable hard drive or hard drive based MP3 player.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
A $500 item is nothing for an industy that'll spend millions for a few actors, or a few seconds of SFX, or constructing a huge set that's only used for one scene.
Heck, I'll bet the daily catering bill alone could buy hundreds of iPods.
So, instead of paying $70 for a 40GB firewire drive, they spent $500. Talk about news! Or maybe the news is that the 614% more expensive device didn't fail?
Apple sure is amazing and superior and stuff.
Heck, for $500, all a lowly PC user could afford is half a terrabyte in firewire drives, and still have money left over to buy some pizza and beer, and catch a movie, and buy a CD. Not nearly as cool as a 40GB iPod.
But I admit, if I could convince my boss to transfer terrabytes of data on iPods that I could snake afterwards, I would do it in a heartbeat.
What exactly defines being "worthy of Slashdot?"
After the ridiculous "Microsoft Violates Human Rights In China" article, in which Microsoft is blamed for bad people using their software even though China has its own custom Linux distribution (!), and KDE removed the Taiwan flag so they could sell in China, there isn't much for standards around here, not that there ever was.
Here's the part where people chime in about how this is just a "hobby site" for the editors and that they post what they like, because it's not some journalistic site. Here's a clue--it doesn't matter, because the readers treat it journalistically. This site is where a lot of people get their news and treat the articles as fact. And the fact that people ignore that this place is corporate-owned, with a bias against Microsoft, is silly.
Imagine a beowulf clus... oh, wait, they were using one. Kinda. Never mind!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Someone should make a USB key like device that is an mp3 player, but uses those usb harddrives instead of an internal one. Then put the lcd on the remote
(direct from a person at Weta Digital) ... was that in London one of the production runners was walking from one central city location to another, carrying one of the (fully loaded) ipods.
Gang of youths approach him and try to mug him, they see he's got this ipod and really want it... the runner realises that he *cannot* lose the ipod, so puts up a good fight and then hi-tails it outathere.
--- cut: Eat well, exercise, die anyway.
Oh whoopty-effin-doo, let me pee from all the excetement! iPod can be used as an overpriced energy-inefficient lousy-seek-rates-and-transfer-speeds removable storage device! Who would have thought... fanboys.
I have a co-worker who is directing/producing film and video and uses his iPod ... as a presentation external hard drive.
You know you could get brownie points by letting your co-worker know about Personal Video Players (PVPs), systems from Archos and RCA and Creative and others that not only store video, but also play it back, either on-screen on using video outputs. The iPod seems a little limited in this respect - it's just a storage medium, with a mnonochrome display that does not, in fact, display video. Even the old Archos Recorder can now display 30fps video (mono!). PVPs were super-hot at CES... Apple better get a move on releasing that video iPod.
Da Blog
Which goes to show how ridiculously versatile the iPods are in relation to almost anything
What is this "anything" exactly? If you mean anything as in "any object known to man", sure the iPods are veristile in comparison.
If however, you mean "any portable music player made in the past 5 years", you'd be very mistaken, since pretty much every single one can function as an external USB / USB 2 / Firewire drive (depending on available interfaces). It's not an Apple innovation... companies were doing this for years before the iPod.
Imagine if apple would have shyed away from the ipod because of the "evil dangers of MP3". this never would have been possible.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
I can see the usefullness of having the LCD screen so you could see what files are on the iPod's drive without having to hook to a computer(although I'm not sure if the iPod does this, or if it only shows audio files). Also, I think they just transferred the files from an office with a dedicated, secure, high-bandwidth connection to one of the exec's homes a few miles away, not long distances.
Do you really want to watch a video on a 4" screen, when it's what you do all day?
Of course not, but it beats lugging a 48" screen around on the train! Seriously, I think the point is that PVPs come with output jacks so you are not limited to the on-device 4" LCD. And the on-device recording is a nice touch.
What you're describing in terms of features sounds more like a notebook computer than a PVP, and I think they have already been invented, and cost seriously more than $400.
I do note IBM's nice new double-density-pixel LCDs mean a nice boost for small-screen devices. Finally, for multimedia, streaming, transcoding, codec support and so on, the freeware iTunes really isn't going to cut it. Consider something more along the lines of Media Center. ALthough I am still looking for a good all-round solution that also supports OGM and Matroska.
Da Blog
It's odd. People will see things as either one way or another.
Look, th iPod is useful. Certainly more so than a dislocated hard drive with a USB/FW port.
At the same time, the crew of the rings movies has been on Apple's advertisements alot.
The iPod is cool & this is a marketting campaign. The two do not cancel each other out. Period.
You pay $$$ for a portable storage device you can fit comfortable and easily in your pocket. It can play music and some other neat feats. It is also a good portable hard drive.
The fact that there is a strong marketing campaign around it does not and should not belittle the innate usefullness of the device.
I don't personally own an iPod, but having been using an iBook alongside my Windows and Linux boxen, I would have to say that what Apple's got is a heck of alot easier and nicer to use than most other things out there.
The right tool for the job. It was the right too for their team. End of story.
Winged Power Photography
Did you not have the attention span to reach the next paragraph?
What is the big deal? Just take a firewire box, put a laptop drive inside, you get something whith the size of an iPod but much cheaper and with more storage than an iPod.
Right now a firewire box it is about $50 and an 80GB laptop drive (toshiba or Hitachi) is about $220-230. You get 80 GB storage for $270-280!
They could have purchased firewire hard drives instead, rather than going through the extra expense of the Apple branded firmware and designer casings.
The iPod is a great piece of hardware, and The Lord of the Rings is a great trilogy. Interesting to see the two going hand in hand.
Free Wii Points
In New Zealand there is a Television Advert by the dominant Teleco suggesting that they provided a broadband connection for Jackson to use as a virtual directors chair allowing him to direct in real time to as many as 3 or 4 locations from anywhere. This appears to be a more current technology solution than using what is basically a portable hard drive with a custom media interface.
24 Hours in a day - 24 Cans of Beer in a carton - Coincidence
Professionals use Unix SGi workstations with Inferno and stuff like that...:) hehe I like it anywayz...:P
The paragraph that was pure speculation and had no basis in fact? Yes. I read it.
miserable failure
How many frames of HD resolution can you carry around on a 256 MB flash based MP3 player?
Maybe you should stick to low resolution porn.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.