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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.'"
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!
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
yeah, seeing how you use the batteries a whole lot when you have it connected to the computer :P
As someone who writes software for the iPod all day, I can say without reservation that iPod's can stand up to this usage pattern. My iPod 5gb has been running basically non stop for 16 months in this mode with no adverse affects.
My tips for cooling:
- Keep the metal side up (the dock is fine)
- Never cover your iPod while connected to your computer
- Never place it metal side down while connected to your computer on a blanket/pillow or something similar
- Place a small fan on it if you are very concerned
I have not had my iPod go above touchable temperature (any of my iPod's, 5gb, 15gb, 40gb). Touchable from memory is around ~55C and hard drives can usually handle 60C quite fine.
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
The iPod doesn't have a bitrate. It plays your files at the bitrate you encode them. That can be uncompressed WAV/AIFF, if you are so inclined. For both mp3 and aac, the maximum supported bitrate is 320kbps (+vbr). I'm not sure how much there is to gain by going higher than that.
The battery is getting 4-6hrs of life, which is reasonable I suspect for that age period, although the heat could easily be attributed to it I am sure. Also, my 5gb is not used as my daily music machine so charge up/down cycles are irregular or do not happen at all.
The video being distorted is something I have witnessed but quickly disappears after temperature returns to normal with no ill effects from my observations.
There is also another issue of the ambient air temperature. I guess people's mileage will definitely vary in that regard.
Some people with large (ie. more than will fit on their ipod) use applescript and smart playlists to change the music on their ipod very often.
If you have, say, 100MB or so of MP3 to pull from (either due to a huge library, or high bitrates), and use a random playlist generator, its quite possible that most of the 20G (and much of even a 40G) could be re-written every time you sync.
(and it is quite possible to have a 100% legal music library that goes beyond 100MB. its just probably not terribly common.)
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