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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.'"
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?
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 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 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.
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
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.
Where else are you going to find something that small, with that much storage and speed, that also looks (to the general public) like nothing more than an mp3 player? For that price?
Professionals in the movie business use Macs because Macs can reliably do the job.If you want to get mired in the "needn't have been" excuses, well, they needn't have bothered to with digital dailies at all. In fact, why bother even making the movie.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Exactly. It's a bit of an apple fanboy story, something I doubt the veracity of. It didn't have to be an iPod , didn't have to be a G4 laptop, and didn't have to be a cinema display. Telling us the equipment used for the film is quite irrelevant.
Would it have been the same story if it was a Dell DJ, on a Dell laptop, with a Dell monitor? No it wouldn't. I don't see what the fuss is about
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?"
Not necessarily -- they could easily be referring to the total amount of video transferred back and forth during the entire production process. In which case they just deleted the stuff from the iPod and placed it on some hard drive or backup somewhere.
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!
The fuss is about this: a trendy consumer appliance is being used as a mission-critical device. It's a nerdy change in consumer behaviour that heralds something significant about the way technology is crossing professional/consumer boundaries.
I have a co-worker who is directing/producing film and video and uses his iPod for just this purpose, both sneakernet and as a presentation external hard drive. Of course, he also loads it up with his music collection, and does the standard iPod-snob-ish "here, listen to this" sort of thing.
Another interesting thing in this story is how these things are damn reliable, damn fast, damn flexible, and very well integrated into mac users' lives. They're being trusted with more important tasks than consumer devices typically get, and at the end of the day it's just something to put on your head and bop around with.
No, I don't own one, but if I had to play large video files off an external portable drive, I wouldn't use a Dell, dude! Especially on a deadline. iPod + mac pc = time (and face) saved.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I am happy that you enjoyed it, but the fact is - I didn't like the second and the third part. There are reasons for that and they are discussed all other the Net (various character and plot changes, which in opinion of some people, weaken the films and go against the ideas of Tolkien). The fact that we hold different opinions doesn't make one of us a troll.
I still think that Faramir's character was butchered by PJ, Arwen's subplot was unnecessary, conflict between Sam and Frodo was stupid, Aragorn was not kingly, dialog in TTT and ROTK was lame and contrived, the quality of special effects was not consistant (just think, why all agriculture in the movie was concentrated in Shire? PJ was too cheap to add a few CGI fields/villages/gardens to Gondor/Rohan panorama shots?). The movies sucked. Many people and critics enjoyed them, but they sucked.
That someone can downmod this comment doesn't change the fact that TTT and ROTK were just lame B-movies with expensive CGI.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
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
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.