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.
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...
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
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
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.
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?"
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.
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
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!
It's not like many other films can do this. Who else could get a budget big enough to buy that many Apple products!
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.
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
(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.