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Rent A Bit Of Weta Digital
An anonymous reader writes linking to this story at stuff.co.nz, excerpting: "Five hundred powerful computers used by Weta Digital to help create the special effects for the Lord of the Rings may be put up for hire.... The pizza-box sized IBM blade servers each incorporate dual 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors and 6 [gigabytes?] of memory." Update: 03/22 07:08 GMT by S : The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, we don't believe 'em.
to dual G5 Xserves!
The point isn't that WETA is going to go bankrupt. It's that their render farm has a bad business model, it's going to suck up money. It's unsustainable. They wouldn't be trying to rent out the farm if they had a current business model that was sustainable. I don't know how WETA's structured, but if it's anything like Hollywood, it's all phony accounting and even the most profitable movies have zero profits on paper, it gets siphoned off by investors and never gets plowed back into the production companies. That's just how it works. So the production companies have to stand on their own two feet financially, they have to make a profit on their own.
/. users with mod points.
The article says their primary advantage is that people can use WETA's proprietary software which kind of defeats the whole idea of outsourcing your render to them, you can't set it up yourself and let it run on their hardware without having WETA do it for you. You can't just rent the farm, you have to rent the whole company and outsource the design too.
And BTW, whoever modded my oringinal msg down as flamebait is abusing their privileges, someone mod it back up. It may be unpopular to criticize WETA, being godlike figures to LOTR fanatics and all, but I actually worked in the industry and know how it works, unlike 99.99% of