ILM's Datacenter

kylegordon writes "CGW has inside scoop on Industrial Light and Magic's facilities after they moved from San Rafeal to San Franciscos Presidio. With 3000 disks, it can shift 170Tb to 5000 rendernodes over 10GbE and 1GbE network links. It's an impressive system, for impressive films."

Comments

Way to go Spinnaker!

[drewzhrodague]

Way to go, guys! Who would have known that a small startup from Pittsburgh with some killer engineers, could make it into ILM's datacenter. Hi, Gus!

Re:By my calculation ...

[blane.bramble]

How long would it take you to copy the data for transit (you're not suggesting you transport your master copy, surely), and then restore it?

CGI is not the enemy

[Kombat]

I bet I could make a graph that represents how the quality of movies is characteristically inversely proportionate to the amount of CGI effects in them. Oftentimes, eye candy is used to shroud the plot and mask the bad acting/directing. American audiences especially just go looking for explosion sequences and CGI in the annual summer action flick hunt. We often fear a movie that might prove to be too cerebral and that pretty much disgusts me.

OK, here's the thing. Movies that are "cerebral" and thought-provoking don't draw people to theaters. I see previews for a movie like "Sixth Sense" or "Se7en," and I say to myself, "renter." Studios make more money by drawing us to the theater, and the way they do that is by making movies that benefit most from the big-screen, big-sound environment of your local megaplex. Usually, that means "action flick."

And it turns out they're right. Look at the biggest moneymakers. They're not the "Good Will Huntings" and the "Brokeback Mountains." The summer blockbusters are the "Spider-mans" and "X-Men" and "Independence Day" and "Star Wars."

Regarding your other point, about using CGI to mask bad directing, etc., I can only half-agree. While movies like "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" certainly used CGI as a crutch, don't you agree that at least the CGI was good? Don't you agree it would have been an even worse movie if the CGI had been terrible? Look at "Air Force One." Decent movie, spoiled by absolutely terrible special effects at the end. Or how about "King Kong." Great movie, that benefitted from good CGI. Same with "Titanic."

Good CGI can make a terrible film bearable, or a good film great.

Liar

[Kombat]

I ALWAYS notice CGI.

No you don't. You think you do, but you don't. When you do notice it, you point it out and say to yourself, "that was so obvious, CGI sucks." But when you don't notice it, you don't realize that what you're looking at is CGI. You think it's real. You think the man really has had his legs amputated ("Forrest Gump") or Arnie really did jump his motorcycle off a 15 foot ramp ("Terminator 2"). CGI is used all over the place in movies now, not just for the big explosions that still may not look 100% convincing (however, it's much better than stop-motion animation).

Great Stuff Going on Nowadays but Not at ILM

[Aqua04]

I've got to echo a lot of the comments here, that sadly ILM and hearing details about ILM, has lost its luster a bit since the old Star Wars days. Not that the acting or the plot was that great in the early Star Wars films either, but there was just a rebelliousness to it, a certain type of moxy, plus a lot of us Gen Xers were very young back then, so maybe it has to do with that.

Still, there was Jurassic Park, which had that wow effect, but only in a suburban, sterilized kind of way. Maybe it was just the seventies with their more "adult", less megaplexy, disney-fashioned attitudes. The one company that embodies that spirit of combining new tech with a fresh attitude is obviously Pixar. They still have their mojo intact. We also have tons of great political films, clever films and documentaries coming out nowadays, so there is no reason to despair in the times per se, I was just thinking of ILM specifically. Maybe George will lose that weird suburban Disneyfied taste of his at some point and get back to some Thx1138 type goodness.

Re:What?!?!

[east coast]

CG doesn't make movies worse...

IMHO, you are wrong. CG can make a movie suck. Once Hollywood understands this maybe good films will not be as uncommon as they are today. Good CG and/or a good story can both do something for the fantasy aspect of things but when you put too much CG in to make up for a lame storyline than CG does suck (*cough* matrix 2 *cough*).

It really doesn't bother me to watch an episode of (the old) Dr. Who, ST:TOS or Twilight Zone and notice that rocks are made of foam rubber or that a costume is little more than a pie plate and a grocery bag painted green on someone's head when the story is good and these series put out consistantly good stories. No amount of CG can make up for poor acting/writing.