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'Hobbit' Creates Big Data Challenge

CowboyRobot writes "In the past five years there has been an 8x increase in the amount of content being generated per every two-hour cinematic piece. Although 3D is not new, modern 3D technologies add from 100% to 200% more data per frame. In 2009, Avatar was one of the first movies to generate about a petabyte of information. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was shot in a new digital format called High Frame Rate 3-D, which displays the movie at 48 frames per second, twice the standard 24-fps rate that's been in place for more than 80 years." But with digital storage transcending some other limitations of conventional projection techniques, it's not just framerate that directors are now able to play with more easily; it's the length of movies themselves, which stats suggest just keep getting longer.

12 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. How big was the hobbit? by iONiUM · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I read TFA, and nowhere does it say how big The Hobbit was.. only that Avatar was about a Petabyte. Why isn't this stated anywhere? It's very frustrating, and also makes the article less useful, since its entire premise is that "The Hobbit creates big data challenge" with no specificity.

    1. Re:How big was the hobbit? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      According to the torrent sites; 2.32 GB though they do use the lossy video camera conversion...

    2. Re:How big was the hobbit? by mill3d · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, it's all the data required as input to make the *final* frames. We're talking many layers of video at 32 bit per channel (128bit images), VFX cache data which can be GBs per second of footage, thousands of textures that are also GBs in size, point clouds... All of that is meant to retain a maximum amount of flexibility before finalizing the footage. Read up on the REYES pipeline for detailed info.

      Disclaimer: Film and animation professional and professor.

      --
      Nothing is enough for whom enough is too little - Confucius
  2. Comment on Movie length by Dartz-IRL · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Am I the only one who longs for the return of an intermission? If only for a little relief rather than ducking out for 3-4 minutes and missing that one important little line of dialogue on which the whole thing pins?

    --
    So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
    1. Re:Comment on Movie length by interkin3tic · · Score: 5, Funny

      Until they do bring it back, there is an app for that

  3. Bring back the intermission. by Naatach · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It was so classy. I'm sure it would help with the theater owners concession sales as well.

    --
    There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
  4. Re:Smart play by the studios by hpacheco · · Score: 4, Funny

    :poor guys that pirated avatar.. they had to download over a petabyte:

  5. Re:Smart play by the studios by jandrese · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Petabyte figure is almost certainly for all of the working copies of the movies while it was being produced. Nobody is sending a Petabyte to every theater in the country, and much less to every home. Once the movie is finished a final copy is compressed and sent to theaters and the disc authoring house. The disc authors have to further compress the image to make it fit on the Blu-Ray or DVD. Your average pirate is going to compress the movie even further because full Blu-Ray rips are still rather unwieldy for most broadband connections and personal storage solutions.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
  6. Wikipedia to the rescue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Tolkien writes that Hobbits are between two and four feet (0.61–1.22 m) tall, the average height being three feet six inches (1.07 m).

  7. Re:Smart play by the studios by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I know people who are still downloading it, you insensitive clod!

  8. Not a Big Data Problem by ranton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How does this have anything to do with Big Data? Storing large amount of data isn't the important part, it is being able to analyze that data. You do not analyze a movie's data file. You just load and display the movie, which can easy be stored in one large continous file. A Big Data problem would be Netflix trying to determine what kinds of movies to recommend, not storing and then displaying a long movie to users.

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    -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
  9. Re:Smart play by the studios by SuricouRaven · · Score: 4, Informative

    The standard pirate sizes ate 700MB for a recompressed DVD-rip and 4.4GB for a recompressed blu-ray rip. These sizes are used because they are just small enough to fit onto a CD-R and DVD-R respectively. It's not universal though. Especially long or difficult films might go up to 8GB in HD, and there has been a recent trend towards smaller files where quality wouldn't be compromised rather than just assuming media-size for everything.