A couple of weeks ago, I posted a fascinating/disturbing video from Stargate Studios that revealed the increasingly unrecognizable use of CGI and digital backlots in TV and film production. (“Don’t worry. No reality was harmed in the making of this film. In fact, I’m not even sure any was used.”)
Now, courtesy of /Film, here’s a brief look at Pixar and ILM’s computing power, and some of the other technical aspects involved in this sort of whole-cloth reality creation that grows so common:
OK, so that’s probably a bit too technical for us ordinary human folks to appreciate. But a couple of the lines dropped by the Pixar guy — like “We couldn’t do anything to fix our current AC system, even though it was maxed out, because we couldn’t afford to turn off the processors for a single moment of interrupted processing time” — provide some context for us less tech-savy individuals. And the Lucas technician’s willingness to recklessly toss around such terms as terabyte — when did we start using those so casually? — is a little disconcerting.
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He also mentions the second Transformer film at the very end of the clip, which suggests that the numbers he’s talking about are already far outdated. So, here’s another way to think about the sort of data capacity they’re talking about:
Transformers took 20 terabytes of disk space. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen took 145 Terabytes. Seven times bigger! 145 terabytes would fill 35,000 DVDs. Stacked one on top of the other without storage cases, they would be 145 feet tall.
Oh, and if you had (foolishly) decided to try and render the entire movie on your own personal computer, you would have had to start the renders 16,000 years ago to finish in time for the film’s eventual premiere.
And we haven’t even started talking about WETA Digital yet…