GOVERNMENT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- SGI (NYSE: SGI) today announced that Weta Digital evoked the power of more than 230 SGI® IRIX® OS-based and SGI Linux(TM) OS-based visual workstations, storage products and servers for production, postproduction and visual effects on the much anticipated live-action, CGI-laden 'The Lord of the Rings' film trilogy. Weta Limited shot all three films simultaneously with Weta Digital, its digital effects arm, concurrently producing more than 1,200 visual effects shots. The Wellington, New Zealand, company is using a full complement of IRIX OS-based Silicon Graphics® Octane® and Silicon Graphics® Onyx2® visual workstations, SGI® Origin® family servers, and SGI Linux OS-based visual workstations and servers to create and manage up to 100TB of data. Released by New Line Cinema, the first film, 'The Fellowship of the Ring,' premiered in the U.S. on Dec. 19. The second film, 'The Two Towers,' is scheduled for a December 2002 release, and the third, 'The Return of the King,' for December 2003. Directed by Peter Jackson, the movie trilogy is based on the popular epic adventures written by J.R.R. Tolkien that feature the world of Middle-Earth-a place inhabited by hobbits, elves, dwarfs, wizards and trolls, plus other fantastical creatures including orcs, wraiths and balrogs. The films each require dozens of digital human/humanoid characters plus lead creatures who are entirely CGI-created, vast CGI landscapes, battle scenes with hundreds of thousands of animated characters and more special effects than you can shake a wizard's staff at. Weta Digital, which has been working on the trilogy for over four years, built a state-of-the-art facility from the ground up. More than 150 artists, keyframe animators, modelers, digital paint artists, motion editors, compositors and numerous software engineers were provided with 150 Octane visual workstations, which run Alias|Wavefront(TM) Maya® as the facility's core 3D application; an eight-processor Onyx2 system running Discreet inferno for compositing; and 80 dual-processor Silicon Graphics® 330 and Silicon Graphics® 230 Linux® OS-based workstations, which are used for a combination of paint, rotoscoping and compositing duties. Two SGI® file servers using SGI® TP9400 storage arrays, StorageTek Tape Robots and SGI® Origin® 2000 server technology provide a combination of 4TB of online storage and more than 20TB of nearline storage as a global storage repository to support workstation information sharing. ``What we're about is the ability to move large amounts of information around the facility all day, every day, and we rely on SGI to help us do that. Ninety percent of our equipment is SGI,'' said Jon Labrie, chief technical officer of Weta Digital. For nearline/offline storage Weta Digital uses DMF, the SGI hierarchical storage management system, which is already managing 50TB of information. ``SGI DMF has greatly simplified our management of the thousands of tapes needed to store the bulk of the data,'' Labrie added. From the beginning of preproduction, Weta Digital has also used the IRIX OS-based Octane visual workstations to write extensions to Maya and create proprietary technology. This technology includes Massive, a custom-built crowd animation or ``artificial ecology'' system developed on IRIX and now ported to Linux that draws from a huge database of motion-capture data. ``We're using Massive for battle animation scenes with hundreds of thousands of fighting, screaming and dying orcs, elves and all the other magical and fantastical creatures that appear in The Lord of the Rings,'' Labrie continued. ``For these sorts of graphical challenges we prefer to work in the world of IRIX and UNIX®. The graphics engines available to us on the SGI platforms make our jobs easier. We are so thrilled with the latest increase in performance and quality with the new Octane2 system that we've enlisted it for our next production.'' Weta Digital purchased the Silicon Graphics® Octane2(TM) visual workstation running Discreet flame software to help in the final phases of postproduction. Octane2 offers high-performance VPro(TM) V12 graphics with perspective-correct color and texture, extremely realistic blending of colors for transparent objects and high-quality volume visualization using 3D textures. The new Octane2 system will now be put to work on the next film. Weta's primary rendering resource is based on SGI® 1100 and SGI® 1200 Linux OS-based servers. Having started with 32 dedicated processors, the facility currently runs 192 dual-processor SGI servers rendering frames 24 hours a day, seven days a week. ``Weta Digital's purchase of both SGI IRIX and SGI Linux technology is an excellent example of choosing the right tool for the right job,'' said Jason Danielson, director of marketing, Media Industries, SGI. ``It is testimony to how both operating systems can work together seamlessly to produce, render, manage and store powerful visual effects ranging from the photorealistic to the universe of human imagination.'' For more information visit www.sgi.com