MOVIES

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.-- While the Ring may have the power to move heaven and hell and corrupt even the purest hobbit's heart, Weta Digital summoned up a different kind of power -- the visual supercomputing and asset management power of SGI -- to deliver the much-anticipated second film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Two Towers. This film adaptation of the epic fantasy-adventure classic written by J.R.R. Tolkien has even more special effects, CGI-created creatures and horrific battle scenes with hundreds of thousands of animated characters than The Fellowship of the Ring, its blockbuster predecessor. Weta Digital continues to rely on the same full complement of SGI(R) IRIX(R) OS-based Silicon Graphics(R) Octane(R) visual workstations, Silicon Graphics(R) Onyx2(R) visualization systems, SGI(R) Origin(R) family servers, and SGI Linux(TM) OS-based visual workstations and servers as on the first film. For The Two Towers, Weta Digital, the digital effects arm of Weta Ltd., the Wellington, New Zealand, production company that shot all three films back-to-back, upgraded its SGI(R) Origin(R) 2000 server to handle twice the data load of the first film. Released by New Line Cinema last December, The Fellowship of the Ring has grossed over $860 million worldwide, earned 13 Academy Award(R) nominations and won four Oscar(R) statuettes. New Line released The Two Towers in the United States on Dec. 18, 2002 (which has earned over $261 million to date), and has slated the third film, The Return of the King, for a December 2003 release. Key to producing the entire The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson, is the premier SGI(R) solution for hierarchical storage management, the SGI(R) Data Migration Facility (DMF), which allows high-performance, reliable and efficient data management with virtually unlimited storage capability while also dramatically lowering total cost of ownership by moving data seamlessly between high-performance storage arrays and lower-cost-per-megabyte tape libraries. On The Fellowship of the Ring, Weta Digital first used SGI DMF to manage 100TB of data from approximately 10 million files, which range from small to extremely large. A file can consist of an element, a texture, one version of a shot or a completely rendered image sequence. Adding the data from The Two Towers doubles Weta's information storage to 20 million files. Approximately 230TB, representing the first two films' worth of data, is now managed by SGI DMF. "We rely heavily on DMF," said Scott Houston, chief technical officer, Weta Digital. "DMF is running on one Origin 2000 system and we recently upgraded it to 12 400 MHz processors. The key objective is to free up as much disk space for the artists as possible. We use SGI DMF to offline the data from the online disk storage to tape storage. The StorageTek L700E robotic library now has six LTO (Linear Tape Open) drives and four DLT drives. In June, we migrated from DLT to LTO, which gave us greater capacity on the tape cartridges and faster tape cartridges. That gave us more capacity on near-line; we went from about 25TB available to about 75TB potentially available. We're able to move data from very valuable online disk storage to near-line disk storage and still be able to retrieve it relatively quickly and seamlessly, from the artists' point of view." One of the many challenges Weta Digital faced at the start of The Two Towers was that it needed to bring back 100,000 files from the first film from offline storage to online storage in order to make those elements, textures and shots available for the artists. Again, the totally automated DMF made that relatively painless for the artists, according to Houston. "The 300 artists working on the second film were moving 1TB of data in and out of DMF every day. Being able to migrate the data seamlessly between online and near-line and then back again has been absolutely critical. We couldn't do that without SGI DMF," said Houston. "We need to have access to all the files, including files that are two, three, four or almost five years old, and we need to be able to have access to these as well. We keep everything, and keeping and managing that is going to be a challenge. There are also opportunities for repurposing some of those assets, and that will be essential for Weta in the future." Weta Ltd. has already begun repurposing its assets stored by SGI: The Two Towers video game was released a month before the film, and Weta is currently working with Electronic Arts on an action game based on the next film, The Return of the King. "Weta Digital's workflow for The Two Towers exemplifies the explosion of data management necessary in the creative side of the film industry. Increasingly complex data management issues in the digital content creation and cinema mastering aspects of the business expand the need for more powerful tools to manage that data," said Louise Ledeen, director of production, Media Industries, SGI. "The choice of SGI DMF on the highly scalable SGI Origin server family has allowed Weta Digital to meet the challenges of the trilogy's movie release schedule and deliver what is sure to be another Academy Award-nominated blockbuster film with groundbreaking visual effects also created, in part, on Silicon Graphics equipment."