Processing AVATAR
Information Management Newsletters, December 21, 2009
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The queueing system is a Pixar product called Alfred, which creates a hierarchical job structure or tree of multiple tasks that have to run in a certain order. In any single job, there might be thousands of interdependent tasks. As soon as CPUs on the render wall are freed up, new tasks are fired at idle processors.
At the peak of AVATAR, Wilkie was wrangling more than 10,000 jobs and an estimated 1.3 to 1.4 million tasks per day. Each frame of the 24 frame-per-second movie saw multiple iterations of back and forth between directors and artists and took multiple hours to render.
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For Gunn’s data center, that added up to processing seven or eight gigabytes of data per second, a job that ran 24 hours a day for the last month or more of production. It’s a Goldilocks task of keeping the gear running fast, “not too fast, not too slow, but just right,” Gunn says, to keep the production on schedule. “It’s a complex system and when you’re on deadline with a project like this, you really want to make sure the lights stay on.”
A final film copy of AVATAR is more humble than all the back and forth that occurred in its creation: at 12 megabytes per frame, each second stamped onto celluloid amounts to 288 megabytes or 17.28 gigabytes per minute. Deduct the credits from the 166-minute movie and you understand better what the final file consists of.
But the immersive effect of AVATAR comes from the many hours or days of attention to each of about 240,000 frames that go into the final product. Weta asked us to mention vfx supervisor Joe Letteri, who oversaw the interactions of directors, a half-dozen lead concept artists and the supporting artists who made the technology process so intensive and powerful.
For technologists like Wilkie and Gunn, it’s an unusually people-filled environment to work in and a fun workplace because things are constantly moving forward. “The artist shows their work, the director wants more of this or that and it goes back and forth many times,” says Wilkie. “It’s the review cycle that drives the way things look and that drives our job work. In that way each tiny bit gets better and better, then perfect, and we move on to the next item.”
(see related blog post on Weta's data center -ed)
Jim Ericson is editorial director of Information Management, a SourceMedia publication. You can reach him at Jim.Ericson@sourcemedia.com.
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