Avatar, the movie Oscar winning Director James Cameron, is now the world’s most expensive movie ever made.
The movie has received enormous praise, particularly from the movie and tech blogosphere who have been blown away by the films 3D and CGI effects. Also, the movie currently sits at 26 on IMDB’s list of the most highly rated movies of all time, no mean feat.
One thing that particularly fascinated me however is Cameron’s use of a new 3D shooting technology called 3D Fusion. The technique requires an enormous amount of processing power, and needless to say, also a lot of storage space, but how much?
The entire rendering of Avatar reportedly requires over 1 Petabyte of storage space according to BBC’s Clickbits, which is the equivalent of 500 harddrives of 2TB each. That’s equal to a 32 year long MP3 file(!).
The movie was shot and rendered in Miramar, New Zealand, (population 8,334) in one of the most powerful purpose-built data centers in the world (same place they created King Kong and Lord of the Rings). According to Information Management, the computing core – 34 racks, each with four chassis of 32 machines each – adds up to some 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of RAM. The blades read and write against 3 petabytes of fast fiber channel disk network area storage from BluArc and NetApp.
All the gear sits tightly packed and connected by multiple 10-gigabit network links. “We need to stack the gear closely to get the bandwidth we need for our visual effects, and, because the data flows are so great, the storage has to be local,” says Paul Gunn, Weta’s data center systems administrator.
So before you wonder what someone did with a 300 million budget, it’s worth noting that just the storage costs of the movie would have been in the million range. Mind blowing.
It hasn’t won an Oscar yet. You could say “Movie by the Oscar winning Director”
He said James Cameron has won Oscars.. not that movie.
Agree, about Pocahontas and Dances with wolves tho. The storyline is way too similar.
Just how many original stories can you make.The world is a repeat.Just like today .War after war.Greed has gone on for ages.Murder happens every day every where.Bad politicians finding ways to screw American civilians every 4 years.
The movie is great.The Visuals are fantastic.The Action is superb.
The only thing that sucks is your tastes and expectations.
So all remakes are by nature crap? There are so many top-notch movies that all have the same core storyline. A movie is not rated on the storyline alone, a movie is a composoting of so many features, every single one worth to be included. The CG was fantastic and surely till today the motion capturing shown wasn´t there before. The creative component in the assets, the characters, the whole world, even if you disliked it, earns to be credited (if you are from the field of CG you probably would speak completely differently). It´s a milestone in photorealistic movie animations. But also the cinematography was worth watching the movie alone.
Yes, the story was simple, linear and not very suprising but the execution of that simple storyline was fantastic. It had everything a modern fantasy needs. Bad guys, good guys, conspirecy, magic, a hero, a beloved female and a fantastic world. Bad guys want to destroy the world of the good guys and they fight for it. The hero seems to fail but he is the solution in the end.
1. This description fits Lord of the rings as well as the matrix. And it fits hundreds of other movies and thousands of quite old movies. It´s a classic storyline. It´s a good one cinematographically. Yes, it won´t win the oscar for most creative script but it serves its purpose! Pocahontas wasn´t the first movie using it, so that credit doesn´t belong here. ;)
2. Would you have been able to create a world as it was shown in the movie from your mind with this storyline as base? Well, it´s not as easy as it may seem.
All this put together, I don´t think it´s fair to say the movie was crap just because there was no genius-oscar-winning-making-apes-talk story behind it. It´s a modern fairy tale. It must also fit the young watchers, actually a blockbuster like this that swallowed hundreds of millions of dollars has no other chance than trying to reach audiences of all age. This wouldn´t work with a deep-minded plot.
It is what is is, an entertainement blockbuster for everyone. And it does its job superb!
“Avatar, the Oscar winning movie directed by James Cameron, is now the world’s most expensive movie.”
Oscar winning ? Already ?
It’s amazing that such a bad movie would take up so much space. Bloated by all that bad story line I suppose.
Amazing effects, how unfortunate that in the fifteen years making this project that James Cameron couldn’t find an original story.
Eye candy aside, this meld of Pocahontas meets Dances with Wolves in space has all the earmarks of the DVD bargain bin.
So much hype for so much fluff.
Effects don’t impress me, I’ve seen cartoons with better story lines.
Quite sad really.
Epic fail.
They should compress this movie to STANDARD definition anyway.
sigh…
I agree totally with u, me as a CG artist, virtual believer, deep imagining thinker, and creative director and i dont wanna mention the rest who cares now comparing to this sibject, id like to tell u guys that i agree with the long previous reply, coz AVATAR is the maximum and trust me u may watch this movie and be sure ull be living the present time, no, but u will live the future of entertainment, names, creatures, post production, info, technology, and and and…virtuality came reality and vice versa, I mean i was on tension the whole movie ..saying inside me…howww did..what the…ha ho he…just amazingggg…i reached limits that i want to be an avatar at least to beone of those suuporters real ones that support the mother earth at least for one tree..i think it has a lot of lessons and deep ones either…but u have to sit in different places inside ur mind try different shoes to be in..and then judge…thank Cameron…thank u Weta..thank u all data center..thank u I max and Cinema City in my country for their amazing cinema 3d technology they got for that movie, thank u CG artists thank u everyone who was working in that project honestly its just a shift..
“That’s equal to a 32 year long MP3 file(!).”
Is it? How much space does one minute of MP3 require? Exactly: it depends. It can just as well be equal to a 16 or 64 year MP3 file.
Quote: “We need to stack the gear closely to get the bandwidth we need for our visual effects, and, because the data flows are so great, the storage has to be local,” says Paul Gunn, Weta’s data center systems administrator.
The storage doesn’t have to be local but since they were using Netapp NAS and crappy 10 GigE/Fibre Channel, I guess it does. Next time, Cameron should try a combination of Infiniband/RDMA. Just imagine if there was a cataclysmic event at that data center. All the data would have been lost or very hard to recover. They could have done very fast network backup and in fact kept the storage remote if they had gone with the better technology.
I suspect he’d also get much better performance and need to use less CPU (hey James Cameron isn’t green!)
No. No it’s not.
This is an interesting article on Avatar
http://www.moneyteachers.org/Deadmanmusings8.htm
wow, amazing I had not heard of a Petabyte yet!
HURRRR
I obviously don’t know anything about computers. Avatar takes up one terabyte.
DURRRR
stupid fake
Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. How many great movies (and crappy ones too) have been made with this plot? Shakespeare lifted many of his plots from other plays. It’s what he did with the plots that make his plays immortal while the originals are long forgotten. Avatar has taken the important messages of Dances with Wolves and put them in a form that many people who otherwise would not hear those messages watched. If some uber-wow CGI is what it takes to get people to think about the abuses of power, capitalism and technology, then I say give us more!
I was amazed by the artwork and wild fantasy in details.
I would wonder if someone find fault in this movie too! :O
Every slide of the movie was so amazing., It was a visual treat!
I even loved the theme of the story., the characterization of aliens was so real and great. The director just created a new planet. We just had a trip to the other world and makes us we feel that there is a planet named “PANDORA” really exists!
What could be better!
no no, my fault – i changed it. my bad
*petabyte