Weta Digital used SGI's IRIX OS-based Silicon Graphics Octane visual workstations, Silicon Graphics Onyx2 visualization systems, SGI Origin family servers, and SGI Linux OS-based visual workstations and servers as on the first film.
SGI Solutions delivered the power behind WETA Digital's The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
Weta Digital used SGI's IRIX OS-based Silicon Graphics Octane visual workstations, Silicon Graphics Onyx2 visualization systems, SGI Origin family servers and SGI Linux OS-based visual workstations and servers as on the first film.
For The Two Towers, the New Zealand digital effects company shot all three films back-to-back, upgraded its SGI Origin 2000 server to handle twice the data load of the first film.
The SGI solution for hierarchical storage management, the SGIÒ Data Migration Facility (DMF), which has unlimited storage capability, were the keys to producing the entire The Lord of The Rings film trilogy.
On the first film, Weta Digital 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.
For more information visit www.sgi.com and www.wetadigital.com
