Two Towers hold two storage solutions
Two Towers hold two storage solutions
The publicity juggernaut for the second film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Two Towers, has made a whistle-stop in the storage industry, with Seagate Technology and Network Appliance among the happy suppliers.
The Two Towers opens in the US today, and in Australia on Boxing Day, representing one of the most complex technical achievements in modern film making. As with the first film in the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, several hardware and software suppliers were chosen to meet the high-performance needs of such a technology-intensive work.
Network Appliance has continued its support of Weta Digital, the special effects studio for the films. Weta now has 48 terabytes of capacity bought from NetApp, comprised of several F800 series filers, and disk-based R100 devices. The latter installation is a change from the first film: work for The Fellowship of the Ring was completed using three F840 filers totalling 20 terabytes of capacity, but Weta added five F880s and the R100 for The Two Towers.
"This three-year project called for state-of-the-art storage capability and, especially, scalability and speed of data delivery that we found only NetApp could provide," said Jon Labrie, chief technology officer at Weta Digital. "We have scanned millions of images for the films and these are being worked on by our 143 graphic artists. The images have to be scanned and stored for manipulation and with a single frame representing anything up to 12 megabytes, we are talking about a lot of storage."
Weta retained the use of tape drives it had used in the first film - a StorageTek TimberWolf 9710 tape library with six DLT 7000 drives, adding up to around three terabytes of capacity - but Network Appliance marketing manager Harry Christian told IDM.net.au that that company scrapped plans to rely on tape for anything other than archiving.
"I wouldn't say they had moved completely across to disk. They still use it for a lot of archiving of production work. They still use tape for archiving, but for regularly retrieved material, they have chosen disk-based storage," he said.Meanwhile, several other parts of the production process used Cheetah and Barracuda drives from Seagate Technology. Every frame of The Two Towers was stored digitally, in what was claimed as a first for a live-action film (excluding computer-generated films like Toy Story).
Seagate drives were also used to record the orchestral score at the Abbey Road studios in London, using a storage area network (SAN) configuration. 48 simultaneous tracks of sound on Cheetah drives were captured within a Studio Network Solutions SAN system designed specifically for the audio/video industry, according to the company.
"The Studio Network Solutions system using the Cheetah drives gave us a worry-free performance during the Abbey Road sessions with no tracking or time errors as can unfortunately be the case with other systems not optimised for these environments," said David Gleeson, associate music producer for Lord of the Rings.
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