The Avatar storage effect

[hugh_]

I haven't seen Avatar, but at the very least it seems to be a masterpiece of PR. I forget, now, how many articles I've seen describing every random aspect of the production. How do they manage to get these written and published?

[blhack]

To be honest, I am more interested in the production than I was in the movie.

Maybe this means that Avatar was done well, but I wasn't terribly wowed by anything in it. Yes, it looked real, but...so do movies that have no CGI at all.

I guess my point is that the back-end stuff from this movie is the interesting bit, so the PR is welcome.

[anigbrowl]

They use a PR company, and there is a small but avid market for information about the production techniques - that of other film producers and technicians. Workflow management and server administration is a standard line-item expense on pretty much any film budget nowadays, same as it is in other highly-constrained engineering contexts.

[robin_reala]

To be fair this does describe something genuinely interesting (the custom data transfer format). It’s not the fact that it’s about a particular film that made me link to it, but the technology limitations that were overcome.

[peterwwillis]

I am not surprised Weta doesn't use Isiton. We've had nothing but problems. But they are cheap. And Aspera rocks.

[Raphael]

I would have used BitTorrent.

[hallmark]

That does not seem to make sense here. BitTorrent is good for distributing many copies of a file to many clients. The large number of BitTorrent clients with full or partial copies of a given file can help transmit pieces of a file to another client requesting a download.

In their case, the producers of Avatar needed to transfer large quantities of data between two points - Los Angeles and New Zealand.