Weta creates FX, Film Unit mixes Rings - Post News - Brief Article

Post, Feb, 2002

WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- Weta Digital turned to the power of more than 230 SGI IRIX OS-based and SGI Linux OS-based visual workstations, storage products and servers for the creation of New Line Cinema's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Weta Ltd. shot all three films simultaneously with Weta Digital, its digital effects arm, producing more than 1,200 visual effects shots.

The studio is using a full complement of IRIX OS-based Silicon Graphics Octane and Silicon Graphics Onyx2 visual workstations, SGI Origin family servers and SGI Linux OS-based visual workstations and servers to create and manage up to 100TB of data.

Weta Digital has been working on the trilogy for over four years and built its facility from the ground up. More than 150 artists, keyframe animators, modelers, digital paint artists, motion editors, compositors and software engineers were provided with 150 Octane visual workstations running Alias/Wavefront Maya for 3D. An eight-processor Onyx2 system runs Discreet Inferno for compositing, and 80 dual-processor SGI 330 and SGI 230 Linux OS-based workstations are used for paint, rotoscoping and compositing.

Additionally, two SGI file servers using SGITP9400 storage arrays, Storage Tek Tape Robots and SGI Origin 2000 server technology provide a combination of 4TB of online storage and more than 20TB of near-line storage as a global storage repository to support workstation information sharing.

From the beginning of preproduction, Weta used the IRIX OS-based Octane visual workstations to write extensions to Maya and create proprietary technology. This technology includes Massive, a custom-built crowd animation system developed on IRIX and now ported to Linux that draws from a huge database of motion capture data.

According to Jon Labrie, Weta Digital's chief technology officer, the studio is using Massive for battle animation scenes with hundreds of thousands of fighting, screaming and dying orcs, elves and other creatures that appear in The Lord of the Rings.

THE MIX

The Film Unit Ltd. in New Zealand provided audio post for the first film, mixing it on the studio's Euphonix System 5-F all-digital film mixing console.

Last year the studio planned an upgrade in its premier room in order to accommodate the massive audio post demands of the film.

John Neill, sound department manager of The Film Unit studios, notes, "We decided on the System 5-F to get the large number of channels needed for a film like Lord of the Rings. The project ended up as a three-operator mix. We also decided it was time to go digital -- our previous console was analong. The System 5F fit the bill and performed really well during the mix."

The Film Unit also added a Euphonix FC727 digital format converters that allowed the studio to connect its Pro Tools systems directly into the console through MADI (Multichannel Audio Digital Interface) without the Digidesign 888/24 converters.

"Having all-digital audio paths streamlined the setup and made the project easier," says Neill.