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The Avatar storage effect

theregister.co.uk

21 pointsrobin_reala9 comments

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?

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.

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.

> Yes, it looked real, but...so do movies that have no CGI at all.

Yea, but Avatar makes stuff that can't be real look real, which aids greatly in being able to suspend disbelief and go along for a ride in someone else's imagination. Movies without CGI just show me the boring real world I'm already very familiar with.

No offense, but I'm betting there are plenty of boring old real things that you haven't seen yet and that most of them will blow your mind.

If this is just me, please don't tell me--being wowed by the real world is awesome :).

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.

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

I would have used BitTorrent.

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.

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