2. You Can't Be Too Rich Or Have Too Many TeraBytes

The old saw of never having enough storage is certainly true when it comes to supporting the special effects produced by ILM.

"There is never enough storage, never enough memory and you always want faster processors. Every time you think you reach a milestone and you can relax a bit, someone else pushes beyond it," Plumer said. "It happens because of complexity. The more tools and power we can throw at an artist, the complexity factor stays a step ahead."

They constantly push the envelope of what is possible with microprocessors, high speed networks and other technologies.

"We were pushing 150 TB across our network on a daily basis during peak production times," Plumer said. "And now we just have new peaks, with games for next-generation consoles as complex as some of our films, and all this strains our systems more and more."

The ILM network stores all data in the data center, and as a result nothing of significance is stored on local drives. "An artist can login to any workstation and get access to all their tools and assets. Within the data center we have 160 TB of online storage, and another 90 TB of near-line storage to serve our production needs," Plumer said. "With near-line storage, we can call it back up with a command. Only when a production is done do we archive it. We have plenty of other storage for media servers to playback into critical viewing rooms and theaters. For a production like Star Wars, we have the movie online all the time while we are working on it."

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An example of how their storage needs have grown is to look at their earlier movies. When Pearl Harbor was made several years ago, the entire storage for the project was contained in 1.5 TB. "Now we have individual shots taking up that much storage. This came a lot quicker than I ever thought," Plumer said. "Everything is about what you are going to see on screen. The more complexity we can add to a character or an environment the better."

When we look at movies, we tend to forget that not every digital character is ready for their close up shot. "When we use a synthetic character or a digital double, a director can have that character in the distance and get away with it," Plumer said.

The resolution on the image isn't as exacting, and the representation isn't as taxing on the collection of digital assets that are required to assemble that character. "But now the director is going to move the camera closer and closer where there is no margin of error, and that increases complexity for the software, the processing and the storage," Plumer said. "The entire system requirements increase accordingly."