Weta Digital
Weta Digital is a world leading visual effects company based in Wellington, New Zealand. They provide a full suite of digital production services for feature films and high end commercials, from concept design to cutting edge 3D animation. Weta Digital is an Oscar-winning company that created the visual effects for films such as "Lord of the Rings", "Avatar" and "Rise of the Planet of the Apes". Weta Digital selected Infobright's analytic database for near-real time analysis of data generated from the film-rendering process.
Overview download as pdf
Creating visual effects in movies requires enormous processing power and data storage. Generating just a single frame may take hundreds or thousands of hours of compute time. The combination of increasingly complex visual effects and strict production deadlines make it imperative to maximize the efficiency of the available processing resources and the production pipeline.
As individual visual-effect shots are rendered (using specialized programs to create computer-generated images), data needs to be captured and stored. This information includes how long each of the 600,000 rendering commands executed daily take to run; whether the command was successful; how much of the Renderwall resources were used for each shot; which systems produced errors, and much more.
Challenge
Analysis of this data is critical to production staff for ensuring high-quality effects within required deadlines; to the IT staff (known as "wranglers") managing the operation of the Renderwall; to production engineers using this data to identify ways to streamline the rendering process and enhance software quality; and to Weta Digital management using this data for overall optimization of current operations as well as planning for future projects. Weta Digital needed to find a database that would improve long-term data analysis for its render pipeline.
The ability to capture, store and analyze all of the data we are generating brings enormous benefits to the facility.
- Kathy Gruzas, Chief Information Officer, Weta Digital
Solution
Weta Digital chose Infobright when deciding to increase their investment in long-term data analysis for their render pipeline. Now Weta Digital can store and analyze the detailed data needed to optimize the film rendering pipeline and the massive, 42,000 core Renderwall (rendering server farm). Infobright delivers up to 20:1 data compression and enables fast ad-hoc analytics that allows Weta Digital the ability to store years of detailed data. Weta Digital also chose Infobright for its ability to eliminate some of the database administration work required by other database solutions.
Additionally, Weta Digital is now planning to archive this data and make detailed cuts of the data available across the company to a diverse set of users.
Using Infobright helps us identify problems more quickly, allocate our processing resources more effectively, and with less administrative effort.
- Kathy Gruzas, Chief Information Officer, Weta Digital
download as pdf
Infopliance Portal
Next Steps
Customer Stories
Polystar OSIX
“In the highly competitive telecommunications industry, service performance is a key differentiator. As a result, our customers expect our applications to be able to process large amounts of user data…
A New Approach
The Analytic Data Warehouse
Traditional data warehouse products put a tremendous burden on IT in order to create and maintain an environment that will allow users to query against large volumes of data.
