Macs do Star Wars dirty work By Spencer Kelly BBC Click Online reporter in California http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/program mes/click_online/3945149.stm
Behind the scenes, painstaking effort and computing power has gone into cleaning up George Lucas's original Star Wars trilogy for its DVD release. Since 1977 the Star Wars saga has been followed by hundreds of millions of viewers and grossed more than $3 billion. Now the original trilogy is out on DVD, and the hype for this matched that of the biggest Hollywood premieres. Far away from the hype there is a back lot in Burbank, California, where a lot of the hard work was done. < snip > The 70 MB per frame of film requires an enormous amount of storage, and fortunately there is an impressive 400 terabytes sitting just down the corridor. The processing power is quite formidable too. The brains of the facility are 600 Apple G5s, each a dual processor 2GHz machine. Mike Inchalik says: "The Apple G5s were chosen because it's an extraordinary floating point processing machine, and with 1,200 such processors there's a really immense amount of processing capability here. "One of the beauties of using general purpose computers to do this work is they get faster and faster every year. You are a subscribed member of the infowarrior list. Visit www.infowarrior.org for list information or to unsubscribe. This message may be redistributed freely in its entirety. Any and all copyrights appearing in list messages are maintained by their respective owners.
