AVATAR

We watched AVATAR again tonight, the film everyone's heard about.

Watching it again reminded me of how fantastically visionary and advanced the film is. Mixing cutting-edge technology/computer wizardry with live action filming to create a very believable world, Pandora, with its natives, the Na'vi.

Amazingly, the computer cluster needed to render the film (which is from the same company that rendered Middle Earth for us) is made out of 34 racks: each rack has 32 machines, 40,000 processors, and 104 terabytes of memory.

Even more mind-blowing, the final film footage takes up 17.28 GIGABYTE PER MINUTE of storage. Remarkable, once you consider that the film is 166 minutes!

Best thing is that James Cameron (the director) is a gamer, and his gaming inspired this film the most. The gaming inspirations are to be seen everywhere - from the title of the film, to the main character's alter-ego, to the world of Pandora and it's creatures and habits, it's like watching an amazing video game come to life.

Superb. Watch it, love it.