Flying filers and Game of Thrones: Jon Snow? No, latency is dead

Special effects for season 6 of Game of Thrones were created by Spanish video special effects (VFX) house El Ranchito, which explains how it solved its classic scaling problem below. El Ranchito, which was founded in 2010 in Barcelona, has an office in Madrid. It has done work on movies including The Homesman and it also did …

[John Stoffel]

So where's the details?

It reads like marketing fluff. It's all expensive, but hey we made it work with this other product! I was at least hoping to read some techincal details of the environment and how it improved things, or even how the Avere XRVTDTY whatever thingies did so well. Obviously they're NFS accelerators with SSD/disk/magic cache to keep files local.

But the details matter. And since they did two seperate steps (migrate TB of data to Linux, then serve out via Avere), it's not clear what made the most difference! Also, they stated it was the slow render farm causing slowdowns, not disk.

I give this article a 3 out of 10.

[Justin Clift]

Re: So where's the details?

It reads like marketing fluff.

It was just marketing fluff. :(

[Vic]

Re: So where's the details?

It reads like marketing fluff.

There have been some changes around here lately. There was a missive about it at the beginning of the year, IIRC.

This is the new El Reg.

Vic.

[BoldMan]

Is it just me or is this article really badly written and almost entirely content free?

[Sgt_Oddball]

I was thinking the same. Very thin explanation of just how the issue was solved.

For the sake of brevity the article can be read thus;

High demand users demand expensive solution.

Cheaper solution found by adding special sauce direct from marketing.

High fives and smiles around.

[Naselus]

So the message is caching stuff on faster storage is faster than not caching it and drawing directly from slower storage.

Thanks for this, it has completely changed my world view.

[Anonymous Coward]

I/O or compute?

"With latency mainly due to the sluggish render farm performance, the artists couldn’t work as the files were just not available fast enough for them.”

That quote seems to be saying that the bottleneck was in producing the increased number of ray-traced CGI image-frames, which is down to compute, not IO. Sure, each scene/frame to be rendered will need the scene/frame data to be loaded before rendering can start but the render time will be far greater than the IO time.

[John Deeb]

MMORPG

Or since they moved to LInux, they couldn't play that Windows based home-brewed MMORPG any more. And behold, productivity soared! Or at least, that would have been a more interesting angle. But I guess the Register needed the extra cash and couldn't even afford the usual rewrite and tart-up any more for such infomercials? And why still pretend, they must have thought. Better just pipe-line it straight to consumers, as they should know better. Some truth to that, as well.

[I am the Walrus]

Sponsored Content Warning!!!

Come on El Reg. I know you need to pay the bills but this is just embarrassing.

P.S. I work in the industry and are always looking at ways like this for our studio to work with freelancers remotely but this "article" is a glorified press release/click bait/puff piece.

[Rich 11]

A Monster Calls

Well, the most useful piece of information I took away from that article was the fact that a film is being made of A Monster Calls. For anyone who hasn't read it, it's a kids' book which is just as terrifying and as relevant to adults.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Re: A Monster Calls

Is that the kids' book about the lens-grinder from Omsk?

[Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse]

"...and produce top quality visuals"

And fair play... what a ream of top quality visuals have you produced. GoT seems to be outdoing itself in terms of production design and VfX at every single turn.

Season 5, episode 8 : Hardhome - IMHO, quite possibly the greatest episode of TV I have ever had the pleasure of watching.