Microsoft was forced to build a brand new system specifically for the purpose of storing massive amounts of data for Avatar. Each minute of final footage for the nearly three-hour-long film occupied 17.28 gigabytes of storage. It took several hours to render each individual frame of the film.
Jurassic Park
Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park is actually known for its lack of CGI. The team behind one of history's most iconic films pulled it off by mixing digital imagery with real-life animatronics. You might be surprised to learn that only 15 or so minutes of the dinosaur scenes were computer-generated. The rest used SFX master Stan Winston's physical dinosaur models.