agent4256 writes: Barbara Robertson over at Studio Daily put forth this article featuring the technical background for the production of The Dark Knight. With most of the film shot with IMAX cameras (producing a theoretical resolution of 18k), the studios could not handle the size. Instead, the cut the resolution more than in half down to 8K, the maximum resolution for scanned film.
"A single 8K frame requires 200 MB of data," Franklin says. "So we had to upgrade our whole infrastructure. We needed faster network speeds to move data around, massively beefed up servers, and — the most important thing — a new compositing solution."
To give you an idea of how far technology has taken us — "In 1999, when we worked on Pitch Black [released in 2000], we needed to access 2 TB of data," Franklin says. "This show used over 100 TB of data."