What is Digg?77 Comments
- suomi, on 10/12/2007, -2/+27Every time I read this story, the number of hours to render a single frame increases...
- shad0w, on 10/12/2007, -8/+30Why would you pirate a movie like this? You can barely see the quality of the animation with a crapping camcorder copy.
- edsonmedina, on 10/12/2007, -6/+26Not all pirated versions are camcorded
- strcmp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+19I don't think that the 20 hours per frame figure accounts for parallelism.
- carguy84, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18I once caught a fish THIIIIIIIIIS big.
- srg13, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16They use a render farm. It takes one computer 20 hours to render a frame. Many computers (apparantly 3000 for cars) render a frame each. Thats about 2.08 minutes of film every 20 hours. Meaning a full render can take up to 43 hours or more. Remember that different frames take different amounts of time, so the total render figure I provided could be give or take around 20 - 30 hours...
by the way, film is 24 frames per second, not 25 - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16does it matter what platform it was rendered on.
"bighitsummermovie built on Linux"
LinuxFanBoys: yeah! I told you so
"bighitsummermovie built on a Mac"
MacFanBoys: yeah! it must be the white plastic, it runs faster
"bighitsummermovie built on SGI/Solaris/whatever"
AllFanBoys: boo hiss! what a waste, I'll never see that movie
This movie could have been built on a PocketPC, it would just take a lot longer. It's just hardware folks, it's just an OS. The magic is in the software. - CosmicJustice, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Yes. Pixar uses a Linux render farm. Everybody who cares already knows that. It is not news that each time they make a new movie it's rendered on Linux. Every day somebody could post a story titled "15 billion business documents created today on Windows." Big deal. It wouldn't mean anything.
- Califax, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Some movies are better seen in theatre and I will say the same about Cars
- I remember a story just like this a few weeks ago, not sure if it is the same - himey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8STokumine,
strcmp is correct. They use thousands of computers which each take 17-20 hours per frame. I think Pixar can afford more than a single CPU Pentium 4 to render the movie with. - STokumine, on 10/12/2007, -6/+14Header summary is slightly misleading. Apparently it took 20 hours per frame in scenes of peak complexity...
1 movie ~= 90 mins
90 mins == 5400 seconds
5400 seconds == 135000 frames (at 25 frames per second)
135000 frames == 2700000 hours to compute (at 1 frame every 20 hours)
2700000 hours == 112500 days
112500 days ~= 308 years... - TrevorBradley, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10I was just about a comment about "The Animation wasn't so great, everything looked blurry"... :)
The sad part about this was Cars wasn't a particularly awesome movie. Both Finding Nemo (which I saw in theatres) and The Incredibles were *awesome* movies with terrific plots, which showed through even in a crappy cam or telesync version. Cars was more like "OK, that was fair", but I was expecting much more from Pixar. Pixar movies are best when they make me forget that I'm watching an animated movie.
(Well, except of course for the original Toy Story, with all the nods to computer animation and culture. That was cool.) - avatarpalin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Yes exactly... Some of the other animated titles are just after characters with snappy one liners surrounded by a rather simple watered down story.. graphics is graphics, but a good story is a good story...
..and i just murdered the english language... - Grimboy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Shhh... you'll break digg.
- EmileVictor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6This movie is brilliant. One thing I must say is that Pixar is doing the best job of any studio in producing animated movies that will appeal to a very wide range of audience.
- Jozer99, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5This just in, Sony announces that the PS3 will be delayed while they are adding the cabability to render pixar movies to the Cell processor.
A Sony press spokesman said "Of course the price is going to go up! What are you, to poor for videogames? I bet I make more money than you, a whole lot more, cause PS3 is sooo freaken cheap its unbelievable!" - Jozer99, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6We all know that Linux bits are of a higher quality than closed source bits. This small quality difference is magnified as we move to bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, etc... By the time we get to gigabytes, open source gigabytes are of such obvious higher quality that they are virtually uncomparable to closed source gigabytes. This should be considered when talking about raytracing, as such a computationally intensive task involves many gigabytes.
- chucker, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8"Man Hours perhaps?
They proably had more than one person working at once on more than one computer."
This is a render farm; there's no people working on it (aside from admins). The creative work isn't being done on this farm, or on Linux, for that matter; they mainly use Power Mac G5s with Mac OS X. - Haroldx, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5They used 3,000 computers.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10004076-cars/about.php
It actually works out to be somewhere around 30-40 days. - Wolfboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs in 1986.
- mragentr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Sorry, it is their custom RenderMan running on PCs.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/graphics/renderman-faq/ - Criterion, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I think you're remembering different stories like the one where they removed a network bottleneck to significantly reduce render time for one of the animated movies and confusing them.
- TrevorBradley, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'd agree. Pixar is known for good stories. However, Cars felt like a bit of a letdown after Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Those left me thinking "WOW!". Cars was cool, but sort of in "A Bug's Life" kinda way. Pixar has done better.
I'd love to see another Brad Bird movie, but he seems to put them out about every 6 years. (Before "The Incredibles" was "The Iron Giant") - masamunecyrus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I believe they said that before they went to the Linux farm the maximum time per frame was up to about 90 hours.
- MacGeekGuy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I totally agree this is a movie that should be purchased... but seen at the theater? Sure, the quality would be better... but all the screaming kids might be another story altogether.
- GrendelT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Let us not forget this was all done a cluster of hundred/thousands 8-way Opteron nodes. AMD++
- Grimboy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5The artists use macs in the creation of models backgrounds, textures, ect., but the actually rendering of it all put together is done on linux.
- ordminute, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2No where in the section of the Pixar site you refer to does it say what the art was created on:
https://renderman.pixar.com/
What they actually used to make this crap film is speculation. All we know is that they'd be extremely unusual within the industry if they did produce the character and scene animations on WIndows or Apple machines, as all their competitors don't use these platforms, they use Linux or SGI.
See http://www.linuxmovies.org/software.html for a list of the software used on Linux to animate, composite and render the feature films you know and love these days. - Flynnz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I still think they use PC's for most of the modeling. Macs were probably used for texuring. Rendering was probably mostly done on Linux.
As a big studio should ....they use EVERYTHING. - ordminute, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2No big animation studio uses Mac's for modelling and compositing now. It's all Maya on Redhat running on IBM Intellistations, Shake on Linux for the compositing - film's like Lord of the Rings, Shrek, King Kong were all made this way. I don't know about Pixar films, but I believe they are no different.
Macs are more for the hobbyist film-maker market and are increasingly rare in big studios now. - sk545, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2huh! They shoulda used the PS3. lol.
- jocknerd, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4FWIW, Cars was rendered on Linux, but not created on Linux. And like others, I have to say I was somewhat disappointed in Cars. About a half hour too long for my tastes. And it didn't have the depth like other Pixar movies. Its a pretty good movie, but not a Pixar classic. Its nowhere near Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, or the 2 Toy Stories. I'd put it on the level of A Bug's Life. But maybe it really has something to do with trying to make the cars living objects. I don't know.
- Flynnz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2well thats odd cause none of the places I did stuff for (or friends) ever used a Mac on a game/movie for 3D.
Can you even get high end 3D cards for Mac to use with Maya? - olegk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If you read the story carefully, 20 hours is only for the most complex frames (with 160,000 cars).
- Criterion, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4"The artists use macs in the creation of models backgrounds, textures, ect., but the actually rendering of it all put together is done on linux."
References please? All the high end animation software is on Linux now. That's what all the studios seem to be running now.
http://www.linuxmovies.org/software.html - brkn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't know what platform Pixar uses, but they do use a lot of in-house software, such as Marionette, for animation and of course PRMan for rendering. They may use Maya for some things, but afaik, it's not like they have their pipeline centred around it.
- Tiak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm thinking he was right with saying "20 hours at peak complexity" as in 20 hours for the whole farm for a few massively difficult frames... The concept behind a render farm as I've seen it used is usually a machine (or group of machines in case of this size) dishes out work to the member machines fairly equally on the short term. To me the concept of all those machines just peacefully working independantly for 20 hours before asking for a whole new frame all at once seems like something else entirely.
Either way it'd work out, I mean it could logically take 20 hours to render a couple peek difficulty frames with multiple reflections/reflections of reflections and a bunch of complexity, while many of the frames could be done in a manner of seconds, leaving the average somewhere in between. - Flynnz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@brkn
you are correct...they dont use off the shelf software for their movies.
Though they make a model here and there in Maya or other software if needed. - phonepimpbill, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Whatever built it, I liked it.
- air12ick, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Title is a little off. The movie "Cars" was animated on Windows and Apple machines (proof, go to Renderman under Pixar's website). Once the animator is done with his/her scene, they push it out to the Linux based server farm to render. As I said in another post, the Linux environment allows Pixar to customize and optimize the Render farm to make it efficient. I won't report it inaccurate though, because the article that this submission is linked to is pretty accurate.
- iSlayer, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Why is there old news on the front page again? Seems like the same old comments in there with the number of frames as well. Get a life!
- shakeyshakey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1a proof that just because it was made on linux, doesn't mean it's good
- Jozer99, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I know, but it might be worth it for the increased quality. Plus it would take 1/2 the time to render a 1080p version than it would to render the 2040x1080 version, and about 1/8 the time to render a 480i version.
- cyssero, on 04/18/2009, -0/+1"Apparently it took 20 hours per frame in scenes of peak complexity"
You are all calculating as if the movie is constantly peaking in complexity. The way the statement is worded, it leads me to believe not all 90 minutes of the movie is complex, or they would have omitted that.
So, in addition to using a render farm, it may only take 20 hours per frame to process say, half the movie [with only half being 'complex']. - vondur, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1If you stay around for the credits on this movie (and I suggest you do, they have some really funny parts), they go on to thank Intel processors, and the IT staff at Pixar. Pretty cool.
- iet2004, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2After reading that comment, I'm so surprised that Digg wasn't down due to traffic. You've got cojones, man.
- alienSkull, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1hey even Gates is doing it
http://www.digg.com/technology/Bill_Gates_Piracy_Confession
hurry everyone get on the bandwagon...
/sarcasm - Matt2k, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It's more appropriate to say they use Renderman, in my opinion. The operating system is not really invovled in the process very much at all beyond hosting the application.
- sentai, on 09/08/2008, -0/+0http://www.ia7.info I appreciate the good advices written in this article
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