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- jonathantneal, on 10/12/2007, -2/+126I've made sense of everything, fear not...
60 [seconds in a minute]
96 [minutes in the film]
60 * 96 = 5760 [seconds in the film]
24 [frames per second]
17 [hours per rendered frame]
24 * 17 = 408 [hours per rendered second]
5760 [seconds in the film]
408 [hours per rendered second]
5760 * 408 = 2350080 [hours for the rendered film]
24 [hours in a day]
2350080 / 24 = 97920 [days to render the film]
365 [days in a year]
97920 / 365 = 268 [years to render the film] (rounded)
2006 [current year]
2006 - 268 = 1738 [year to start rendering]
A History of the world in 1738 confirms...
- March 28: English parliament declares war on Spain (War of Jenkin's Ear)
- April 15: Bottle opener invented
- May 9: England routes fleet in Mediterranean Sea and West-Indies
- May 24: Methodist Church forms
- May 27: Turkish troops occupy Orsova and Ochakov
- June 9: Pixar begins rendering "Cars"
- August 2: France offers emperor Karel VI mediation in war against Turkey
- November 18: France and Austria sign peace
- December 9: Jews are expelled from Breslau Silesia
I don't know about you guys, but that seems right to me. - thetanbark, on 10/12/2007, -7/+94Here's the math I came out with.
1 frame = 17hr of encoding
1 frame = 1020 min of encoding
1 frame = 61200 seconds of encoding
Film runs at 24 frames per second.
1 minute of film = 1440 frames
90 minutes of film = 129600 frames
129,600 frames * 61200 seconds/frame = 7931520000 seconds of encoding
7931520000 seconds / 1 min/60 sec = 132192000 minutes of encoding
132192000 minutes / 1 hr/60 min = 2203200 hours of encoding
2203200 hours / 1 day/24 hr = 91800 days of encoding
91800 days / 1 day/365 yr = 251.5 years of encoding
251 years to encode the movie? I'm either way off (did the math twice) or Pixar is lying. Based on those numbers, I would say 17hrs per SECOND of film I would believe, but 1 frame... no way. - niiru, on 10/12/2007, -1/+68Perhaps it was 17 hours per frame, but each computer handled an individual frame at once. Being 3000 computers if they were each doing 1 frame per 17 hours that would make it take.. (taken the frames figure from previous posts)
129600 frames / 3000 = 43.2 (number any single computer had to do in total)
43.2 frames * 17 hours = 734.4 hours = 30.6 solid days
Does that sound more realistic? - tormented, on 10/12/2007, -1/+67The problem is the 3000 computers were a cheaper solution.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+58No wonder it takes them 6 years to produce a film. I guess Pixar likes to be perfect.
- RadiantBeing, on 10/12/2007, -1/+49Checkout the Cars HD trailers. The crisp detail of the scenes is unreal. It's the best demonstration of HD video I've ever seen.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/cars/hd/ - Tyrekicker, on 10/12/2007, -22/+68(mod me down)
- piratearggghhh, on 10/12/2007, -8/+50They should've used the PS3 - it renders CG in realtime at 1080p. =D
- briansalo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+45...it can also shoot pixie sticks from the USB ports and cure third world poverty at the same time ;)
- Switch22, on 10/12/2007, -4/+37If they had 3000 computers each rendering one frame at the same time, you would have 3000 frames after 17 hours. Leobaby is correct, it probably took them about 40 days to render the movie, math is fun.
Get the shovels, here come the diggers. - shit, on 10/12/2007, -2/+33And that was 2D, walking through the snow, uphill both ways.
- Terc, on 10/12/2007, -6/+24Ok, let me take a stab at this.
Number of frames in a film = (90 minutes * 60 seconds * 24 frames per second) = 129600 frames in a 90 minute film.
Number of hours to render all 129600 frames (129600 frames * 17 hours) = 2203200 hours
Number of days equal to 2203200 hours = (2203200 hours / 24 hours in a day) = 91800 days (not looking good here)
Number of years equal to 91800 days = (91800 days / 364.25 days in a year) = 252.0247083... years
So 252 years plus (.0247083*364.25) = 9 days.
So 252 years and 9 days. I don't think it was 17 hours per frame. - ani-pockdotnet, on 10/12/2007, -4/+19...if you can afford one
- DoubtfulSalmon, on 10/12/2007, -2/+16The digg.com corollary to Godwin's Law:
"As a discussion on digg.com grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the PS3 approaches one" - Bhima, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15It seems to me it's time to abandon general purpose processors and start using things that are a more specialized
- Monkeyget, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14More numbers:
To make Shrek 2, Dreamworks used a render farm made of
-347 dual pentium 3 at 1.2 GHZ/2 GB ram
-433 dual pentium 4 at 2.8 GHZ/4GB ram. They rented another 500 of those machine from HP, those 500 where not at dreamworks studio but remote at hp.
The total of computer processing time was 10.000.000 hours (that's over 1100 years!).
The result was 20 tera byte of produced data. - JDex, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12--You can't make two or more computers to work on a single frame.--
In fact you can, many commercial renders (including Pixar's Renderman) can use multiple workstations to calculate one single frame... the 17hrs per frame is spread across a 3000 node render farm that the rendering TDs used to full capacity whenever possible. Using satellite rendering on more demanding shots and more traditional 1 frame per node on less involved or resource intensive shots adds flexibility to the system and which type of rendering option was chosen on a shot by shot basis.
Also consider that there have been shots "in the can" for several months. Movies like this are not rendered all at once, it's a pipeline. Different shots start and finish before others and the renders are completed and moved on through the pipeline to various others who will have work to do with them. - dan.grover, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13They did. Then Disney acquired them.
- sugarbearcsa, on 10/12/2007, -12/+24I think 17 hours is a little high. Most moive theaters run at 24 Frames a seconds. And the film 1 hour 57 Mins long (117 mins long. Means there would be (117 X 60 X 24) 168,480 frames in the moive. If each one takes 17 hours (168,480 X17).
We get 2,864,160 hours to render the film. Or 119,340 days or 326 years..... which means they had to start rendering it back in 1680 if every single frame takes 17 hours. - leobaby, on 10/12/2007, -7/+18I think what this means maybe is that you get 3000 frames in 17 hours... or 176 frames per hour.
for 116 minues of film is 167,000 frames takes 950 hours to render, about 39 days? - kwelling12, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Yeah, I think each computer does one frame. I came up with 39.78 days, which is much more reasonable.
- porksoda, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8It's funny, with 3ds max, one little check box for physically accurate, ray-traced reflections on a material takes your average Frames Rendered Per Hour and rapes it in the bunghole. and god forbid you throw in some indirect illumination and light scattering.
- editorialctrl, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7"niiru" is correct, and this Digg headline is *****.
There are 3,000 computers in the renderfarm, but 3,000 computers working on each frame. IMDB puts the runtime at 116 minutes, which means the whole movie would take 34.5 days to render.
What is it with Digg story contributors and their crap headlines? Cmon THINK about what you're writing. - millixaw, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Actually if you watch any of their "making of" stuff, you'll see rows and rows of Apple Xserves. Gee I wonder why; who was their boss before Disney acquired them......?
- wolfzero, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Damn, you people are lazy. A simple search query of "cars rendering time pixar" brought me to a great article featuring Greg Brandeau, Pixar's VP of Technology.
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=92075
"Brandeau added that the rendering system used for animation was creaking under the strain of the new release, prompting a rethink of the firm's storage strategy. "We realized that our rendering time was taking too long. Frames were taking 10 hours [to render] that should have taken one hour."
According to Brandeau, it was not the rendering system, which is based on Dell servers, that was causing the slowdown. On closer inspection, an NFS file system feeding data to the Dell boxes was found to be the source of the problem. "Our central file system was getting hammered in a way it had never been hammered before. The NFS caches couldn't go fast enough -- they did not have enough RAM on them."" - EGOvoruhk, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8@Baruce
Pixar uses Linux - lo0ol, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Oh coolness, Tony Shalhoub is voicing one of the characters. That's pushing me straight to the theater to check it out.
Cars is interesting. I heard the concept a year or three ago and thought, "Wtf Pixar, that movie sounds a bit garbage." As soon as I saw the first trailer I realized that I should never doubt Pixar, of course. Looks like it'll be yet another funny Pixar film. - iSlayer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6They dont use pcs people, they use macs and you should see their x-raid servers when they glow. It looks very beautiful
- mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5you must've not seen the hi-def trailer.. it's incredible.
plus, this is a high-budget motion-picture film that they spent countless hours animating! pixar isn't going to skimp on the details! - olegk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5>I guess You've never used more than one computer to render an animation. You can't make two or more
>computers to work on a single frame
you are wrong. Even 3D Max allows parallel computing of a single frame. - devindotcom, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5From the article:
"The addition of reflections in practically every shot of the film added tremendous render time to the project. The average time to render a single frame of film for "CARS" was 17 hours. Even with a sophisticated network of 3000 computers, and state-of-the-art lightning fast processors that operate up to four times faster than they did on "The Incredibles," it still took many days to render a single second of finished film."
I smell a little inaccuracy on the article's part... Sugarbearcsa's math seems correct with those assumptions but leobaby and 22pixels probably have the real story. Can't wait for the movie, anyway. - s0ny, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"Checkout the Cars HD trailers. The crisp detail of the scenes is unreal. It's the best demonstration of HD video I've ever seen."
No doubt! I just got done watching the 1080p version and you do have to agree there is just a level of detail and reality in Pixar movies that I have never seen equaled by any other computer animated film. Over the Hedge? Chicken Little? They look like 14 year olds rendered them in their basement in comparison.
So I guess the only non-Pixar animated movie I enjoyed was Shrek. But thats still a distant 6th to The Incredibles, Toy Story, Toy Story 2, FInding Nemo, and even Monsters Inc. - jchalmer85, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4This also assumes that A), each frame is equally complex, B), they only render 1 frame per processor, when in fact the data to be crunched (the so called "bucket", usually a small portion of the total frame) is farmed out by the master server to a proc. that is free, and C) that they render the entire movie sequentially, instead of shot by shot. Shots are often times produced very much out of order, and they may not render certain passes (IE dirt, lighting, raytrace, shadow) all at once. It's possible they render a baseline pass for editing purposes, and then composite things in later. On top of that, Pixar wrote their own renderers - a highly complex and custom system called RenderMan. This is a long loooong way from 'Default Scanline Renderer' in 3d Studio.
Basically, the point of the article focuses on the characters and content of the movie, and leaves out a lot of the technical detail that goes into these films. - davidstop, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Sometimes its cheaper to spend more time rendering than to spend wages on people optimising the render times
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3They use macs, but the Render-farm is a bad ass cluster of Intel based servers.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Added to that, Pixar are not amateurs. They've pioneered some of the most advanced rendering there is in the production environment as well as having done this type of thing long before Windows was on every desktop.
- node3, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4They used to. Once Apple hardware and OS X became powerful enough, and the software became mature enough, Pixar began a major switch to Macs. I don't know the ratio of Macs-to-Linux today (anyone who works at Pixar care to comment?), but I do know a push was made towards using OS X. I would not be surprised if the entire render farm is all Xserves.
- mkaufman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3no, you're wrong.
I don't know of any rendering technique that uses information from the previous frame to speed up the process. However, it is possible to reuse shadowmaps and radiosity solutions but that does not speed it up much.
So, having almost identical frames doesn't help you at all. - funkytaco, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6The math sounds a little wrong.
- DoubtfulSalmon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Oh NOES! You cannot *borrow* it on DVD! The MAFIAA requre that you buy your own copy!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7yes they did.
- mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2i hate when people bury me just because they assume i'm wrong. look it up sometime *****.
- SquirrelOnFire, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2According to the special features disk from "The Two Towers", Treebeard, the Ent's face took 48 hours to render each frame. VERY complex face. 'Course his face was only in about 10 minutes of the movie...
- phonepimpbill, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That's one hell of an electric bill.
- salmonmoose, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3I'd actually suggest it's somewhere between the 2, if you rendered each frame out on the entire network, you would lose much of your productivity time shunting data across the network constantly; however, if you put a single machine to each frame, you would likely not be working quite as efficiently as you could;
The 3000 computers would most likely be made of several classes of computer, file servers, render managers, workstations & render nodes.
At a wild stab in the dark, I would guess around 8 cpus per frame would be about right so do your maths based on that
Also, not every frame would take the same amount of time to render, scenes with motion blur, depth of field, fog/smoke/dust effects will take longer than pure geometry. Also, that 17 hours might be a cold render time, without pre-cached data, much of the scene could be "baked" into the textures (shadows on non animated objects for example) whilst this would take significant time, it's a once only job. - billflu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Time to report this story yet?
- jmdajr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2wow... you all have me confused :)
seriously though, I'm sure it's 17 hours PER computer.
I - stimpy2k, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1According to the credits at the end of every Pixar movie, they state that the movie was rendered using Intel processors. Back in the day I guess that meant they did NOT use macs for rendering, but it's not that straightforward of an assumption anymore with Intel-based macs.
- Tiak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Things are even more interesting when you consider the "it still took many days to render a single second of finished film."
Now, I don't know how you define many, but usually one things of many as more than one... So for demonstration purposes, I'll say many is three... It still seems wrong, but the least "many" could possibly mean, so let's see how things turn out.
3 days per second, and 60 seconds a minute=180 days per minute
117 minutes in the film and 180 days per minute=21060 days
21060 days divided by 365 days a year=57.699
So took them at least 57 years 255 days.... And of course, this is a conservative measurement.... - birch25, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2it may have been 17 hours per frame, but they were definitely doing way more than one render at a time.
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