17 hours to render a frame for "Cars?" I don't think so

FlintMI

FlintMI

Well-known member
from IMDB Trivia page for Cars.

"Even with a network of processors that ran four times faster than the ones on The Incredibles (2004) each frame of "Cars" took an average of 17 hours to render."

Let's do the math (I think I did this right...)

116 minute film*60=6960 seconds
6960 seconds*24=167,040 frames
167,040 frames*17 hours=2,839,680 hours

2,839,680 hours/24=118,320 days
118,320 days/365=324 years! :nads:

if it was supposed to be 17 minutes per frame, that's still 5 years render. :Drogar-Sick(DBG):
 
Divided by the number of processors and cores...

Pixar's render farm was used for SETI@Home one christmas break and they were doing 4000wu per day. My computer, which was considered very fast at the time, was doing 3 per day. Figure 1333 times a high end PC for a corporate render farm speed and then what does that come out to?

118,320 days / 1333 = 88.76 days to render. That doesn't sound out of line now.
 
not so sure...

not so sure...

Mike Poindexter said:
Divided by the number of processors and cores...

Pixar's render farm was used for SETI@Home one christmas break and they were doing 4000wu per day. My computer, which was considered very fast at the time, was doing 3 per day. Figure 1333 times a high end PC for a corporate render farm speed and then what does that come out to?

118,320 days / 1333 = 88.76 days to render. That doesn't sound out of line now.
Click to expand...
Where do you get 1,333 from? Sources please. As of 2003, Pixar uses Intel 1,024 Xenon processers (source: http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20030210comp_a.htm)

That may be different now.

And IMDB states "Even with a network of processors that ran four times faster" which implies total computational power, not per CPU. At least, that's how I read it... :Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)

Trivia is typically user submitted, so it's a typo or BS from a user, but I'd like to know the actual time per frame.
 
240 frames took me 14 days (if I remember correctly...there's a post somewhere around about it) on my SF entry. A single Xeon processor.

Maybe it was 4 days. A week? A longass time, anyway.

I'm not surprised by anything anymore.
 
Here is an excerpt from an article, it looks like at one point in time it took 17 hours per frame, but they probably shaved that down considerably for the final render.

One of the biggest tasks was being able to accomplish all of the expanded lighting techniques while cutting down on the render time, which, early on, approached 17 hours per frame. “We instrumented a lot of what we did with statistics so we could glance at the numbers and figure out if we were doing what we should be doing and to catch our mistakes,” Ostby adds. “Say we had an object that was using ray tracing for shadows. If we knew that the whole world was looking to the car for shadows, it could be expensive. But if you could limit that to just one road, you could simplify things dramatically, particularly when you have the vegetation that we had, which contains a lot of detail. So we wanted to make sure that the part of the ground that was checking for information from plants was doing so only from plants in its neighborhood.
Click to expand...

Here's the link: http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=pageone&article_no=2900&page=4
 
FlintMI said:
Where do you get 1,333 from? Sources please. As of 2003, Pixar uses Intel 1,024 Xenon processers (source: http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20030210comp_a.htm)

That may be different now.

And IMDB states "Even with a network of processors that ran four times faster" which implies total computational power, not per CPU. At least, that's how I read it... :Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)

Trivia is typically user submitted, so it's a typo or BS from a user, but I'd like to know the actual time per frame.
Click to expand...

I didn't have a source for that - I was just using math based on how many work units they were churning out for Seti@Home vs. what I was putting out. Considering that I was working with 1 signigican digit of precision, I think 1333 is fairly close to 1024 - within about 30%.

Actually, when I read "Even with a network of processors that ran four times faster" it is saying that their processors are running four times faster, which again is about on par with my computer power increase compared to what I had back then and also tracks Moore's Law well. Then again, if you have the same number of processors and they quadruple in speed, your network computing power is roughly quadrupled as long as you don't bottleneck on something.

While Pixar has a lot of computer rendering power, it isn't unheard of and certainly one could get a decent amount of processing power if they are buddy/buddy with the IT manager at a large firm who could have render projects run as a service in the background at low priority, cranking up to full speed in off hours and weekends.
 
Disney and Pixar both have pretty decent sized render farms. With queing systems
(disney uses LSF), your desktop machine is also available and is added to the que
if you leave it unattended for any period of time. There is a LOT of processing power
available and its running 24x7.

Its always amazing to have a job running with an average priority level then have
some big wig need to see a test fast and they bump the jobs to top priority and
you can really see the speed at which frames are belted out!
 
Ok.. here is the poop - I worked in LA at foundation imaging in 2001 and they did Starship troopers, Voyager, Dan Dare etc.. 8 min per frame was the max in render time -(Lightwave) if it was past that you had to alter your scene so that it would go back under 8 min - 145 computers took 23 min to render an entire footage needed for a half hour cartoon back then.. so I doubt the industry has changed that much..
 
Wait... you're saying you had experience with certain computers 5 years ago and nothing much has changed since? Maybe I'm missing your point?
 
jimwww said:
Ok.. here is the poop - I worked in LA at foundation imaging in 2001
Click to expand...

Did you guys finish at video resolution?:)

Back in 2001, on the other side of the valley, I was on Treasure Planet with
2400ish CPUs in the render farm and 3 hours a frame wasn't gonna turn too
many heads :)
 
You also have to consider WHAT is being rendered. 3D models, heavy in geometry is going to take ages. But, with large render farms, it isn't surprising that a frame could take hours.

I can't wait for the day when computers are fast enough to render things instantly...but then again, the source material will then be heavier....it just never ends....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top