Live data from Hacker News

Pixar's Render Farm

twitter.com

11–20 of 323 posts

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#11

It's good to know they care about optimization. I had the assumption that all CGI is a rather wasteful practice where you just throw more hardware at the problem.

No, artists can throw more problem at the hardware faster than you can throw hardware against the problem. There are enough quality sliders in the problem to make each render infinitely expensive if you feel like it.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#12
post #6
post #3

My understanding (I am not an authority) is that for a long time, it has taken Pixar roughly an equal amount of time to render one frame of film. Something on the order of 24 hours. I don’t know what the real units are though (core-hours? machine-hours? simple wall clock?) I am not surprised that they “make the film fit the box”, because managing compute expenditures is such a big deal! (Edit: When I say "simple wall…

Well it can't just be one frame total every 24 hours, because an hour-long film would take 200+ years to render ;)

you solve that problem with massively parallel batch processing. Look at schedulers like Platform LSF or HTCondor.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#13
post #3

My understanding (I am not an authority) is that for a long time, it has taken Pixar roughly an equal amount of time to render one frame of film. Something on the order of 24 hours. I don’t know what the real units are though (core-hours? machine-hours? simple wall clock?) I am not surprised that they “make the film fit the box”, because managing compute expenditures is such a big deal! (Edit: When I say "simple wall…

Wait, what? 24 hours per frame?! At the standard 24fps it takes you 24 days per film second which works out to 473 years for the average 2 hour long film which can't be right.

24 hours scaled to a normal computer, not 24 hours for the entire farm per frame.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#14
post #6
post #3

My understanding (I am not an authority) is that for a long time, it has taken Pixar roughly an equal amount of time to render one frame of film. Something on the order of 24 hours. I don’t know what the real units are though (core-hours? machine-hours? simple wall clock?) I am not surprised that they “make the film fit the box”, because managing compute expenditures is such a big deal! (Edit: When I say "simple wall…

Well it can't just be one frame total every 24 hours, because an hour-long film would take 200+ years to render ;)

True. With render farms, when they say X minutes or hours per frame, they mean the time it takes 1 render node to render 1 frame. Of course, they will have lots of render nodes working on a shot at once.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#15
post #3

My understanding (I am not an authority) is that for a long time, it has taken Pixar roughly an equal amount of time to render one frame of film. Something on the order of 24 hours. I don’t know what the real units are though (core-hours? machine-hours? simple wall clock?) I am not surprised that they “make the film fit the box”, because managing compute expenditures is such a big deal! (Edit: When I say "simple wall…

Wait, what? 24 hours per frame?! At the standard 24fps it takes you 24 days per film second which works out to 473 years for the average 2 hour long film which can't be right.

Maybe they mean 24 hours per frame per core

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#16
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it can't just be one frame total every 24 hours, because an hour-long film would take 200+ years to render ;)

True. With render farms, when they say X minutes or hours per frame, they mean the time it takes 1 render node to render 1 frame. Of course, they will have lots of render nodes working on a shot at once.

[deleted]

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#17
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it can't just be one frame total every 24 hours, because an hour-long film would take 200+ years to render ;)

I’m going to guess they have more than one computer rendering frames at the same time.

Yeah, I was just (semi-facetiously) pointing out the obvious that it can't be simple wall-clock time

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#18

It's good to know they care about optimization. I had the assumption that all CGI is a rather wasteful practice where you just throw more hardware at the problem.

In the end it’s still more profitable to hire performance engineers than hardware. For the last decade I’ve heard the “toss more HW” argument. It hasn’t held because the amount of compute and storage goes up too.

That’s very much an exaggeration. Pixar/Google etc can’t run on a single desktop CPU and spends a lot of money on hardware. The best estimate I have seen is it’s scale dependent. At small budgets your generally spending most of that on people, but as the budget increase the ratio tends to shift to ever more hardware.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#19

For those that can't stand Twitter's UI: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1345146328058269696.html

Thank you. All I saw was a post with zero context, followed by a reply, followed by another reply using a different reply delineator (a horizontal break instead of a vertical line??), followed by nothing. It just ends. It's hard to believe this is real and intended.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#20
post #3

My understanding (I am not an authority) is that for a long time, it has taken Pixar roughly an equal amount of time to render one frame of film. Something on the order of 24 hours. I don’t know what the real units are though (core-hours? machine-hours? simple wall clock?) I am not surprised that they “make the film fit the box”, because managing compute expenditures is such a big deal! (Edit: When I say "simple wall…

Wait, what? 24 hours per frame?! At the standard 24fps it takes you 24 days per film second which works out to 473 years for the average 2 hour long film which can't be right.

Not saying it's true, but I assume this is all parallizable so 24 cores would complete that 1 second in 1 day, and 3600*24 cores would complete the first hour of the film in a day, etc. And each frame might have parallizable processes to get them under 1 day wall time, but still cost 1 "day" of core-hours
Post reply on HN