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Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

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Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#41

Post by bee_rider »

jfb wrote: post #32

I remember learning that when Pixar did a pan-and-scan version of one of their movies, they wouldn't just use a floating 4:3 frame over the 16:9 original -- they'd re-render the movie , moving items around as necessary, to get a better framing. The perfectionism was palpable when we'd meet with them.

This seems like a huge advantage with mostly-digital movies.

I wonder how easily a Marvel or Starwars movie could be re-rendered like this. Technically there are actors of course, but they are usually the main focus of the scene anyway...

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#42

Post by locallost »

I remember the stories from Ed Catmull's book Creativity Inc. Although not that they tossed the movie out after almost deleting it anyway, like it's said in the article. The story about starting from scratch was that they left the team that did it alone, but it was their first movie and it fell flat. Reading about it then felt like a dick move and kind of questionable, but even more so later when I'd read that Lassiter, who was the most critical one, is a certified creep / jerk. So I don't know, but I guess if you're successful in the end your opinion is never questioned.

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#43

Post by pstuart »

dingosity wrote: post #4

This is a great example of why it's a good idea to always test your backups.

In the olden days when I was the admin for a small shop we would immediately restore the backup to a second system to be used as a playground. Win/win: verified restore and a place to test/train with production data.

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#44

Post by haswell »

nathanvanfleet wrote: post #34
trynewideas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering how good Toy Story 2 was, "sad" is an odd way of putting it, unless you're talking about the ensuing crunch. There are a few more details about that side of the story elsewhere: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/... https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/toy-story-2-disasters-almos...

The sad part is that the thing they saved didn't actually get used and was just thrown out. So it wasn't exactly the big save it's made up to be. But if it wasn't framed as a big save maybe it wouldn't be posted every week or so.

If the thing they saved hadn’t been saved, it makes me wonder if they would have remade it as written, and then either have to throw that out or release what was by all accounts not a good first pass.

I suspect some character models were reused, and recovering what they did enabled the rewrite that came after.

I think it’s still fair to characterize this as a big save even if it wasn’t used as-is. They arguable needed the first version to decide to move away from it.

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#46

Post by jen20 »

opencl wrote: post #19
yakubin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW how do you test a personal workstation backup? I don’t have backup workstations to rotate between by backing one up, restoring on the other, working and then cycling between them in this manner. How do you test the restore procedure without risking destruction of the original?

You can buy an extra storage device and swap them out (either physically or swapping the boot order), as long as your workstation doesn't have soldered in storage.

Even if it does, you can usually boot from an external volume anyway.

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#47

Post by coding123 »

diskzero wrote: post #25
jefftk wrote: post #8

More details on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Pixar-company/Did-Pixar-accidentally-d... The ending is sad -- that intrepid recovery mostly didn't end up used: And then, some months later, Pixar rewrote the film from almost the ground up, and we made Toy Story 2 again. That rewritten film was the one you saw in theatres and that you can watch now on Blu-Ray.

I think we made How to Train Your Dragon three times at DreamWorks. So many rewrites, director changes, character redesign, etc. If you ever wonder why a feature length animated film can cost over $300 million dollars, this is one reason.

The dragon looks exactly like one of my cats. Thank you for iterating.

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#48

Post by LanceH »

raldi wrote: post #20

I'm reminded of the time I was on the InfoSec team at a company you've all heard of where all software development was done on a handful of Unix servers with a shared network file system. I reached out to the Systems team to suggest they look into mounting the home directories with the no-setuid option, and one of them invited me over to pair at their desk. They explained that there was a trick, where you could leave…

I was one ROLLBACK away from the Users table in production. Mid 90's, we fixed things in production all the time, and I left the where clause out. There were no soft deletes back then, we just deleted the row, and that would trigger the deletion of user resources elsewhere...

I'm sure we had backups, but it would have been bad and resulted in a lot more fixes in production. I guess the upside of the "seat of the pants" days is that there was poor referential integrity, so it wouldn't have taken out anything else like billing history.

edit: I never typed anything so carefully as I typed that rollback. I almost want to say there was an autocommit when closing the session, but my memory on that is fuzzy. MS SQL Server, if anyone knows. From then on, when called on for sketchy but necessary actions, I write the where clause first, run it as a select, see the number of results, wrap it in a transaction, etc...

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#49

Post by sdevonoes »

> In order for her to work on the movie while out, they had plugged the machine up to the local network and copied the whole file tree over.

Now image the same situation in 2022:

- there is no acceptable backup for the whole movie (or let's say, app)

- only you know there is one acceptable copy... but it's on your personal laptop. You did copy it back in the day because, well, let's say you wanted to run the app in our local machine

There is no way you would tell your team/boss: "Hey guys, no worries! I have a perfect copy of it!", because why on earth did you copy work material into your personal laptop?! That's the rule number 1 of every modern tech company: don't mix work stuff with personal laptop (and the other way around: don't use work laptop for personal stuff).

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#50

Post by asciimov »

sdevonoes wrote: post #49

> In order for her to work on the movie while out, they had plugged the machine up to the local network and copied the whole file tree over. Now image the same situation in 2022: - there is no acceptable backup for the whole movie (or let's say, app) - only you know there is one acceptable copy... but it's on your personal laptop. You did copy it back in the day because, well, let's say you wanted to run the app in o…

- If you can trust an employee with a $25K ($50K today) computer, trusting them with a complete source tree isn't a stretch.

- I'd be more pissed off that somebody didn't have a complete backup somewhere, even if it was a personal laptop they used for work.

- Back then, most people didn't have home computers. Hell nowadays a home pc isn't a guarantee, as most of my (non-engineering) coworkers only have cellphones and ipads at home. And while I agree don't mix work and play, most of these people do.

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