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Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

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Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#81

Post by Daub »

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.

Nice to hear this story.

I teach in an animation program. We tell our students over and over that animation is not like the movies: re-=shoots, pick-up shots, multiple take etc are simply not possible. That is why the bloopers reel in Toy Story was so ironic.

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#82

Post by Daub »

asciimov wrote: post #50
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…

The computer in question was a Silicon Graphics workstation (pictured in the article). What the image does not convey is the sheer gargantuan size of SG machines. Desktop computing it may have been, but in some cases people actually used their SG boxes as physical desktops.

The SG Octane that features in this story was actually one of the more petit versions, but still it would take two people to move comfortably.

One is shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHsA8iq4N0s

SG machines used to be the object of desire for all digital artists, sadly now gone the way of all things.

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#83

Post by diskzero »

Daub wrote: post #81
diskzero wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nice to hear this story. I teach in an animation program. We tell our students over and over that animation is not like the movies: re-=shoots, pick-up shots, multiple take etc are simply not possible. That is why the bloopers reel in Toy Story was so ironic.

Cool. I hope your students are finding places at some good studios.

Not only did DWA have bloopers, there are entire sequences rendered and ready to go that didn't make it in the final movie. There is also some shorts and an entire film that made it to pre-viz that never were released.

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#84

Post by dingosity »

haswell wrote: post #45
vikingerik wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need backups. You need restores .

Generally speaking, I think this is what testing a backup means.

I recommend restoring your backup as a test. Restoring a blank tape often doesn't do anything. And if it does do something, it's probably not what you want.

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#85

Post by jfb »

acuozzo wrote: post #62
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.

Disney did this with "Lady and the Tramp". Cinemascope and an academy ratio versions were animated individually in order to make the best use of the frame shape.

I didn't know this. The level of effort involved there is just staggering.

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#86

Post by pj_mukh »

bee_rider wrote: post #41
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...

This is a huge selling point for rendering software in almost all media. Working on something for ecommerce here: https://www.dabble.so/

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#87

Post by knodi123 »

LanceH wrote: post #48
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 pant…

I was manually monitoring a slow query of mine with "SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST", and at one point I saw "delete from readings" pop up. Readings being a massive, massive table that drove most of our functionality. I quickly killed the query and went about trying to see who else was connected to the DB, but then I saw the query come up again. So I killed it again, and second later it came back.

I had to shout one of the sales guys over, and tell him to go office to office and demand anybody who was deleting rows to stop. Meanwhile I stayed at my desk and kept killing the query.

Shortly after, I heard our CTO yell "shit!", and the query went away. He was trying to clear out his local testing DB, and didn't realize he was in a production shell. I don't know if I saved the company, but I certainly saved us from a couple of days of downtime and maybe an equal or larger amount of lost data. But the CTO couldn't praise me publicly or he'd look like an idiot, so that was the end of that story!

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#89

Post by dang »

joezydeco wrote: post #74
dang wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flagging from the new page doesn't go nowhere - it's handled the same way as flagging from any other page.

Of course. But I'm guessing that dupes aren't flagged as heavily as something illegal/inappropriate/ads/etc. So they survive more often, correct?

They must, because dupes are less obvious than those other things. You need to either have seen the story on HN before and remember it; or do a search.

Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)

#90

Post by speed_spread »

Daub wrote: post #82
asciimov wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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…

The computer in question was a Silicon Graphics workstation (pictured in the article). What the image does not convey is the sheer gargantuan size of SG machines. Desktop computing it may have been, but in some cases people actually used their SG boxes as physical desktops. The SG Octane that features in this story was actually one of the more petit versions, but still it would take two people to move comfortably. On…

> sadly now gone the way of all things

Which is to say, overpriced on eBay and yet mostly unusable without now-discontinued proprietary applications and compilers.

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