[ChicagoBoy11]

> The rendering time for one frame was from 4 minutes to 15 minutes

I have zero experience in this space but this bit caught my attention. If I'm understanding this correctly, he is saying that the production render of a single frame would take anywhere from 4 to 15 minutes PER FRAME?

If that's the case, the fact that the video is around 200 seconds long would imply that the lower-bound estimate of the time it would have taken to produce the final render of this is around 320hrs assuming 24fps. That's two weeks. I can't imagine the artist actually had to wait two weeks to render his product -- what am I missing?

[dvt]

> I can't imagine the artist actually had to wait two weeks to render his product -- what am I missing?

You're not missing anything :) I worked briefly in the special effects industry[0] and it takes a long time to render stuff. Monsters University took 29 hours to render a frame[1] and they had a whole server farm.

[0] There's an old joke that everyone in LA works in the 'biz' at least once.

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/24/the-making-of-pixars-lates...

[ChicagoBoy11]

Wait so 29hrs GIVEN the server farm or 29hrs of computing time, thus requiring a server farm? Can't be the former... right? Wouldn't that mean decades of computing to render it?

And that was part of my question too: Given the rendering time faced by dono, would someone like he have access to technology to distribute this over a few machines/in the cloud or is that something that just big studios have the capacity to do?

[asperous]

1 frame takes 29 hours but they render frames concurrently (so the whole thing only takes a couple months).

See: https://web.archive.org/web/20080215205807/http://www.pixar....

Slide #13

[raphman]

You have a live OpenGL preview. Furthermore, you can render the scenes in lower resolution for editing the movie, and then switch the low-res clips with hi-res ones. However, rendering reflections and refractions, particle effects, fog, motion blur, etc. in HD resolution still requires a lot of processing power/time

[je42]

a renderfarm ? :)

[asperous]

A large number of computers in a cluster dedicated to rendering