[mprovost]

Often you can't reliably re-render shots from a few months earlier on the same project due to the pipeline changing so rapidly. Nevermind going back to the tapes for files that probably came off Irix workstations originally. The file formats for assets (models and textures) are backwards compatible enough that you can usually reconstruct models and maybe animation. So having an archive of the original files doesn't mean that you can re-render at higher resolutions without a lot of effort. The originals would need to be redone with more detail in any case to benefit from the higher resolution.

[cracell]

I'm not familiar with modern VFX software. But couldn't you just take a snapshot of the server and then load that onto a box in the future if you wanted to re-render it?

[iampliny]

Archive-by-VM has been attempted from time to time. In the case of VFX there isn't a single server, but many different workstations, servers, render blades, etc. So preserving the entire pipeline in amber is a challenge.

[mprovost]

And, somebody has to pay for it. The producers of the current project won't allocate any of their budget to preserve something for a (hypothetical) future sequel/re-release - that is somebody else's problem. The only places that I know of that do a decent job with archiving are animation houses like Pixar that own their own IP.

[KaiserPro]

its a question of cost. Sure you can keep a pipeline frozen, but thats very expensive, and there is little need to do it.

its just cheaper and simpler to re-do it from the clean footage, or perhaps get some of the original models.

[NegativeLatency]

Possibly but I believe some software packages use a render server to farm the heavy lifting out to