Ireland (boh.delete@this.outlook.ie) on January 25, 2017 8:33 am wrote:
>
> I do know one thing about rendering at Pixar though. Back in the 1990's it took ten hours or whatever
> it took, to render a final production quality frame. In the present day, it still takes ten hours
> or whatever it takes. Not because the processors haven't gotten faster, they have. But the animators
> and movie directors just keep on adding more effects and added layers into the job of rendering
> - which means the time per rendering per frame at Pixar, over a whole swathe or years and decades
> - has remained more or less constant. I do know that much, for a fact.


One other thing about this, because it's important. The real wall that animators and movie directors do run into, is not how to render 60 minutes, or 120 minutes of animation at 'X' level of finished quality. The problem is how to make a story fit into 120 minutes, in a way that doesn't compromised the telling of that story, too much. Like, you look at long form content, as it Amazon Prime, or iTunes, or Netflix or whatever. They choose to tell stories over eight hours or more and multiple episodes. Movie makers such as Pixar don't have that luxury.

It's like writing a dissertation - one quickly finds that the 15,000 word count or the 25,000 word count - achieving that isn't the problem at all. It's trying to remain inside of that envelope, and not omit whole chunks of important content. That's the real problem, that one is trying to solve with something like a rendering farm at a company such as Pixar. How can we be really clever and find some way to tell this story, in the time budget that we are allowed in movie theaters? The real 'budget' or limitation for Pixar, isn't even electricity or computation or anything - it's the 120 minute time budget that they have to work with.