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bongodongobob12/09/20243 repliesview on HN

What were you working on? It took a month to render 2 seconds of video?


Replies

throwup23812/09/2024

VFX heavy feature for a Disney subsidiary. Each frame is rendered independently of each other - it’s not like video encoding where each frame depends on the previous one, they all have their own scene assembly that can be sent to a server to parallelize rendering. With enough compute, the entire film can be rendered in a few days. (It’s a little more complicated than that but works to a first order approximation)

I don’t remember how long the final rendering took but it was nearly two months and the final compute budget was 7 or 8 figures. I think we had close to 100k cores running at peak from three different render farms during crunch time, but don’t take my word for it I wasn’t producing the picture.

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Arelius12/09/2024

Most VFX productions take over 2 CPU hours a frame for final video, and have for a very long time. It takes shorter then a month since this gets parallelized on large render farms.

elmigranto12/09/2024

I would guess there is more than one computer :)

Pixar's stuff famously takes days per frame.

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