Why It Takes Pixar 3 Years To Render A Movie

[@trimeta]

When Sam started talking about a hypothetical Pixar movie with stock footage of a wall, I was sure he was going to suggest they make a film about bricks.

[@earnestbrown6524]

He's such a brick tease.

[@Imthefake]

i think he intentionally baited us with that brick wall

[@caltheuntitled8021]

Now I need a Pixar movie about sentient bricks struggling with absurdism

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

Pixar's Bricks, coming to theaters 2059. Find out how fully interesting bricks can be.

[@Iskelderon]

Pretty much what Lego's making tons of money off.

[@DdW85]

I once met a guy in university who studied game design, where they learn movie animations as well. The guy reserved the academy's special computer over night. He was proud to render just a couple of seconds of a patch of grass perfectly moving in a breeze in that time.

[@PrograError]

bless him if there's a blackout...

[@lancelindlelee7256]

Honestly, games are just interactive movies at this point (in terms of animation). Instead of the animator moving the characters themselves, they give them a set of animations to trigger whenever the player does X.

[@sabikikasuko6636]

Oh my god I totally understand that feeling. Games are all about trickery, you can't use the best techniques there are to make the best results because most computers can't do them all reliably 60 times a second, so you HAVE yo make consesisons that make it look slightly worse but that are BLAZINGLY fast. As a result, you wonder what would your scenes look like if you just had more than a 60th of a second yo render them. It's like an itch that you just have to scratch every now and then 🤣

[@Attaxalotl]

"Saying the computer does all the work in 3D animation is like saying the oven does all the work in baking" -Someone much smarter than me

[@iyad8644]

Yup, most people think digital art, whether it's 2D or 3D is just a matter of telling the computer to make something and it automatically spits out art lol

[@circuit10]

@@iyad8644 That is starting to be true now though

[@monodragon]

@@circuit10 ai art isnt considered a creative work though

[@Clumrat]

@@monodragon according to who

[@circuit10]

@@monodragon Why not?

[@Real28]

The lighting work they did in Toy Story 4 was OUTRAGEOUS.

[@battosaijenkins946]

@Half as Interesting, Hi there. As an OpenGL graphics programmer and blender practitioner, you forgot to mention that all this rendering is done silent, NO audio, no sounds nothing. It is then up to the sound effect gurus to come up with amazing sound effects and unique music to tie everything together. And thus, that also takes time... 👍

[@pyropulseIXXI]

@@battosaijenkins946 Did you really just say that? NO F*CKING SH*T RENDERING SOMETHING DOENS'T ADD AUDIO. NO F*CKING SH*T IT IS SILENT ffs, man, wtf are you doing? Why are you telling us that "Did you know that Trees have no knees? It is true; when you plant a true, it is done without knees growing out of the tree; no bones; no cartilage, nothing. It is then up tp the "knees upon trees' gurus to come up with amazing knees and unique copes to tie the tree together via knee sombray" It is just a pure non sequitur

[@nahuelma97]

I wouldn't know. I watched Toy Story 3 once, in 2011, cried an awful lot more than expected which was -10 tears per hour, and have stayed away from any Toy Story movie, old or new, ever since, and have no eminent plans to change my course of action.

[@YusuffYT]

@@battosaijenkins946 That depends on the workflow, in the case of Pixar, they record dialogue first and then make the animation later, it'd be highly inefficient to make the voice actors try matching what the 3D render is doing, and with tech like mocap the process of animating mouth, hands and other parts of the body is way better!

[@blindedbliss]

@@battosaijenkins946 thanks, helpful fellow human being. There are also the voice cast.

[@MikeCauchiArt]

Wanna know the best part? We don't just render films once in the film industry, in fact most shots for a film will have been rendered 10/20/100 times before we (or the client) are happy with everything. Plus, all of the departments that lead up to those final shots usually have to do their own renders too. I'm a lookdev artist (Part of surfacing) and it's very normal for me and most other artists to send renders every single night :D

[@Hasteroth]

if I'm not mistaken, in large scale productions it's commonplace to make test renders of individual frames in each scene to make sure it looks right. As well as rendering out scenes without the final lighting in place to review the animations. Once the final renders start, they render in pieces the can be redone if something is wrong, then put it all together at the end.

[@MikeCauchiArt]

@@Hasteroth You are not mistaken, and yeah you are right that movies are rendered in chunks. Its very normal to have some parts of a movie rendered months before other parts :) During the process shots usually start with super low quality settings (Noisy images, some features missing) and we will render 1 in every 10 frames. This pretty much just lets us see a slideshow of what key moments in each shot will look like. After that, settings get increased and more frames are rendered. Eventually, we are rendering final quality for every frame so we can start getting shots ready for edit. The whole time though, characters and animation are being updated, so we need to render the lighting again to see the updates until the film is final. That entire process is repeated for every shot until either it looks right OR we run out of time :)

[@marcellinoyohanes43]

I am curious on what the frames looked like on the "drawing bench" or the "workstation" stage. Do you get a low resolution, inaccurate look of the same scene, much like how you can preview your edited videos on video editing programs with lower resolutions? Or are you guys just looking at a bunch of numbers, functions/programs dictating the lighting/scene?

[@madrid_seu]

@@marcellinoyohanes43 look up "Maya playblast" on KZbin, that's pretty much what it looks like

[@LineOfThy]

@@marcellinoyohanes43 sometimes you just screw all the lighting and simulations and leave only the base objects

[@canuckguy0313]

My daughter is an animator (not with Pixar) and she said this is all pretty spot on. (And that “rigging is THE WORST! Don’t go into rigging (as a job)!!”)

[@therealPelo]

As an amateur animator, I have SO much respect for anyone who does rigging. I'm always blown away by high detail rigging and human animation, because i know how much time it takes. It's also a big reason why i stick to stills lol

[@simplyepic3258]

The good part about rigging is that if you do it professionally you'll probably be able to easily get a job because nobody else wants to do it

[@dimensional7915]

Professional riggers are a special breed of human

[@finalpharoah1]

As an animator, I agree 100% rigging is the absolute pits. I'd rather chew glass

[@FreeManFreeThought]

Rigging: "I adjusted the pinky toe tolerance, why is my head spinning uncontrollably?"

[@jdatlas4668]

Honestly the tech behind computer generated stuff like this is incredibly fascinating. Even "live action" movies have huge amounts of it at this point, to the point where the things actually shot often look almost nothing like the finished product. Unfortunately a lot of the details are kept rather tightly under wraps, so it's hard to learn most of the interesting details :(

[@glitchybrawl7012]

im not a bot, i think

[@silly_lil_guy]

@@glitchybrawl7012 please click on all the images with cars in them

[@tobi437a]

What country is your pfp

[@jdatlas4668]

@@glitchybrawl7012 me neither. I hope. Wait, what if I am and nobody ever told me? Sorry, I need to have an existential crisis real quick, I'll be right back.

[@fbiagentmiyakohoshino8223]

that avatar gave me a stroke

[@crazybird199]

My respect for animators has skyrocketed.

[@gothicboulder]

@Bully peter nobody cares

[@YouAreBreathing]

My respect for animators definitely went Up.

[@veganpatriotmemedogenfrens7209]

They're not personally rendering it tho

[@crazybird199]

@Bully peter dont remember asking

[@crazybird199]

@@veganpatriotmemedogenfrens7209 still, they put in a lot of work

[@jessetorres8738]

It's funny rewatching Toy Story 1 after watching Soul, Turning Red, & Lightyear then noticing how the humans in that movie look like mannequins when compared to these more recent films.

[@BrowncoatInABox]

And it was ground breaking for how advanced it was at the time lol

[@Milnoc]

@@BrowncoatInABox What also made it a success was an incredibly solid story. And it's funny listening to the commentary track and learning that Pizza Planet was a last minute name change because everyone almost completely missed the obvious relationship with Buzz!

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

Yeah... there's a reason the animators chose to create characters made out of plastic.

[@soundscape26]

Well, 720p was considered HD back in the day. Considering we have 8k (and even beyond) nowadays I'm not sure what to call it anymore.

[@mattbosley3531]

Frankly I didn't think the people in Soul were particularly realistic. They didn't move like real people. It was cartoonish.

[@KevinBerstene]

Even though you didn't explicitly say something incorrect about it, it's worth mentioning that the "p" in "1080p" doesn't stand for pixels, it stands for "progressive scan" (i.e. draw each row every frame), as opposed to 1080i, for "interlaced" (i.e. draw every other row each frame).

[@ShaunYoung]

Actually I think he did say something wrong. HD is actually 720p, and Full HD is 1080p

[@EebstertheGreat]

To get even more nitpicky, a "frame" in TV jargon is a complete image consisting of every single line, while a "field" refers to a single pass by the electron gun. So in interlaced scan, every field consists of 262.5 (notional) lines, skipping every other line, and thus a "frame" is any arbitrary pair of adjacent fields (since there is never a single complete frame drawn in interlaced scan). So NTSC television is still 29.97 frames per second, even though it is 59.94 fields per second.

[@PrograError]

yes but no, most screen these days is "progressive" anyway so what he said doesn't deviate from fact as animation is frames in quick succession.

[@soundscape26]

@@ShaunYoung It is... but with the technological advances calling 720p HD is quite anachronistic.

[@patrickmeyer2802]

And they're actually more likely to render the movie in DCI 2k, which is 2048 pixels wide, with the vertical pixel resolution varying with aspect ratio.

[@jans879]

Thank you for the hotdog explanation. There is no possible way I could have comprehended the comparison if its not for the hotdogs. My gratitude is insurmountable.

[@kstxevolution9642]

americans will use anything but the metric system

[@FacterinoCommenterino]

Today's fact: A small population of Mammoths survived on the Wrangel Island until 1650 BC, about 900 years after the construction of The Great Pyramid of Giza were completed.

[@glitchybrawl7012]

✨️magic trick!

[@Riomojo]

Damnit I was gonna comment that

[@raptorfromthe6ix833]

aight imma go there

[@agrobots]

Thank you! I just had to Google where that is. It looks like a fun place. Unfortunately for us westerners who would like to visit, we will need to wait for Putin to calm down

[@rdspam]

What was the rendering time?

[@katherinegarlock2249]

For everyone who has seen Coco, remember the scene when they are going over the bridge, specifically the moment where Miguel looks up and sees the other side. When it was all put together, but not yet optimized for rendering, one frame took 22,000 hours to render alone. Each one of those lights is impacting the color of each pixel, and there millions of tiny lights there.

[@lisahoshowsky4251]

This is one of those things I’ve never really thought about but makes instant sense. I do architectural renders and they can take 24+ hours for a single photo. Even if I send it off to a cloud service it can take a couple. Crazy what goes into everything.

[@Iskelderon]

It's actually a multiple of that number of pixels, since many renders these days are done in layers that are then composited, so if something goes wrong you only have to re-render the wonky elements instead of having to rerun the calculations for every single element in the image. Also gives them more freedom when they're fine-tuning the color grading and other things later on.

[@Hasteroth]

lighting is often done last too as it typically takes the longest.

[@MacToecutter]

Not really. AOVs or multilayering are more or less the raw data of a rendering. The beauty pass is a composition of the layers.

[@NakAlienEd]

I remember seeing that Mainframe Studios, the people behind the show "ReBoot" were able to render in super-high detail & HD, but it just took way too long, so we ended up with much smoother & less-detailed sets. I saw a couple of the promo HD shots that they had rendered & they were pretty sweet. Allegedly, if the master files still existed, the whole show could be remastered, but, also allegedly, the master files have gone missing.

[@NakAlienEd]

@Tin Watchman I'd link the pictures of the Hi-Def renderings, but ReBoot stuff is really hard to search for; what with it being an older niche show, and having common computer names for most characters & locations.

[@TikkaQrow]

If any show could use a reboot, it's reboot. I think that was all rasterized graphics too, no ray tracing yet until Pixar I think. They used a version of the Silicon Graphics computer that's briefly showcased in the original Jurassic Park, that goofy Unix machine the little girl 'hacks', a $100,000 computer from the early 90s. Not sure the model reboot used specifically tho, Jurassic Park used the Silicon Graphics Crimson

[@lmpeters]

I read that the same thing happened with Babylon 5: they rendered all of the space scenes in SD because that was all they needed for 90's broadcast television, but then they lost the master files and couldn't re-render for the later DVD and Blu-Ray releases.

[@NakAlienEd]

@@TikkaQrow your comment just made me remember that they literally had a character named "Ray Tracer", he was the web surfer Enzo & AndrAI meet when they're game hopping.

[@larsjonasson2959]

Would maybe be possible with AI upscaling

[@pleasantgoose]

i was in a CAD class in high school, and at one point we convinced the instructor to use some of that year's budget to buy what was effectively a box of multi-core Xeons with an ethernet port. being able to just Let It Simmer overnight was a huge morale boost

[@seanlally7384]

What'd you model with it?

[@K16711]

I have studied animation for years and this is the first time I feel like I understand what ray tracing means. Good stuff.

[@MarcusH...]

How can you not have understood it until now when consumer GPUs have had ray tracing for 4 years already? It's been explained to death over and over these past few years

[@finalpharoah1]

Same here 🤣🤣🤣

[@Bob_Smith19]

We found someone who doesn’t game. Ray tracing isn’t new technology. It’s been implemented in games for years but is finally coming into its own.

[@Jason9637]

@@Bob_Smith19 Ray tracing itself isn't anything new. It's realtime ray tracing that makes RTX special.

[@iz5772]

I'm not in the field , but Stull know what Ray tracing is and how it work. I call bullshit .

[@gcarsk]

The stat about dying from extreme hotdog consumption was incredibly funny. I love Sam’s stupid jokes

[@asterlite2747]

Doesnt Adam write the jokes?

[@emberthecatgirl8796]

@@asterlite2747 It’s a gestalt

[@armaanaryaan5464]

maybe u try getting out more and meet real ppl once and awhile

[@asterlite2747]

@@armaanaryaan5464 who are you talking to lmao

[@ChuckSploder]

Timestamp 1:24

[@Blaster_Unity_UB]

Wow! Just 3 yrs to render a film, imagine how much time it takes to just even make everything before it!

[@Blaster_Unity_UB]

Don't spam

[@jordanspencer2157]

I too talk to bots

[@prashank]

@@jordanspencer2157 maybe they are lonely

[@Brent-jj6qi]

@@prashank if they are, then good

[@Malandrin]

avatar took several good years to get completed

[@lucassalinas1165]

I think that after this video the animators deserve to be fed as a reward

[@davaychyk]

Then accidentally someone presses "stop rendering"

[@catalintimofti1117]

They almost lost a toy story movie 💀💀💀💀

[@tempest_dawn]

@@catalintimofti1117 yeah that's honestly a really shocking story on its own too - like two years of work all accidentally deleted and the whole studio in a panic until they found someone had taken an off-site backup without telling anyone

[@baksatibi]

Just for the reference, it was Toy Story 2. They actually lost about 90% of the assets (models, textures, etc., not the rendered frames) and their backups had stopped working for about a month. A technical director called Galyn Susman had a backup from just a few days ago because she was working from home.

[@zan1971]

Sentient socks talking about nihilism is something I would definitely watch. Take notes Pixar!

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

I would watch that, but I don't want it to be a Pixar movie. It should be done with actual sock puppets.

[@craigfeaster9535]

Unmatched: sentient socks whose partner is lost in the great dryer vortex coming to grips with a solo existence.

[@BJGvideos]

That sounds like something Calvin and Hobbes would come up with for a school project

[@TheHylianBatman]

Wow, that's amazing. This is one of the best HAI videos in a long time. It's funny but still super duper informative. I NEVER understood ray tracing, but now I do! And I feel like a fool for not having understood it previously! And the insight into the 3D film process. It's a delight. What an excellent video. I hope Jet Lag gets the gold play button.

[@crytocc]

No need to feel like a fool; like so many subjects in tech, it's often just _really_ poorly explained, making it much more difficult to understand than it needs to be. That's a problem of the teacher, not of the person trying to understand it :)

[@junkyardmonkie]

I love the idea of rendering can be turned into the phrase, “What color is this pixel?”

[@asdalotl]

listening to books on audible is my favorite way to protest pixar's rendering inefficiency, it amazes me you know your audience so well!

[@ThinkerYT]

You want a NASA computer? Na.. *You want a Pixar Rendering PC*

[@pigeoncubes]

3:09 thanks for finding the perfect stock footage for the average expression of an animator. i felt every emotion that made me drop out of my 3D animation degree just looking at the screen

[@LeelssDelta]

One thing you forgot to mention, When they came back to do TS3 all of the original models from TS1&2 were obsolete and had the muscle/joint points wrong, the models were so low on detail, the physics behind each character needed to be re-done. Andrew Stanton i think said it took them just a year of reworking the old models before they started the motion tracing or animating for 3. With 4, because of that work they were able to do on 3, they were able to subsidize a lot of the time normally spent on character creation/design into getting high resolution details and background objects. Albeit the technology from 1/2 to 4 has changed and grown considerably so take it as a grain of salt.

[@pokepress]

Also, sometimes scenes are rendered multiple times for different countries, usually to swap out textures on billboards, newspapers, etc., but sometimes models get swapped as well. For example, in Inside Out they changed toppings on pizza to reflect different tastes in those countries.

[@khesesian]

0:49 HD is 720p (1280x720), whereas 1080p is called Full HD for clarification.

[@monsieurr33fer]

The hot dog analogy absolutely took me out 😂😂😂

[@1224chrisng]

it took Sam out too, and about 10'000'000 pigs

[@ajogar]

you never really respect the writing of this channel until he simplifies something you understand in depth. this is a great explanation of an incredibly complex process that honestly anyone could understand

[@sebastiane7556]

It was only a matter of time until we got "the logistics of" videos on HAI as well.

[@trimeta]

I legitimately saw that thumbnail and thought I was on Wendover, until Sam made a joke.

[@uzair851]

0:50 correction: HD is 720p, FHD (Full High Definition) is 1080p, Technically 1080p is "HD" but its not commonly known as "HD"

[@niek024]

That must be a regional thing then. Over here (Netherlands), TVs that had a resolution of just 720p (but could show a scaled down 1080p) were labelled 'HD ready', as 'HD' was reserved for 1080p.

[@theodanielwollff]

@@niek024 HD has two requirements. It must be 1280x720 or greater in resolution and is progressive video.

[@ugwuanyicollins6136]

720p HD 1080p FHD 1440p QHD 2160p 4K UHD 7680p 8k UHD

[@stephenchurch1784]

Even rendering photos takes ages. I turn portfolios into slideshows for my school art gallery's digital frames and the number of times I have to explain that, unless the school wants to buy me a really nice computer, there is no possible way I can get them a slideshow in 3 hours is astonishing

[@kice]

1080p technically stands for 1080 pixel height progressive scanning (video/monitor ). Not a resolution like 1920x1080 or 1280x720.

[@traso56]

a minor detail is that movies generally use path tracing and not ray tracing. They are similar but not really the same

[@std-ci4ws]

The title should be the insane logistics behind 3d movie rendering

[@Thirds]

I'm a visual effects & CG generalist, this video gets the basics of it very well. But, with everything, it's a deep rabbit hole.

[@dammtri]

Out of all the hundreds of people who do the extremely hard and complex work that goes into making an animated movie, the highest pay in the millions goes to the few movie stars who read out their lines in front of the microphone while making funny faces, arguably the easiest job there was in the whole project.

[@zionkelly]

it's called capitalism baby. hard work never equates to the most pay. Ask people who work in amazon warehouses

[@wolfetteplays8894]

@@zionkelly socialism doesn’t equate to accurate pay either, neither does communism, neither does fordism, neither does soulism. Stop acting like it’s exclusive to capitalism smh.

[@MuchWhittering]

To clarify for anyone who was slightly misled, the p in 1080p does not stand for pixels. It means progressive. As opposed to 1080i, interlaced.

[@syed--2023]

And what do progressive and interlaced mean?

[@NatjoOfficial]

0:56 Man, never thought I'd have to say this. You described FHD here, HD is 720p, and FHD is 1080p. It's hard to understand, bullshit and I genuinely can't blame the sweatshop worker you have locked up in the basement for getting this wrong.

[@calebmcurby8580]

You know what FHD stands for? _Full_ high definition. Meaning 1080p is the _epitome_ of what it means to be HD. It is still perfectly acceptable to call 1080p HD. It's not the _only_ thing that's HD, but it's still okay. Your pedantry is misguided.

[@lzygenius]

3:35 Better yet, talking socks overcoming "nylonism"

[@CellHead]

I was so excited to see this topic, I literally centered my college capstone project on basically this question! Pretty much spot on

[@plaunit61398]

Honestly not a bad explanation of the basic path tracing algorithm for the layman. good job sam! Did a course as part of my masters covering how to program these things. Really fun to play with, if a bit frustrating with all the subtle ways you can mess it up.

[@gigitrix]

It's nuts that we get to do a cut down approximation of this stuff at 60fps in videogames - throwing seemingly-infinite compute offline at something is impressive but to me I'm always astounded by what a laptop can kick out at a stable frame rate, especially as the industry is beginning to adopt proper raytracing even

[@DodaGarcia]

That hot dog analogy really did help put the number in perspective, thank you

[@haleysettembre]

2:30 I also refuse to smile until Jet Lag reaches 1 million subscribers as it's the best series ever created

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

As much as I try to avoid smiling, I cannot help but smile while I'm watching Jet Lag, as it is simply too entertaining of a series to frown while watching.

[@salvadormuro7346]

2:41 I’m dead dude😂 I love those little notes hahahaha

[@Housechicken06]

You just told me all the stuff I’m learning about blender in like 5 minutes

[@herp_derpingson]

One thing you missed is that just because a movie takes a year (e.g. 365 days) to render, doesn't mean that they do. If you just split the workload into 365 machines, then it will render in a day. Split it into 3650 machines and it will be in an hour. There is a sweetspot where it makes economic sense. So, we call it GPU-years instead of just years. ChatGPT for example most likely took thousands of GPU-years to train.

[@Snowy123]

Breaking news: Pixar makes a super computer which beats NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer in order to render movies 1 day faster.

[@Snowy123]

@Dr.Dingle 🅥 I mean unrelated but yeah I wanted that clip without knowing

[@froginthemachine]

This is a great summary, though there's so so much more depth that breaks down why Pixar takes several years and gigantic teams of artists to make these movies happen. Just the surfacing part alone is fascinating. Surfaces are broken down into many many different qualities, so even after an object has been modeled they might add displacement maps to add height to very fine details that would be impractical to model by hand like scales or wrinkled skin, normal or bump maps that add subtler texture like the surface of an orange or pores on skin, specular reflection & roughness, metalness, subsurface scattering (like how red light transmits through skin) and many more. Each of these qualities is applied with a particular function with different constraints you can manipulate, you can actually apply black/white or color maps to most of them to get variation in specific parts of a surface. So the computer has to calculate all of this and how it influences the color of each pixel - and that's before lighting. Pixar movies will have many lights in a scene, often a sky dome/diffuse lighting and several area or spot lights. Each of those has a different color, intensity, shape, and size that will influence the environment around them differently. And when you render, the camera has many settings, there's a million render settings (you can set sample values for several qualities. Like upping subsurface sampling by 1 greatly increases render times), how you output your image varies (raw, sRGB etc colorspaces, Gamma), the type of file (for things like transparency), and finally after all that they have to open it in another software to color correct it for different display types because computers, TVs, theaters, etc all have different color spaces and they need to basically recalibrate all of those rendered images for each of those display types. And then after that when it's all being edited, there is even more color correction and effects added in post. And even this is a gross oversimplification

[@KennyMemester]

1:24 So 268,738,559,999 hotdogs is the limit... okayy.

[@darkchoclate]

For clarification, HD is 720p, FullHD is 1080p

[@Walcap]

I refuse to smile until jetlag gets a gold play button 😭😭😭😭

[@PuppetMasterIX]

"If I ate 268,738,560,000 hot dogs, I would die." Sam does not have what it takes to become the Trombone Champ. 😔

[@superNova5837]

This makes the several times I’ve had my laptop running all night to try and render a still image a lot less painful (Blender on AMD uses CPU and it gets so bad some times I have to time a render start to when I’m least likely to need my laptop for anything leading to the all night renders that more often than not aren’t done in the morning)

[@custard131]

the answer to the question is really that thats how long they decided was a reasonable amount of time for the new movie to take. if the higher ups at pixar wanted it to only take 1 year they could cut down on some of the effects or use 3x as powerful a computer there are probably things they could have done to slightly improve quality which would have resulted in it taking 10 years rather than 3 on current hardware but someone decided that wasnt worth it

[@Hasteroth]

generally that's fairly accurate yeah, they could always bump up the resolution, and more effects, bump up the samples per frame, etc etc. But all of that adds to render time. So they do what they can in a reasonable amount of time with the tech they have the budget for. same principle applies to video games, if a system can't render something in real time at the desired framerate and resolution... they strip out stuff to get it where it needs to be.

[@shakikahnaf9783]

1:30 nice comparison 🥴

[@andrewyearwood5087]

Love your videos. Currently learning some basic coding. Nowhere near this level, but it’s still helpful.

[@theodanielwollff]

As for 1920x1080P in the video. The P doesn't stand for Pixels, it stands for Progressive. Once upon a time, video was interlaced with every other line as the laser beam blasted the tube per frame. This switched back and forth given the illusion of a full frame image with no gaps.. Now the tech for outputting video has come so far, that interlaced is a thing of the past, now full-frames are rendered. Every modern video is progressive and monitors and TVs support this as well. Basically the P is a relic, but saying 1080P is still correct if you are referring to Progressive video.

[@jamesburgess9101]

*electron beam

[@theodanielwollff]

@@jamesburgess9101 one of those lol.

[@ddrsquirrelz]

I finally understand what ray tracing is. Thank you.

[@TakuroSpirit]

Adam getting a W outside of Jet Lag by making Sam say "ooey gooey sticky icky"

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

This must mean that either Sam won Jet Lag and Adam is getting his revenge, or Adam won and he's rubbing it in.

[@user9267]

HD is actually 720p. 1080p would be Full HD. ...this is why nobody uses the stupid names below 4K

[@decb.7959]

Recently, render times have been improved by machine learning algorithms called denoisers that can drastically reduce the samples per pixel needed. Rather than needing enough samples for each pixel to individually average out to a correct image, denoisers use data from surrounding pixels (as well as additional data provided by the renderer) to guess the missing samples. This is also the technology that makes real-time raytracing possible, since raytraced games can only afford to use a few samples per pixel.

[@Hasteroth]

If I'm not mistaken, the way this works is the raytracing is done at a lower sample rate... resulting in a whole lot of noise and artifacting in the frame, the denoisers then use various sampling techniques to guess what the image is supposed to look like. I don't believe it's the preferred method for high budget large scale movie productions like Pixar movies, but I might be wrong. As it typically doesn't produce as high quality an image as high sample rates do. It's basically a technique for fixing a deliberately low quality render rather than producing a higher quality one in the first place

[@decb.7959]

@@Hasteroth Denoisers have gotten much better (and faster) in recent years thanks to machine learning, so they are now sometimes used for production renders. Since raytracing is diminishing returns, a denoiser is useful for removing the last bit of noise in an already pretty good image.

[@zocto3459]

Bro thats alot of work for a 1 hour long movie, mad respect for animators.

[@ErelH]

This video is spot on, especially the part about the hot dogs. But honestly, despite being an animator for over a decade I learned something 😉

[@sams_gaming_lounge]

i had to convert the hot dog count to seconds, and he 100% would die long before he ate them all. sad.

[@Tirkka]

@@sams_gaming_lounge That's over 30 hot dogs for every single human alive right now. I wouldn't be able to eat even that amount in one day, lol.

[@thabs2001]

Dude, 1:33 you would die from much fewer hotdogs. This analogy does not land. Awesome vid💯

[@adameverythinggames]

I had a Pixar inside out 2 commercial at the start of the video

[@TheRealLink]

As someone offering freelance rendering services but who has dabbled with it with architectural designs in college way back as well as for personal projects, it's pretty nuts both how you can make tons of detail, but inversely that detail can start to add up. Crank all the settings and layering to the extreme for big movies and it's no wonder they take so long to render.

[@megumin6456]

The one thing that annoys me is: 4:09 It's not ray tracing it's path tracing ugh!

[@jackdavenport5011]

Another important thing to keep in mind is that the render farms are responsible for rendering lots of different frames at the same time which drastically reduces the render time. If they rendered every frame of Toy Story 4 one after the other every 30 hours it would take about 26,000 years to render the whole movie.

[@SparklyFoxy]

Interesting video, my respect for the animators in the industry definitely rose after looking into this.

[@LtexprsGaming]

The advancement of Graphics cards when it comes to rendering time from Seconds/minutes per frame to Frames per second which is a huge improvement.

[@jbird4478]

I never really realized just how much two-hundred-sixty-eight-billion-seven-hundred-thirty-eight-million-five-hundred-sixty-thousand is until now.

[@Capybara1997-o1l]

And to think, this is the same company that made the Genesis Device demo video in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

[@starleighpersonal]

Yep

[@simplyepic3258]

I know from experience that managing a render farm is really fun. And by really fun I mean excruciatingly time consuming and the sort of thing you will lose sleep over because if you don't something is gonna break the render farm

[@Denes2005]

0:17 and in cars 2 they mastered ruining an entire franchise

[@jordanabendroth6458]

Cars 3 was pretty good imo, but yes, cars 2 was awful

[@TobiNightcore]

When a video about logistics is too short for Wendover

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

"The Logistics of Pixar Movies" would be a pretty cool Wendover video; it could cover this video's topic along with the soundtracks, the voice acting, the marketing, etc.

[@kjul.]

That's just not true. While it certainly takes years to create a full length animated movie für obvious reasons, the rendering progress itself takes a few days at most. It's also not a single machine that takes care of rendering the final product, but a cluster of synchronized computers, using hardware which is highly specialized and built for this particular task.

[@robertzeurunkl8401]

5:22 - Something else to add is that from THIS frame that you just rendered, you have to take that state info into the next frame, because it affects that frame too. So, every frame of the movie affects perhaps the next few frames after it. At almost 8 million frames for a hour and a half movie, That's the whole 280 billion calculations times ~8 million frames.

[@pawebernaciak1581]

Correction Pixar usually use BxDF but most shader use BSDF(reflection and refraction) there some particular shaders having only BRDF(only reflection) and very few having BTDF(refraction) only. After rendering there is compositing which is like photoshop but for many frames.

[@benni5941]

DCI spec for theater projectors maxes at 4k, or 1,146,617,856,000 pixels for your 90min example.

[@ShepTheCreator]

1:35 bet

[@_Mute_]

WRONG! at 0:54 you refer HD to 1080p, but colloquially 720p is referred to as HD, and 1080p is referred to as FHD, or Full-HD. "But wait!" I hear you say, "HD can technically referred to either 720p or 1080p!" And well yes, you're correct, but we all know that definitions shift all the time and the fact that no one means 1080p when they say HD in fact means HD does not mean 1080p. Checkmate!

[@konradw360]

They could just use an Amazon EC2 instance. Amazon has an endless supply. Each time I click create I get a new one.

[@OceanAce]

All depends on cost and returns on bragging rights.

[@jordanabendroth6458]

At the scales they are working at, keeping compute in-house is going to be significantly cheaper and faster than outsourcing, it would probably require terabytes of data a day for the movie itself plus cloud computing is kind of expensive in massive amounts

[@masshockey49]

@@jordanabendroth6458 sort of, it’s replacing capex with opex. Honestly, if it was just Pixar, it probably wouldn’t make sense to continue investing in their own renderfarm, but it’s under Disney and they will be able to utilize the farm a few times a year. From a cost perspective, data transfer would likely not be the blocker because there isn’t actually that much data needed to make a movie compared to the absolute colossal amount of compute. If Pixar could get away with using EC2 Spot, it probably would be more cost efficient to be in the cloud, but that risks a lot of wasted compute along the way and variable completion times.

[@ryanschwartz4959]

0:44 So, regarding that, a lot of CG animated films are actually rendered at 2048 x 1080 resolution (the native resolution for 2K digital cinema), making for 2,211,840 pixels per frame. At 24 fps, that's 53,084,160 pixels per second, making for 286,654,464,000 rendered pixels in a 90-minute movie. These studios usually don't render at 4K, though, since at 4096 × 2160 resolution, that would mean 8,847,360 pixels per frame, 212,336,640 pixels per second, and 1,146,617,856,000 rendered pixels in a 90-minute movie. It would take 4 times as long to render a 4K CG animated movie than it would to render the same movie in 2K.

[@shreyjoshi1418]

"If you want to protest Pixar's rendering inefficiency or something - *I dont know*" i died laughing at this 🤣

[@Sqeezy3]

HD is 720p, Full HD is 1080p

[@mullvaden83]

The title is misleading. The acutal rendering doesnt take 3 years. They have as you said huge renderfarms that renders several frames at the same time. The making of all the things you mentioned takes years yes. modeling, texturing, lighting, animating.

[@stevemorison3787]

I can imagine Pixar making us cry over talking socks at some point

[@mmoboxs]

You’d be shocked at how low res we render stuff sometimes. Cinema movies are often just 2k which is crazy

[@BJGvideos]

Cinema movies, so...movies...?

[@mmoboxs]

@@BJGvideos yeah you are right. I don’t know what I was trying to do here lol

[@User31129]

What they did with the hair on Merida continues to amaze me.

[@vinterbjork4128]

Loving the animations in this video!

[@ellafoxoo]

Thanks for the Blender tutorial, much appreciated

[@Nate_Joe]

Think about how big 200 billion is! If I ate that many hot dogs, I would die.

[@SebiSuper9mil]

GET JETLAG A GOLD PLAY BUTTON

[@BenAgain452]

I'm surprised this didn't mention why video games can render CG live, at 60 (or more) frames per second.

[@jascrandom9855]

Those use a different render method.

[@ceej5690]

that's mostly because it's a whole topic in and of itself. there are so many little optimization tricks devs do for video games which barely change how the game looks. but eases the load on the computer, it's insane.