Pixar's Render Farm

From what I understand they still seem to render at 1080p and then upsample to 4k. Judging by Soul.

That seems extremely unlikely. The Renderman software they use has no issues rendering at 4k.

The 4k streaming copy of the film has stairsteps though. Like it's been upsampled. I'm sure their software can render at 4k but they choose not to for whatever reason.

are you sure that's not just an artifact of it being streamed?

it's almost certainly rendered in cinema 4k (4,096 x 2,160 pixels), if not more. moreover it'll be in a 16/32bit log colourspace as well

It's not really that unlikely. Most films render at 2k DCI. It's not so much that the software and hardware can't render higher, it's just diminishing gains for the increased render time.

Most 4k films till very recently actually have the digital elements at 2k DCI-ish resolutions and are upscaled. I can't speak to wether soul is rendered at 2k or 4k, but it wouldn't be surprising if it was 2k upscaled.

Nobody renders higher than 4k DCI unless the film is screening on large format (imax etc).

The color space will be acesCG most likely these days.

ahh smashing, I've been away for a while. I had heard rumours that they'd made a new colour standard, but I'd not actually looked into it.

Have you examined it or are you guessing? Because I'd have assumed they did too but I see jagged stairsteps on the 4k stream when zooming on sharp edges.

There is no way on earth that they will render at 1080. If it was 2007 it might have been 2k.

The master will have been rendered into a DCP.

What gets delivered to the streaming service is another thing.

what then ends up at your screen is even more of a guess.

A 4K dcp is a JPEG2000 stream[1], with 16bit colour. Something like 60-120 megabytes a second. Obviously this isn't practical to stream to consumers. 4K over a stream is always a balancing act, more often than not it drops to 1080.

[1] well normally it is

probably. Looking at streaming 4k is just sad, as this is just wasting money (on devices and bandwidth) for marketing having abyssmal quality at 10-20Mbit/s. With a FHD-bluray weighing in at 30-50MBit/s that's nothing to wonder about though I guess..

But you shouldn't be judging a stream, it's the worst version.

That's more accurate, Soul was probably rendered at 2k, as most of their movies.

If a shot doesn't look good enough when upscaled, they re-render in 4k.

Actually, they used to upscale most of the movies using Nuke, but recently, started using deep learning for that. At Siggraph 2020, they gave a talk on this topic: https://s2020.siggraph.org/presentation/?id=gensub_443&sess=...