Pixar's Render Farm

My understanding (I am not an authority) is that for a long time, it has taken Pixar roughly an equal amount of time to render one frame of film. Something on the order of 24 hours. I don’t know what the real units are though (core-hours? machine-hours? simple wall clock?)

I am not surprised that they “make the film fit the box”, because managing compute expenditures is such a big deal!

(Edit: When I say "simple wall clock", I'm talking about the elapsed time from start to finish for rendering one frame, disregarding how many other frames might be rendering at the same time. Throughput != 1/latency, and all that.)

Wait, what? 24 hours per frame?!

At the standard 24fps it takes you 24 days per film second which works out to 473 years for the average 2 hour long film which can't be right.

Again, I'm not sure whether this is core-hours, machine-hours, or wall clock. And to be clear, when I say "wall clock", what I'm talking about is latency between when someone clicks "render" and when they see the final result.

My experience running massive pipelines is that there's a limited amount of parallelization you can do. It's not like you can just slice the frame into rectangles and farm them out.

> It's not like you can just slice the frame into rectangles and farm them out.

Funny thing, you sure can! Distributed rendering of single frames been a thing for a long time already.

What about GI? You can't just slice GI into pieces.