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.

In high-end VFX, 12-36 hours (wall clock) per frame is a roughly accurate time frame for a final 2k frame at final quality.

36 is at the high end of things, and the histogram is more skewed towards the lower end than > 30 hours, but it's relatively common.

Frames can be parallelised, so multiple frames in a shot/sequence are rendered at once, on different machines.