Animation Sophistication: The Croods Required 80 Million Compute Hours 196
Lucas123 writes "It may be a movie about a stone age family, but DreamWorks said its latest 3D animated movie The Croods took more compute cycles to create than any other movie they've made. The movie required a whopping 80 million compute hours to render, 15 million more hours than DreamWorks' last record holder, The Rise of the Guardians. The production studio said between 300 and 400 animators worked on The Croods over the past three years. The images they created, from raw sketches to stereoscopic high-definition shots, required about 250TB of data storage capacity. When the movie industry moved from producing 2D to 3D high-definition movies over the past decade, the data required to produce the films increased tremendously. For DreamWorks, the amount of data needed to create a stereoscopic film leaped by 30%."
Re:Define "compute-hour" (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who works in scientific high-performance computing:
1) N -- the most interesting thing from an engineering perspective is the number of MPI threads or whatever ("How many ways am I going to parallelize this thing"), and while you can sometimes get benefits from understanding that two threads running on different cores of the same CPU can communicate faster than two threads on different machines, it (at least in lattice gauge theory, what I do) is not that big of a deal.
2) Not usually, although there are some allocation-granting groups that have conversion factors ("We give you X million core-hours on this machine, here's a conversion table for our other machines.")
Re:All I wonder (Score:4, Informative)
Also make the point that, films that were pirated, will never be lost. The entire Tom and Jerry archive was lost in a vault fire. We have none of the originals left. All they had after the fire was the film that had been cut down for TV viewing. That's why all the Tom and Jerry episodes are in 4:3 instead of their original wide screen format.
Re:All I wonder (Score:5, Informative)
Negatives for all the Tom and Jerry shorts prior to 1951 were lost in the 1967 MGM fire. Up until 1954, T&J was produced in Academy ratio (1.37:1), which is almost indistinguishable from 4:3 (1.33:1). Later ones were produced in a variety of formats from straight Academy ratio, to widescreen 1.75:1 on Academy ratio negative, to Cinemascope.
The only real difference between initial theatrical and current TV/DVD releases of the pre-1951 cartoons (apart from the obnoxious habit of whitewashing out the culturally-insensitive bits) is loss of the original titles on some, and the odd 'lost' sequence.