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Author Topic: Cars (2006) Mark J. Marshall Film God Posts: 3188 From: New Castle, DE, USA Registered: Aug 2002 posted 06-12-2006 08:38 AM                    No SDDS 8 on this one. When I watched it the first time, I completely missed the entire opening race scene. Then I wrote my review. Then I managed to catch the opening race this weekend. All I can say is: Holy shit, that looks freakin awesome! Way to go Pixar! That is without a doubt, far and away, the best computer animation I have ever seen.  |  IP: Logged John Pytlak Film God Posts: 9987 From: Rochester, NY 14650-1922 Registered: Jan 2000 posted 06-12-2006 12:57 PM                        quote: David Stambaugh Does a theatre get penalized in a TAP evaluation for lab splices? Seems like whether they leave the splices in, or remove them, they'd be screwed. Generally, a lab splice should only be remade if it falls in the middle of a frame. So three out of four should be remade. If the lab splice is on the frameline and won't be visible to the audience, leave it. Since Kodak sells print film in 6000-foot lengths, hopefully on average, a lab splice occurs only once per three 2000-foot reels.  |  IP: Logged Chris Hipp Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1462 From: Mesquite, Tx (east of Dallas) Registered: Jul 2003 posted 06-12-2006 01:04 PM                     Pretty boring with a few good lines thrown in every once in a while. The best animation in the world cannot make up for the lack of a decent/interesting story.  |  IP: Logged Richard Greco Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1180 From: Plant City, FL Registered: Nov 2003 posted 06-13-2006 09:29 AM                     4/5 Mater was the best character in this. Very funny storyline that appealed to both kids and adults. I convinced the people at my showing, 10:30pm last night, about 10 spread out through the theatre, to stay till the end of the credits because I trusted you guys, that final scene was pretty funny. There were a few scenes that had me in stitches, most of them with Mater, such as the tractor tipping, absolutely hysterical. Tha animation was STUNNING, almost felt like it was real. Agreed on the lenthginess, but I personally didn't care....Definately a DVD buy... Oh and Rascal Flatts RULES quote: Bobby Henderson And I agree, the cover version of Tom Cochrane's Life Is a Highway kind of sucks compared to the original. They did a great job on that cover....hell they do a great job on all their songs...  |  IP: Logged Tommie Evans Expert Film Handler Posts: 116 From: Birmingham, West Midlands, UK Registered: Sep 2004 posted 06-13-2006 10:58 AM                     Each frame of animation took on average 6 hours of computer processing time, some scenes with reflections, refractions, particle effects and radiosity took over 90 hours per frame!  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 06-13-2006 12:35 PM                     Who provided those figures? I only ask because that rendering time sounds a bit odd. It sounds grossly way over the amount of time a modern rendering farm would need, even for radiosity-based renderings. 2 hours of movie at 24fps equals 172800 frames Multiply each frame times that stated average of 6 hours of render time. That comes out to 1036800 hours, or 43200 days, or 118.35616 years. That's not even getting into that 90 hours per frame stuff. The can of trash in Fight Club took a couple months to render -and was revised with an additional re-render. What's notable is that sequence was a radiosity based render -done in 1999. Computing horsepower has improved by quite an extreme in the last seven years. I have to wonder if that inflated rendering time claimed for Cars is boiled down to what it would take one single CPU, CPU core or just one instruction pipeline in a CPU to do all that work. Most modern CPUs can handle several executions at once -and that's just in a single core CPU. Most modern render farms are made up of armies of Linux-based or Windows-based PCs, either in box or blade form. It's common for render farm machines to have two or more processors. Some go eight-way or even larger. New servers are appearing featuring multiple processors with each processor having 2 to 8 cores. Average computer users are going to start seeing their desktop machines get more and more parallel in nature. Dual core machines are already very common (I'm typing this note on one right now). Next year Quad Core CPUs are expected to become mainstream items for desktop machines. By 2010, you may find entry level PCs with 8-core CPUs and more expensive gaming machines having 2 or more of those Octo-Core processors. Anyway, I realize the final render of Cars was a pretty daunting thing to produce. It really looks great -arguably better looking than any other CGI animated movie produced. The job demanded great engineering, custom software and a lot of render farm muscle to produce. But the 90 hours per frame thing sounds pretty questionable.  |  IP: Logged Robert Minichino Master Film Handler Posts: 350 From: Haskell, NJ, USA Registered: Dec 2005 posted 06-13-2006 01:15 PM                        Quoting CPU time instead of clock time is normal for cluster batch compute tasks, although I'm not so sure it is standard for quoting rendering times. I don't think it's misleading as it gives a good indication of exactly how much work it took to produce the output, which can then be sped up by doing bits of it in parallel. It's the same as quoting man-hours, man-years, etc.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 06-13-2006 05:01 PM                        According to the "trivia" on IMDB.com, each frame took an average of 17 hours to render.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 06-13-2006 05:50 PM                     So IMDB is claiming it took 335 years to render Cars? That's what 17 hours per frame turns out to be for a 2 hour long movie.  |  IP: Logged Aaron Sisemore Flaming Ribs beat Reeses Peanut Butter Cups any day! Posts: 3061 From: Rockwall TX USA Registered: Sep 1999 posted 06-13-2006 07:11 PM                     Certainly they were rendering tens or even hundreds of frames simultaneously, thus making the entire process go faster and not requiring the hungdreds of years total. -Aaron  |  IP: Logged David Stambaugh Film God Posts: 4021 From: Eugene, Oregon Registered: Jan 2002 posted 06-13-2006 07:21 PM                        That would be the time for 1 computer to render all the frames in the movie. Or 200 systems rendering in parallel would take 1.675 years. Presumably Pixar has a lot more than 200 systems in their render farm. The company I work for did the cinematics for the PS2 game Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror. A typical frame like this: takes about 5 minutes to render on a 3GHz Dual-Core P4 with 3GB RAM. Some frames are faster, some are slower, but 5 minutes is probably a good average. This was using 3D Studio Max 6. FWIW, an Intel Dual-Core P4 running at 3GHz outperforms a HyperThreaded P4 running at 3.2 or 3.4GHz by 10%-20% on these rendering tasks. Same FSB and memory speed on both (800MHz, 533MHz respectively). (We also tested on a comparable AMD Dual-Core and it was about 10% faster than the Intel systems.)  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 06-14-2006 01:16 AM                        quote: David Stambaugh Presumably Pixar has a lot more than 200 systems in their render farm. Yeah, you can buy a helluva lot of computers for $7 billion.  |  IP: Logged Mark J. Marshall Film God Posts: 3188 From: New Castle, DE, USA Registered: Aug 2002 posted 06-14-2006 07:39 AM                    quote: David Stambaugh Presumably Pixar has a lot more than 200 systems in their render farm. Renderman can also take advantage of any computers on the network while they're idle. So at night, when everyone goes home, all the desktop workstations can start rendering. I'm assuming that Pixar utilizes that feature of Renderman - since they did create the program. I wonder if the complicated animation was the reason for this being pushed back. I seem to remember that it was originally scheduled for release last November, but I could be wrong.  |  IP: Logged Aaron Haney Master Film Handler Posts: 265 From: Cupertino, CA, USA Registered: Jan 2001 posted 06-14-2006 06:04 PM                     Pretty entertaining, much better than I thought it would be. I had a bad feeling about this one, but it didn't let me down. It didn't have the same feeling of scope and originality as the Toy Story movies or The Incredibles, but not every film can. It's still far, far better than most of what's in theaters these days. One thing that kept bugging me during this movie: while I realize a good animator can make anything seem lifelike, these are basically solid objects. There's a limit to how expressive they can be. When it's just two of them sitting around talking, it sometimes gets a little boring. However, that's a minor nitpick. Also, while I appreciate the fact that the film was printed on Kodak Vision Premiere, and that Technicolor did such a great job printing it, it still seems to me that the image quality was not as good as it could have been. It was still just a little fuzzy and indistinct. I know it's possible to transfer digital images to film and get better results than that, since we see it all the time from other studios. Pixar is probably still using their own "Pixarvision" laser recorder, instead of letting a company like EFilm run off the dupe negatives for them. Hate to sound like an EFilm fanboy, but all the best digital-to-film transfers I've seen have been done by them. Pixar should investigate the possibility of either outsourcing or upgrading their equipment. "Spot the jaggies": right after the two cars pass through town asking for directions, and Sally is saying "Well, they know where we are", look at Ramone's front grill in the background. You can see jaggies on the edges of the grill lines as he's moving up and down.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 06-14-2006 10:55 PM                     Rendering farms and large networks of computers can do mind boggling tasks. Google is finishing work on another data crunching center in the Dalles, OR. The center features two buildings each of which could fit a football field inside each. They just opened another big data center near Atlanta. Overall, Google has hundreds of thousands of computers crunching data. It's pretty much common knowledge massively parallel systems are being used for all kinds of tasks, including making movies. That's also why I think it is laughably ridiculous for sites like IMDB to post flat, unexplained claims about how many hours it took to render just one frame of Cars. If they're going to claim "6", "17" or even "90" hours per frame they need to explain that claim. What would actually be more interesting is to know how many Intel PCs or CPUs were used to render Cars and how long it took the entire render farm to render one frame.  |  IP: Logged

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