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Rendering Shrek@Home?
JimCricket writes "There's an interesting piece at Download Aborted about using distributed computing (a la SETI@Home, Grid.org, etc.) in the film industry. With the recent release of Shrek 2, which required a massive amount of CPU time to complete, one must wonder why the film industry doesn't solicit help from their fans. I'd gladly trade some spare CPU time in exchange for the coolness of seeing a few frames of Shrek 3 rendered on my screensaver!"
Security issues would be a concern I'm sure. There's plenty of hackers who'd see no harm in, for example, extracting a number of images from around the world and sticthing a trailer, etc. And of course, rendering is a "trial-and-error" process - would they want people to have access to broken scenes? Or deleted scenes? Speculation would seriously dampen their ability to control marketing and release info. On the technical side, farms are reliable and predictable. Who can figure out how many fans will keep their computers up tonight for the critical preview tomorrow? What about the decline of interest after first little while? Distributed computing of this sort isn't well suited for commercial projects with fixed schedules. Not that I don't think it'd be COOL... I just don't think it'll happen :-/
- To err is human; but to really screw up, you need a computer
How would the legal aspect work out? Seems like you'd have to sign a fairly strict license saying the movie studio still owns what your computer rendered, copyright, etc.
Very cool idea nonetheless.
The film industry can afford it so...
Why would they want to do the distributed??? They are using 10Gbs etho and blow your mind away servers to render at amazingly high rates. Probubally several times faster than something like the SETI network could imagine.
And hell, those sysadmins have the most owerful systems in the world. Who would give that up? They even get whole new systems every couple years.
Evolution or ID?
I beg to differ. I suspect that the reason why no one's ever bothered suggesting this is that the amount of bandwidth required to download the frame data and upload the rendered frame are prohibitively large. Besides that, the licensing costs for the rendering technology would be enormous, and what film company would want to freely distribute all of the models, textures, and animation that they spent dozens of man-years working on?
Nice to see you can advertise your NEW BLOG on slashdot...
how much did it cost?
Films and other large productions are tightly scheduled, with costs against these schedules mapped out months in advance. I can't think of a producer who would count on an essentially unschedulable resource as a vital part of their production pipeline, regardless of its economy.
That said, I could totally see a use for a 'render pool' catering to independent filmmakers, students, and nonprofits for whom cheap is more important than timely.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
Do you really want the MPAA to run programs on your computer?
No one has seen what you have seen, and until that happens, we're all going to think that you're nuts. - Jack O'Neil
The main reason they don't employ this technique is that their own 'render-farms' are a known quantity; they can, with reasonable accuracy, calculate how long a given scene will take to render, whereas with public distributed computing this calculation is not possible.
There are many variables in distributed public computing such as:
*Different CPU capabilities.
*Different OS capabilities
*High/Low use Systems
*People's 'uptime'
*Users leaving the project before its completion etc.
Another risk is that another movie-house could start a production which everyone sees as 'cooler' and your entire userbase decides to up-sticks and render for them instead.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
How cool would it be to see them allocate THEIR distributed system to projects like SETI, etc. Even though I'm sure there are other projects being worked on, one would imagine the system is pretty dormant after a release.
...data, nay terabytes of data, can go into a single frame in a movie? You might be able to farm out stuff like some fragments of procedurally rendered smoke that rely on computing noise functions repeatedly, rather than accessing a scene database, but in general this is completely impractical. If visual effects houses wish to share data the easiest thing to do is FedEx a bunch of hard drives. So unless Shrek@Home includes some kind of hard drive exchange program it ain't gonna work!
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
At Pixar, distributed rendering, even within the same building, was sometimes I/O bound rather than compute
Bruce Perens.
Why go through the trouble?
/. so of course someone would try.
The simple answer is to see if you can. It's
Evolution or ID?
Despite the coolness of the SETI project, the major reason I support SETI and other scientific projects (e.g., protein folding@home) is that they are notoriously underfunded. SETI and the organization which operates folding@home (Stanford?) do not make profit, and at each step have to literally beg the government (usually the NSF) for more grants. This is especially true of SETI, which has become a pretty out-of-fashion program in funding circles. In short, the whole point of donating CPU cycles is to allow somebody access to computing power that it would not otherwise have. While I enjoy the Shrek movies just as much as the other guy, I'm not so philanthropic when it comes to a company that's capable of making $128 million in one weekend. Here's an analogy: you might donate clothing to the Salvation Army, but would you donate to Sak's Fifth Avenue? I think not -- I suspect many of you, like me, would rather support the little guy with no alternative.
Awhile ago, John Lasseter of Pixar was in some promotional documentary for one of their films. He claimed that when they originally created their short film with the desklamp, render times were around 7 hours per frame.
He said that for Finding Nemo today, render times were about...7 hours per frame.
More machines and faster processors let you cram much more detail and technology into the same package. Working in commercial advertising, digital editing and graphic workstations are fantastic and powerful...but their advantage isn't speed. We spend the same amount of time making a commercial as 10 years ago...but now we make 7 versions and change it 30-some times along the way. Power gives you the ability to change your mind....and that's a creative force which people gladly pay for.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
I agree with most of the comments so far about why the idea wouldn't work directly, but I'm more optimistic about the general idea. For example, there is a technique called "partial abstract interpretation". The idea is that given code and the input data, one can see what the code would do on the input data and then change the code to not accept any input and do the correct thing on that particular given input. If the company distributed code in this way, it would just be code and no data (so their artwork doesn't leak out), and the code would only work to generate one scene; it would be hard or impossible to uninterpret the code (so they doen't leak their proprietary rendering technology).
It's not that hard--especially when you consider that old-school cartoons had people drawing every freakin' frame of a feature-length movie by hand...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Depends on how you define "no real actors". "Real actors" were used for the voice work. If you ever played a video game where the voice acting was horrendous (about 80% of the time), then you know that good voice acting isn't that easy to come by. You also need talented animators to turn the 0's and 1's into emotion. In any case, Hollywood has always been more than just the actors, there's a whole production crew behind the picture.
As someone who works in a digital studio, it's painful enough getting things rendered with every computer in the same room. Frames get dropped, mangled, lost. In addition, every machine needs to be at the same software revision, and you can't have conflicting apps running. Scattering the render boxes across the planet and having boxes that contain unknown software will only amplify the pain to the Nth degree.
Added to that are huge bandwith problems. In order to render a 2K image, you may need dozens of texture maps, some of which may be even larger than 2K because you zoom in or something -- meaning to get a 2K frame back, you're sending the render box probably 10-20 times that amount of data. With a nice gigabit internal network, that's not a huge problem, but shipping them down a DSL line is just not gonna happen.
"What is much more likely is that the grass, skin, hair, etc. is described by some relatively simple input parameters from which millions of polygons are generated."
That's a very good point. Procedural elements of rendering could be distributed quite efficiently. Shrek 2 had some awesome smoke looking effects that I bet was very CPU intensive. That's exactly the type of thing that could be distributed.
"Derp de derp."
Giving away CPU cycles so that a multi-million dollar company can improve its product is a wholly different thing.
People pay to wear shirt that advertise mult-million dollar companies. : (
-Colin
He's right, this time. Using more procedural elements is not likely to result in smaller datasets for rendering. What's more likely is that other parts of the scene will get more complicated and always exploit the full resources available. Procedural grass, hair, etc. means that the other non-procedural textures can now be more numerous and complex.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
You do still need voice actors. With an animated feature, a really good voice actor can really add to the experience.
Yes, but your pool is WAY more open.
In the days before TV, ugly people with great voices were stars. Today, it's a lot harder for that to happen. (it does happen, but they aren't playing romantic leads.)
An independant filmmaker can find an actor with a great voice, and it doesn't matter what he looks like, what his physical capabilities are, etc.
A quadrapeligic could play James Bond.
The movie industry, give you something like that for free? I doubt it, maybe if you paid them so they could render on your computer....
There is no replacement for displacement.
first we would render parts of the movie on our own pc's and if we would like to go to see the movie in the theatres we'd have to pay 6.5 euro for something i helped create.
next i won't be able to play the dvd legaly (which i had to pay for again) on my linux box.
can't wait to start...
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I'd rather donate the cycles to something other than entertainment. But, if I had to choose entertainment, I'd donate to the needy (read: not Pixar or Dreamworks).
mbbac