Animation Sophistication: The Croods Required 80 Million Compute Hours

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%."

Comments

all that

[vswee]

and it's still going to get downloaded on thepiratebay like every other film out there

Re:all that

[Nyder]

and it's still going to get downloaded on thepiratebay like every other film out there

I prefer Usenet, but yes, it will. And they will still make a profit regardless.

Re:all that

[westlake]

and it's still going to get downloaded on thepiratebay like every other film out there

The difference is that the paying customer has a say in what future productions and budgets will be green-lighted.

The unexpected success of "How To Train Your Dragon" spawned a sequel, a Christmas special, and 40 episodes of the best production values and scripting of any animated series you could name.

Now and again the geek will ride the coattails of WALL-E to the heights or be tossed a bone like "Serenity." Mostly what he gets is a half-century or so of "Dr Who," "Star Trek," and "Star Wars." To tale a chance on something new is too big a risk.

Re:all that

[Anonymous Coward]

The knuckle-dragging apple-users that make up the large part of slashdot nowadays aren't likely to be familiar with usenet, let's be real here.

Itunes is where it's at for this type of 'nerd'

What about tintin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it more than Tintin, though?

But...

[Ixtl]

... it's still terrible. They could have made it with construction paper cut-outs and hired some decent writers instead of spending 70 million on fancy CGI and celebrity voices, and then making the same cliched shitpile we see every two or three months. Also, as is traditional on Slashdot, I am basing my vociferous opinion exclusively on the obnoxious 30-second trailers I've seen, and have not actually seen the movie.

Re:But...

[Nemyst]

The trailer was so incredibly obnoxious (and that's coming from someone who usually doesn't mind most trailers, even the dumb ones) that I don't think the rest of the movie matters. They thought the trailer was a good representation of the movie: imagine the rest.

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

I always face palm when they do a trailer and there aren't enough good things from the movie to fill an entire trailer.

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah not anymore. Culture has set sail.. Kinda like that band that you loved in highschool that never grew up with you. Sure they made millions selling out, but now they're doing hemorrhoid commericals.

Re:But...

[jbeaupre]

Took the kids this weekend. It was better than expected. It's not going to become some classic. But it was entertaining.

Re:But...

[Dahamma]

Actually, two of the three writers (John Cleese and Chris Sanders) are more than decent. Must have been the 3rd guy who screwed it up.

Re:But...

[meerling]

I saw it, and liked it. It's not high art, but then again, when was the last time anybody that wasn't a snob actually liked high art?

As to the falling quality of Hollywood, that goes without saying.

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Going by his public persona (who knows what actually goes down) I'm not sure that John Cleese pushes back very hard when other people take a project in a different direction from where he wants to go.

Re:But...

[digitig]

As far as I can see, the absolute minimum plot necessary to justify the stringing together of some ok-but-not-great gas.

Re:But...

[fatphil]

The trailers contain what they think is (at least teasers towards) the best bits of the movie. The movie will, on average, be even worse.

It looks like they've got a new hair model that they wanted to show off, and possibly a new particle simulation model. Woo, freaking woo. Apparently, they have no interest of having the characters mouths say anything apart from "ah-ooooh-oooh-awwww-eeeeeee-ah" when the dialogue actually does something like "why do you always say that?". Fuck the particle model, fuck the hair model, fuck the polygon count, fuck the number of CPU hours or terabytes - can a deaf person lip-read the dialogue? If not, they're still not achieving one of the most basic and fundamental things. In that respect, they're inferior to the black-and-white silents from 80-100 years ago.

And even if they achieved that, I'd still say it was shit - as even if they get the facial movement and dialogue matching each other perfectly, they've put the wrong voices behind the characers. Fortunately I'm to old and curmudgeonly to recognise any of the celebrity voices, but they were rubbish characterisations. Compare Shrek - the voices fitted the characters almost perfectly.

The MPAA can rest assured that I will not pirate this movie.

But I'm sure it will be massive, as they seem to be able to sell any old crap.

Re:But...

[omnichad]

In other words, they can only manage to do one half of what Pixar can do most of the time.

Then again, Brave wasn't that good aside from the CGI. Went through so many rewrites there wasn't much story left.

Re:But...

[fatphil]

Somehow /Brave/ completely passed me by - it looks like it was the inspiration for the new hair model that Croods' female lead sports. (Apparently it has a physical and rebellious young female lead too...)

I'm not sure comparison is fair, as I'm not necessarily the intended market at all, but it does appear that I've not liked any Dreamworks CGI-fests since Shrek, and that Pixar has really impressed me several times even quite recently.

Define "compute-hour"

[Anonymous Coward]

Does an n-core, n-processor, or n-whatever computer running for 1 hour count as 1 compute-hour or n? Or some other number altogether?

Do faster cores, processors, or whatever count as "more" than slower ones?

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[Entropius]

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:Define "compute-hour"

[nowheremash]

After a quick skim it doesn't really answer this question, but this article (linked in TFA) has more info on the Dreamworks infrastructure and more vague-but-exciting-sounding statistics.

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[Gonoff]

Does an n-core, n-processor, or n-whatever computer running for 1 hour count as 1 compute-hour or n? Or some other number altogether?

Do faster cores, processors, or whatever count as "more" than slower ones?

The usual phrase "computer hours" says it all. X computers times Y hours gives Z computer hours.
As you have indicated, the phrase is pretty meaningless. Then there is the question are these Macs, Windows, Linux or what?

The world needs to use an agreed benchmark and we can all work out conversions to the OS we prefer.

As I can't think of such a standard, I suggest we define it as a " Windows Hour - WHr" but we would need to set the standard on a particular spec of H/W and S/W. Suggestions please...

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the service and pricing model.

Typical shared resource clusters running typical batch processing software (PBS, hadoop, etc), 1 compute hour is 1 core for 1 hour. so 8 cores (even if only on 1 cpu) for 1 hour is 8 compute hours.

If there's a significant variance in available hardware, things become a bit more abstract and you deal in SU (standard units) - often priced per thousand (kSU) - with lower hardware having a lower weighting (0.7 for example) vs 1.0 for standard and 2.0 for exotic stuff - assuming the pricing models and compute quotas aren't completely separated between the hardware systems.

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[nowheremash]

Link above gives a little more insight, they're using RHEL on blades with a mixture of CPUs, but at the highest end they're using 16-core sandy bridge.

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[Anonymous Coward]

One compute-hour is approximately 0.0034 fortnight*libraries of congress.

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[viperidaenz]

The OS doesn't have a large impact on the application performance. Macs Windows and Linux machines generally all run on the same hardware. If they were Macs though, they would not be using the latest hardware, but several year old Xeon's because that's all you can get in a Mac Pro.

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[jxander]

You seem to have picked up an extra R along the way.

It says compute-hours, not computer-hours

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[jxander]

I can really only see it going 1 of 2 ways. Either the biggest number that's technically possible, carefully tracking all all cores, threads, and processors as separate, also counting double if the person has 2 windows open with Crood-related tasks in both ... or the wildest-ass-guess the could muster. "We have 3000 computers, working for 3 years. There are 365.25 days in a year, 24 hours in a day ... soooo 78.9M ... eh, just round up.

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[Anonymous Coward]

FLOPS-Hours?

It'd be the way to compare how much computational work is done in much the same manner that watt-hours are used in terms of energy consumption. At least it seems logical enough without tying it to any particular hardware and/or software environment.

Something like a decent renderfarm can probably put in a hundred or so PFs/H on a project easy.

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean years I presume.

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[forkazoo]

Does an n-core, n-processor, or n-whatever computer running for 1 hour count as 1 compute-hour or n? Or some other number altogether?

Given the public relationsy nature of the number, assume they are going with whatever sounds biggest to the marketing guys, which would probably mean core-hours rather than machine-hours. That is to say, a two socket machine with 4 cores per socket can do 8 core-hours of calculations per hour of wall-clock time.

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[Rockoon]

"We have 3000 computers, working for 3 years. There are 365.25 days in a year, 24 hours in a day ... soooo 78.9M ... eh, just round up.

Thats exactly what they did. From the article, they have 3000 Blades, and it took 3 years.

The article also mentions 250 billion pixels in the movie....

...which works out to 3169 pixels rendered per "compute hour." Horribly inefficient.

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[FishTankX]

It'd probably be better just to use flop (floating point operation), and use the exponent

Like petaflops, exaflops, zetta flops, yotta flops..

Like if you have a machine that can execute 1 petaflops/s, then an hour at 1 petaflops, would probably about 3 zettaflops in one hour of computing.

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[makapuf]

Floating point operations per second per second ? On an ATM machine ?

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[FishTankX]

Well..

Floating point operations, and floating point operations per second would have similar looking spellings
FLOPs
and flops

Like if you wanted to say 2 gigaflops, 2 billion floating point operations
And 2 gigaflops for 2 billion floating operations per second

Perhaps you could differentiate them by just dropping normal pluralization conventions?
Like 2 gigaflop for 2 billion floating point operations, and 2 gigaflops for 2 billion floating point operations per second/

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[Gonoff]

You seem to have picked up an extra R along the way.
It says compute-hours, not computer-hours

I said computer hours because the content of a compute varies depending upon the computer.

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[omnichad]

That reminds me of my younger days playing in 3D Studio Max. Sometimes a 15-second animation would take all night to render on an old Pentium. By the time you get a few lights into the scenes, all the reflection and shadows are insanely complex. With today's movies, they go way beyond that level of complexity.

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[jxander]

...

I was trying for +Funny... ended up +Insightful.

That's a bit +Depressing

All I wonder

[onyxruby]

How many animation studios were forced out of business? That seems to be Hollywood's favorite metric for Fx and computer animation.

Re:All I wonder

[rmdingler]

The bigger sacrifice would seem to be that of cellulose film.

Re:All I wonder

[interval1066]

The bigger sacrifice would seem to be that of cellulose film.

...and a media that sacrifices itself automatically is of *what* value? (You are aware that there is a very expensive rush on to save the last century of cellulose film archives that are fading away into oblivion simply becuase they are cellulose...)

Re:All I wonder

[Charliemopps]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets not forget the tendancy for cellulose film to combust spectacularly given the least bit of encouragement. 'This summer's box office blockbuster, exploding on to screens in a cinema near you, or in the store room, or lets face it in transit!'

Re:All I wonder

[Algae_94]

that's only for Nitrocellulose film. Kodak stopped making that in 1950. Lots of movies are on cellulose triacetate or more modern polyester film stock.

Re:All I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

NOT Tom & Jerry

o fucking no!

Re:All I wonder

[NoMaster]

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.

Re:All I wonder

[westlake]

That's why all the Tom and Jerry episodes are in 4:3 instead of their original wide screen format.

I

Hanna and Barbera ultimately wrote, produced and directed 114 Tom and Jerry shorts at MGM cartoon studios in Hollywood from 1940 to 1957.

Tom and Jerry

These are the shorts that people remember and all but the very last were produced 4:3, not widescreen.

There have been many attempts to revive Tom & Jerry, none showing any great sympathy or understanding of the characters. Chuck Jones struggled here and it shows.

Re:All I wonder

[Sigg3.net]

But we all know it's the missing piece that explains everything. Like the question of the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Maybe Tom &Jerry were sent here by Satan to distract the human race while evil aliens silently take over leading positions in world governments? Now we'll never know the truth!

But we can speculate!

Re:All I wonder

[NoMaster]

Maybe Tom &Jerry were sent here by Satan to distract the human race while evil aliens silently take over leading positions in world governments? Now we'll never know the truth!

Nah, that sounds more like Disney to me...

Shouldn't it double?

[girlinatrainingbra]

You would think that for stereoscopic imagery instead of single-viewpoint imagery that the data-storage requirements would double rather than increasing by 30%. Maybe there's compression of imagery involved to save that space? Regular 2-d imagery = one viewpoint = $K$ amount of storage.
3-d stereo imagery = two viewpoints = $2 \times K$ amount of storage

What's wrong with what I'm thinking?

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[fatgraham]

Just a guess, but... 1 input (scene), 2 outputs (renders) ?
Perhaps 30% is 33.3333333% :)

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[Nemyst]

Things like 3D assets, textures, etc. don't suddenly need to be duplicated. In fact, the 3D scene itself needs very little changes, just having two cameras instead of one. It's once the movie's rendered that things double in size, but that's only a subset of the total movie's required space.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[girlinatrainingbra]

Yeah, I was just talking about the "rendered stereo product" storage space, but you're right about the other assets. So that almost tells us that 70% of the original storage requirements were for the assets (textures, skeletons, linkages, etc) and sequence data and that only 30% of the original storage requirements were for the rendered raw frame images. Thanks for pointing it out to me.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[Prof.Phreak]

Dunno. Napkin: 250000000000000 / (120*60*48*2); ~2 hour movie (120 minutes), 60 seconds per minute, 48 frames per second, one for left-right eye (2); or ~360MB per-frame. Perhaps a dozen or so layers per frame (different lighting models, shadow models, etc.,) leaves ~30MB per ``frame layer'' in super-duper-master resolution losslessly compressed. Animation paths/models/textures/voices, etc., also probably take up quite a bit, but likely not nearly as much as the raw image data.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[UCFFool]

If it's already rendered in 3d, then it would be a 'shift' of the camera and a fixed distance in space for the 2nd viewpoint.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[NonSequor]

Dunno. Napkin: 250000000000000 / (120*60*48*2); ~2 hour movie (120 minutes), 60 seconds per minute, 48 frames per second, one for left-right eye (2); or ~360MB per-frame. Perhaps a dozen or so layers per frame (different lighting models, shadow models, etc.,) leaves ~30MB per ``frame layer'' in super-duper-master resolution losslessly compressed. Animation paths/models/textures/voices, etc., also probably take up quite a bit, but likely not nearly as much as the raw image data.

Imagine... All of that just to render a napkin.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[Charliemopps]

If they were just storing the stereoscopic movie it'd be under 20gig. Clearly they are storing the entire data set including models, textures, etc... In fact, I'm rather surprised that the space increased at all. The rendered version of the movie should be tiny compared to all those assets stored for re-use in McDonalds ads, and sequels.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[mill3d]

I can't be certain that this is the technique Dreamworks used, but it makes sense and would save disk space:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_image_compositing

Instead of rendering images for both eyes, you render a "deep" image that contains depth information. The images for each eye are then written out of post production rather than out of the CG software.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[girlinatrainingbra]

Hey thanks! I'd never heard of that technique before. It must require extra "hidden behind this edge" info too, since each eye can see things that the other eye can't see obscured behind the edges of foreground objects.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[petermgreen]

My guess would be they have a version of the rendering that is stored at high resoloution with no compression (or maybe minimal intraframe compression) so that they can convert to whatever form the market demands for decades to come. This version may also contain material that was unused in the final film.

I dunno what resoloution movies are done at nowadays but if we assume 3 bytes per pixel, 24 frames per second and 8 million pixels per frame that is about 2 terabytes per hour.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[robthebloke]

The images will be OpenEXR, with 16bit floats per colour channel, uncompressed. RGB is a bit optimistic, it's more likely to be RGBA+depth. Typical film footage is a 2k image, or slightly above 1080p.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[robthebloke]

No, the rendered images will consume the most storage. The textures will all be procedural, and geometry data doesn't actually consume as much as you might think (since most of it will be static, and a large amount will be procedural). Version control repositories (to put it in programmer friendly terms) for the asset revisions may be quite a bit resource hog. 20Gb is extremely optimistic for uncompressed open exr's.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[forkazoo]

You would think that for stereoscopic imagery instead of single-viewpoint imagery that the data-storage requirements would double rather than increasing by 30%. Maybe there's compression of imagery involved to save that space?

Generally speaking, nothing clever happens for stereo storage. It's just that the actual rendered frames are only a small part of the total data involved in making a film. I've never worked at Dreamworks so I can't speak in detail about their pipeline, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are rendering to .sxr or something similar. (Possibly an analagous in house format.) It's basically an OpenEXR file with metadata conventions for stereo. Basically, the two views in SXR are completely separate images stuffed into a single file. No correlation between the views so that pixels that are visible from both can be reused. You can read the SXR spec to learn all the gory details.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[forkazoo]

Things like 3D assets, textures, etc. don't suddenly need to be duplicated. In fact, the 3D scene itself needs very little changes, just having two cameras instead of one. It's once the movie's rendered that things double in size, but that's only a subset of the total movie's required space.

While it's true that most 3D scenes don't need major changes, and the camera data is very small, this isn't always true. In 2D, artists will occasionally use horribly nonphysical hacks to make something look the way they want,a nd some of this can break horribly in stereo. So, every once in a while a cheap flat card with a texture on it gets replaced with a real fleshed out 3D model, or a 2D dust/sparkles particle effect gets redone as a full 3D simulation. Stuff like muzzle flashes, glows, halos, flares can be quite easy in 2D but surprisingly more than 2x the work to do in stereo without giving you a headache.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[forkazoo]

I can't be certain that this is the technique Dreamworks used, but it makes sense and would save disk space:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_image_compositing

No idea how much this was used on this particular film, but for the record, deep images don't save disk space. They churn through it like nobody's business! The idea is driven around storing many samples per pixel instead of just one, so you have a *lot* more data than with a normal "shallow" render and compositing pipeline. It is extremely useful for some thing, but it costs so much in terms of resources that it is still not in wide use yet. On the film Battleship, ILM used a deep image pipeline, but they only did it on a handful of shots where it was deemed worth it. The vast majority of the film was done with normal issues since trying to go 100% deep images would have simply crushed ILM.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[Grayhand]

It is still twice the rendering and disk space for the rendered files and 4X the headaches. I've worked 3D back in the 80s and 90s and it's a pain in the ass. I was doing effects rigging as well as some camera work. The problem is in film you get used to hiding things where as 3D has a nasty habit of seeing around the object or person. The cameras weighed a ton and we had one tear up a crane arm late one night. I was approached by a group that wanted to do a 3D film a couple of years ago. I tried to talk them out of it. I started laying out all the problems and I could tell none of them had a clue what they were getting into. Thankfully their money fell through. If you survive the shoot posting a 3D film will be an experience you won't soon forget. It's funny how companies avoided Vistavision because it added 5% to the budget but looked amazing. Depending on your budget and if it's live action or animated 3D can add between 10% to 50% to your budget and everyone wants to make them, the 50% is if you are low budget and crazy enough to try it. Your producer on the low budget film will take up drinking during the shoot and try to hang himself during the post. Most think it's just extra equipment rental and film stock, yeah that's the least of your trouble, With live action the set ups take longer and the camera needs to be checked constantly to make sure the calibration hasn't changed. If you think you're going to shoot 5 or 10 pages a day forget it. In post it's twice the film handling as well as things like adjusting the color timing not only to match the previous shot but to match the other camera. I always say it's twice as much work to make a 3D film. CG is far easier but it's still a headache.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[spire3661]

The two data sets are intimately related in predictable and purposefully engineered ways. They are a 'known transform' away from each other. Not exactly the right terminology, but you get the idea.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[omnichad]

These days, even small theaters show in digital 4K. If you're rendering on a computer you have no reason not to go for 4K as well. Times 2 for the second eye.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[mill3d]

Glad to hear it. I mostly use multi-layer EXR files for my work and those are disk hungry as well, as you probably know (up to ~250 MB per frame in my case). But since there's no need to have 1 image set per eye, I was somehow expecting deep images to consume less space... Thanks for the tip!

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[forkazoo]

Unfortunately, you still need two separate deep images. One for each eye. Things like specular highlights and reflections shift around depending on the viewer's position, so generating a second view froom the deep data doesn't actually look right. There are some cases where it'll work fine, but it's not universally true.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[mill3d]

Ahh, yes. I totally missed those details. Maybe it's just that the following got misinterpreted then:

For DreamWorks, the amount of data needed to create a stereoscopic film leaped by 30%."

After giving it some thought, it could be that their new stereo pipeline consumes more disk space than their old one... That would be expected if they increased their output resolution or used more passes in their comp process. Either way it just sounds more like a "bigger and better!" type of number thrown out there for PR reasons rather than a clever optimization.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[Sporkinum]

The only thing wrong with what you might be thinking is that 3d is a viable form for so many of these movies. 3d movies suck dogshit, with corn in it, through a straw.

Please do HFR next

[Trogre]

Okay, so everyone's doing 3D now, fair enough. I have no idea what high-definition means in this context though - have movies moved beyond 4k?

Lets hope their next title will be in high-frame-rate too. This should be a no-brainer particularly for animated titles. Double the processing requirements again!

Unless of course they go for a motion-interpolation to generate every second frame but the end result wouldn't be nearly as good.

Compute hours? WTF

[RussR42]

This is nonsense. I liked this:

A competed film has more than 250 billion pixels in it.

I wonder how many pixels they used up in development of the film. The article reads as though some one with no technical knowledge was handed a page of statistics about the movie and told to knock up an article by 5pm.

"If they have a vision that requires a certain amount of compute, we don't want technology to get in the way of that, we want the technology to enable that."

Yeah, if they need a certain amount of "compute" we have, like, millions of hours of that laying around!

that's not where the storage is...

[schlachter]

The 2 rendered viewpoints for 3D vision are not the only stored data. It's all the 3D models and textures and animation sequences AND the rendered scenes. So 30% seems pretty reasonable.

The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Taco Cowboy]

They could have ... hired some decent writers instead of spending 70 million on fancy CGI and celebrity voices, and then making the same cliched shitpile we see every two or three months

I can't agree with you more !!!

The development of the CGI technology has opened up a lot of possibilities and leveling the playing fields for many MANY people

But on the other hand, the relative ease of applying CGI animation and effects into movies also gave rise to a whole lot of JUNKS

Hollywood is indeed in decline - back in the days when Ben-Hur was made, it wasn't only the epic sets (it was the largest ever made) that made waves, but the story line, the scripting, the twist and turn, and the suspense, that grabbed the attention of the audience

Nowadays we have movies that are essentially "flat" --- the storyline is flat, the acting is flat, even the overdone CGI animation/effects come out looking "flat"

They have taken the FUN out of movie making, and also, movie watching

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[MightyYar]

I heard an analysis that this is because they need to make the movies internationally appealing, which means stripping out anything that would make it more interesting to any specific culture. You can't get any more vanilla then they are aiming for with a blockbuster, in other words.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Anonymous Coward]

the acting is flat, even the overdone CGI animation/effects come out looking "flat"

The rigging and animation style repeating from movie to movie for a kind of characters is my pet bother. See for example the movement of the APUs in the third Matrix and compare it to various bear-like characters in the later animations. The same old Disney thing all over again, with typified characters without the context of personality.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Tweezak]

On the other hand, a family I know that goes to seemingly every movie that comes to the theatre feeds on this kind of drivel. In fact, unless a movie is an overproduced special effects or CGI extravaganza then they say it isn't any good. Face it...our ADD society wants movies like this so the studios are just giving people what they are paying for.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Anonymous Coward]

They could have ... hired some decent writers instead of spending 70 million on fancy CGI and celebrity voices, and then making the same cliched shitpile we see every two or three months

...

Nowadays we have movies that are essentially "flat" --- the storyline is flat, the acting is flat, even the overdone CGI animation/effects come out looking "flat"

...

And that's exactly what I would expect from pouring too much money into writing. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of film that could do with a good rewrite, it's just that writing, unlike many fields, doesn't actually benefit from more money. If a solo author can't pull magic out of his hat, after it's been rewritten a few times, it tends to come out flat due to the blending of diverse passions and starts in different directions. Great Expectations was written by one author, as were nearly all of the classics. There was a ton of drivel that was written by one author too; however, it seems that the best way to make something worthwhile is to select the right author (or a standing team of people with a proven track record that act as one) rather than to put tons of money into endless rewrites until the story panders to every group, no matter how small.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[DigiShaman]

Personally, I would rather see more movies and media content based on the religious genre. Though by and large Hollywood has a huge disdain for them. Mel Gibson got shunned for The Passion of the Christ regardless of the fact there's a huge hunger for this genre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_films

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute, Ben-Hur is a snuff movie? How is that legal?

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[hairyfeet]

To me what is truly scary is how CGI has allowed moviemakers to be lazy and/or cynical when they make their films. Not sure if you want this movie to be a PG-13 or a hard R? No worries, we'll make all the blood using CGI instead of practical effects, that way we can add as much or as little as we want in post, its not like that EVER looks horribly fake. Not able to come up with a good plot or characters anybody will give a shit about? No worries, just pull a Michael Bay and dump a shitload of bad looking CGI and explosions, that's all them slack jawed movie goers will understand anyway...sigh.

Done right CGI can be just incredible, take The Avengers, in that while there was a lot of CGI it didn't overwhelm the story, same with LOTR, done right it can make us feel for creatures that don't exist or believe in fantastical worlds, done badly it just hurts, Battleship kind of hurts.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[walkerreuben]

If you believe Wikipedia, that's just a myth.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Anonymous Coward]

Even my seven-year-old thought battleship was rubbish.

Anyway, the notion that movies have somehow become worse is completely without basis in fact. There have always been crap movies, and it's only the way in which nostalgia telescopes the past that gives the impression of declining quality.

As for recent movies, look at Franekweenie, or Paranorman, or The Pirates an Adventure with Scientists for examples of proper animation done properly. It's still being done, and is better than ever.

Captcha: Ticket

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[newcastlejon]

Hollywood is indeed in decline - back in the days when Ben-Hur was made, it wasn't only the epic sets (it was the largest ever made) that made waves, but the story line, the scripting, the twist and turn, and the suspense, that grabbed the attention of the audience

I'm sure there used to be a lot of dreck made in the past too, though perhaps not as much because of the higher costs back then, but you have to bear in mind that the reason you saw Ben Hur (or remember it; I'm not going to guess your age) is that it's good.

I expect there were a fair few terrible films made back then too, but no-one is still showing them.

tl;dr Selection bias.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[hairyfeet]

I'm sorry but bullshit, CGI has made selling ideas that frankly would have NEVER been green lighted if they actually had to pay for practical effects and THAT is the problem. For every LOTR where CGI allowed a director to make a great movie you have a Terminator Salvation where you just KNOW that movie was sold on the Arnie CGI bot.

As for Battleship? Watch American Warships, while the effects are worse frankly its a better movie and it was a mockbuster of battleship! Frankly if they would have JUST used the old guys, which really wouldn't be hard, imagine them hearing about how the destroyers went down taking down the other ships so its only them between the aliens and the target? it might have been enjoyable. Frankly when I saw the aliens shooting PEGS, fricking pegs at the other ship in the previews? All I wanted was a FUN movie, not a great movie, just a popcorn muncher. Instead Kitsch's character is just sooo fucking DUMB and such a douchebag you really want to smack him, and his "crew"? Green recruits know more about how to act military more than these clowns, its just awful.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you have never been hooked by a movie showing a very specific story in a foreign setting.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Anonymous Coward]

"flatlining" is a money maker when the economy does poorly. Essentially people are looking for entertainment to keep their mind off of life and they are willing to watch more movies or TV shows. During this time specific formulas are drawn out to catch the audience's attention, the most possible profitable means and this is not only for TV but also videogames, anime, manga etc... Flatlinning isn't anything new, it's a brilliant marketing scheme that targets the casual audience hence why Nintendo did so well with the Wii and EA sells so many copies using formulated games. Have you seen Anime lately? It's nothing but magical girls and lucky star copycats but they sell a whole lot more than well thought out shows because their demographics are much lower in numbers.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[somersault]

I think you guys are missing the fact that there is always shit being made. It's just that only the good stuff stands the test of time. So it always seems like older things are better. There are definitely a lot of average new movies, songs, books, games, etc, out there, but there is also good stuff if you actually look around. Recently I really enjoyed Seven Psychopaths, as well as Robot and Frank for being "different".

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a bit of a catch 22. They lost their mass market appeal because the thumpers turn them into big tent revivals, which leads those who are on the fence to think it's just a recruiting drive and get turned off, the Really conservative to be appalled the bible is being used to make a buck, and the atheists avoid it like the plague.
Internationally, christian nations will get the same as above, and non christian will get a whole lot of "Who Cares?"

Same way that political stuff get big initial viewership, but the fall apart afterwards (like that OMG obama movie, Same with michael moore movies).

There are some genres that are just Anathema.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[omnichad]

You threw me by using the British title of the The Pirates. Was called "The Pirates! Band of Misfits" here, marketing name of just "The Pirates!"

It was done well except for the 3D. It was over-exaggerated and not used to any cinematic purpose. I understand it was their first 3D film, but it's like they were beginner filmmakers in that regard. For truly good 3D, watch Hugo. Still - Aardman knows what they're doing otherwise.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[MightyYar]

I have liked foreign movies, but my wife doesn't like to read the subtitles - and I think she's in the majority. In fairness, she did like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", so maybe it's just a matter of genre.

But anyway, I realize that I miss most of the jokes and cultural references in Japanese films. I saw the series "Oruchuban Ebichu", and fortunately the importers of that show explain many of the cultural references before the program begins. I expect references to American things would be lost on foreigners as well... for instance a joke about Detroit or Cleveland, or a quip about the Carter presidency or Rush Limbaugh. And those are just pop and political references... you'd need to stay faaaaar clear of literary references, since it is unlikely that international audiences will have the same repertoire of English lit education. Hell, you'll lose 75% of the American audience if you make a Romeo and Juliet reference, despite a nearly 100% guarantee that everyone in the audience had to read it in high school.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[MightyYar]

I'm definitely not missing that... I have Netflix!

(Actually, the free on-demand section on Comcast is far, far worse. It's all the stuff I didn't want to see 30 years ago...)

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[omnichad]

I wouldn't say no one is still showing them:

Cinematic Titanic
Rifftrax
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (okay, no ones still showing this).
http://www.rockyhorror.com/participation/showtimes.php

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[fatphil]

unbias yourself: http://archive.org/details/Cat_Women_of_the_Moon

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[puppetman]

I'm just waiting for the next Studio Ghibli film to grace our shores, or maybe a Wallace and Grommit. I'll skip Planes, and I won't take my under-10 kids to see it. The Croods can wait till video (AKA TorrentLeech).

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[DiEx-15]

They have taken the FUN out of movie making, and also, movie watching

To which the MPAA will blame online piracy for.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Rakarra]

Mel Gibson got shunned for a lot of reasons.
First, he's crazy. Albeit, in 2003 people didn't quite yet realize -how- crazy.
Second, he's anti-Semitic, like father like son.
And third, Passion was a snuff/torture film. It played really strongly to a certain sect of evangelicals who consider the torture parts a wonderful intesifying of Christ's sacrifice, but it also turned off a number of regular Christians who found the fetishism of the suffering and torture to be a bit disturbing... and possibly un-Christ-like. Oh, and it altered history in an anti-Semitic way as well.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Rakarra]

I'm sorry but bullshit, CGI has made selling ideas that frankly would have NEVER been green lighted if they actually had to pay for practical effects and THAT is the problem.

I think you're simultaneously right and wrong. Yes, CGI has made bad movies more possible, but it's also made good movies more possible as well. LOTR is an obvious example. Life of Pi is a more recent one. Others have said things along the lines of "there's no way we could have made this movie 20 years ago. The special effects weren't there yet." I'd go back to what the AC was saying -- previous decades were just as full of bad movies as today is. We just don't remember them because they were so unmemorable. Go back and read a release schedule from several decades ago and three quarters of the movies will be ones you don't remember. There's a reason for that.

We'll remember a number of good movies from this last year. In 2030, no one will remember there was ever a Battleship movie, except perhaps as a trivia novelty because it was based on a tabletop game (not even a board game). People will remember Lincoln and Argo though, and say "Man, they made some good movies back then."

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[hairyfeet]

Yeah but its frankly even making good movies lazy, like using CGI blood (which I have yet to see not look fake as hell) so they can change the rating of the movie in post. And honestly a great director can make do and make a great movie without CGI, look at the first Terminator which was all practical effects, it STILL looks good to this day, compare it with the fight scene between Neo and the hundred Smiths in Reloaded and your mind screams "Bad PlayStation game!" because CGI never seems to age well.

But sadly the main side effect we are seeing is the "Michael Bay" effect, movies that obviously have NO plot, lousy characters and clunky dialog getting greenlit because CGI makes the costs reasonable and they are all hoping to be the next Transformers. Before while there were big budget bombs, your Heaven's Gates and Ishtars frankly the studios were more conservative because practical effects seriously ramped up costs but now because they can have a computer just crap shit on a screen frankly movies that in the past would have been told "Go rewrite that shit and bring it back when it don't suck" get told "Meh, throw some cool shit on the screen and it'll sell".

I mean how many movies have YOU seen where this sentence applies "Effects were good, movie sucked ass" as a perfect description? I don't know about you but I've seen a LOT of movies that fit that description and I bet a good half of them wouldn't have been greenlit if it weren't for cheap CGI.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[greenbird]

Nowadays we have movies that are essentially "flat" --- the storyline is flat, the acting is flat, even the overdone CGI animation/effects come out looking "flat"

Amen to that. Even better example, any Alfred Hitchcock movie. Any of them are much more suspenseful than any of that crap they put about these days in that genre and not a one of them had wildly expensive special effects. Just good creative original plot lines, great directing and decent acting. Rear Window is one of the most suspenseful movies I've ever scene yet has not a drop of blood and only the most mild violence with an added touch of subtle sexual tension.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Rakarra]

look at the first Terminator which was all practical effects, it STILL looks good to this day,

Oh, it was not all practical effects, many many shots of the Terminator after it had all the flesh melted off were front projections of stop-motion and look laughibly bad, even unconvincing back in 1982. Aliens, even though it's my favorite sci-fi action film of all time, also had some weird-looking front-projection shots that just look out of place. T2 got rid of the front projection entirely, the opening robot vs human battle in the future looks great. I love well-done miniatures.

But a good number of sequences in T1 are great, like the 70s-style car chase, the firefight between Reese and Terminator, etc. Good times.

compare it with the fight scene between Neo and the hundred Smiths in Reloaded and your mind screams "Bad PlayStation game!" because CGI never seems to age well.

I agree, most of the effects in the Matrix sequels were bad effects.

because they can have a computer just crap shit on a screen frankly movies that in the past would have been told "Go rewrite that shit and bring it back when it don't suck"

Nah, good CG is expensive. Bad CG exists, but it's harder to sell a movie on that than it was in the past. Now budgets are much higher, even for bombs.

I mean how many movies have YOU seen where this sentence applies "Effects were good, movie sucked ass" as a perfect description?

A number of them, but I said the same thing in the 80s. But of course back then my threshold for what "good effects" were was much lower back then too.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[hairyfeet]

But my point is thanks to the ever dropping costs of CG and the fact that Michael bay could put out such dreck and make a fuckton of money (I mean how in the fuck did Skids and Mudflap get past censors? All he needed to do was have them eat fried chicken and watermelon to complete the stereotype) that studios are MUCH more likely to go "Meh, its stupid as fuck but hey, works for Michael!" and greenlight this shit.

Now we can debate whether its the CGI or the rise of the Bay that is the root of the problem but either way whereas in the past there was plenty of smaller crap movies now we are seeing just as many 100 million budget crap movies as we used to see crap low budget junk. The new Die Hard (Oh God THAT is painful, don't watch it, its worse than a cartoon) or Battleship, Terminator Salvation which you just KNOW was sold based on the Arnie CGI demo, things that My God, anybody could just sit and read the script and go "Are you shitting me? that is just retarded!" seem to get greenlit left and right and like Yahtzee at ZP said about the force with Star Wars CGI has become the "all purpose plot cavity filler". Movie have NO plots, lousy dialog, and characters nobody can like? "Well just dump a shitload of CGI on the screen and hope those slackjawed locals buy it!" seems to be the rule in Hollywood these days, bad CGI is spreading worse than Twilight ripoffs on the landscape.

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Sigg3.net]

But the DRM is state-of-the-art!

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Hognoxious]

It was done well except for the 3D. It was over-exaggerated

As apposed to being under-exaggerated?

Re:The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[omnichad]

As opposed to using 3D as a storytelling tool. Instead, they just shove objects in your face.

Video Toaster on an Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be 80 millions hours using Video Toaster on an Amiga.

80 Million Compute Hours

[Anonymous Coward]

and still sucks

storage up; cost down

[schlachter]

what's interesting is that even though their storage requirements have been increasing, the cost of the needed storage has probably been dropping drastically along the way. I bet they are spending less on storage now than they did in the 90s, even though they are probably storing a few orders of magnitude more data. so from a costs perspective...which is how DreamWorks looks at it...it's a non-issue

Re:storage up; cost down

[Kjella]

That's what I was thinking too, if the simplest solution is to just get a bigger disk, then let's just do that. Doing otherwise is like a company rationing office supplies. Personally I just bought 2x4TB drives that'll give me 5TB more HDD space (I'm retiring two 1.5TB drives) because I'm too lazy to sort through it all. Hell, I can't even keep my downloading in pace with technology, at one point I had ten HDDs operational now I'm down to six and if I wasn't looking for room to expand I could go down to four. I don't think of limiting my HDD use any more than I limit drinking from the tap.

Re:storage up; cost down

[jtownatpunk.net]

Yeah, I took a tour of Wavefront Technologies back in the early 90s and they were still measuring storage in gigabytes. They'd just unpacked their first HDTV setup and, if I remember right, the demo system had 10 gigabytes of storage and it was ridiculously expensive because it had to be able to read/write crazy-fast to handle the HD content. I think that was about the time I paid $600 for a 212 meg drive at a computer show and it was a great price. A couple years later, I met a guy who was working on a project to built a 4tb array. Back then something like that was a project.

Now I look at that 250tb and I could order the parts needed to build an array of that capacity from Amazon. Heck, I've already got an array at home that's 10% of that. Okay, I'd probably have trouble getting all of the production/server level equipment thru Amazon but I'd still be able to build it with off-the-shelf parts.

1000 computers going 10 years ?

[Anonymous Coward]

= 80 million computer hours.

That's baloney, so it must be another definition.

What the heck is a "compute hour."

Re:1000 computers going 10 years ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Switch your digits. ~10,000 computers going 1 year. Still sound like baloney?

from producing 2D to 3D high-definition movies...

[Osgeld]

..."over the past decade, the data required to produce the films increased tremendously."

but yet the quality and entertainment of such movies at best remains about the same.

Besides I always get a kick out of the HD systems at a cinema, sure brag about your HD flickering mirrors and your THX Super surround, doesnt mean squat when the picture is still fuzzy and the speakers sound like a cheap set of computer speakers with too much bass running though 2 metal 1 watt tweeters and a 8 inch floppy as shit "sub"

But... Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does the efficiency of this compare to some of Pixar's movies (like Brave or WALL-E)?

I only say this because sometimes long render times and exuberant technical requirements are not signs of proper craftsmanship. When they are, you often point out why they are- maybe you've developed a new BRDF shader that takes a bit longer to render but offers results closer to an unbiased renderer that nobody else can achieve. Or maybe you've written a new global illumination system that, once again, takes a bit longer to render but offers a diffuse bounce count beyond anything anyone else can achieve in any reasonable amount of time.

The fact that they don't mention why or what that extreme amount of resources went towards raises an eyebrow. Was it a rushed production? Are the scenes so poorly setup and configured that they had to jack up the render engine parameters just to get a usable frame out of the thing? Because the movie looks a hell of a lot like any other CGI flick out there (Brave, Wreck-It Ralph, etc), so if there is some grand justification for these numbers I'm certainly not seeing it.

Having spent many years in the CG industry myself, I can tell you that if you don't have a reason to backup your "big numbers"- you're probably doing it wrong. I can't even count the number of times I've seen someone brew up some insane (not insane as in "wow, that's radical", but insane as in "what the hell were you thinking?") over-the-top lighting rig and a gigantically obfuscated scene setup that requires horrendously long render times for sub-par results, when the same scene heavily optimized and relighted can be rendered out in 1/100th of the time and look identical with a bit of post work (if not better).

Re:But... Why?

[dbIII]

over-the-top lighting rig

Then you compare it to the first "Toy Story" which had hardly any shadows and a pile of other shortcuts but is still going to keep a lot of people glued to the screen for a couple of hours.

glitz vs Quality

[bloodhawk]

It seems that while the graphics and data requirements increase dramatically the actual quality of the stories and movies are increasing just as rapidly but in the other direction. I would much prefer less focus on graphics and 3D and them spending some money of some bloody writters that don't just rehash the same shit over and over.

Re:glitz vs Quality

[Krymzn]

Modern animated movies don't all consist of clichés, double entendres and wise-cracking sidekicks, nor even have much swish CGI. I am, of course, talking about Studio Ghibli.

Re:glitz vs Quality

[bloodhawk]

yes and they have made some of my favourite animated movies, however I still wish there were more animated studios up to their standard, their are a couple but I wish their were quite a few more like them, perhaps then we would see more substance it what is being produced.

Easy way to save time

[GrahamCox]

Here's an optimisation they missed, which could have sped render time up dramatically. Take the script, and get some people, dressed up as the characters, to read it out in rooms designed to look exactly like the rendered backgrounds. Of course, the people would need to just go beyond just 'reading' the script, they'd have to sort of pretend they were those characters, like it was some sort of act. Then film it.

Re:Easy way to save time

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet they couldn't find any actors with large enough eyes to play the characters.

Re:Easy way to save time

[Opportunist]

Maybe the "actors" available today were not lifelike enough...

Re:Easy way to save time

[ColdWetDog]

That's sort of the way "Rango" was done. Which, BTW, is a much better movie that "Croods" (who came up with that name?). The scenes where done by live actors and then the animators took over.

Re:Easy way to save time

[Anonymous Coward]

Which, BTW, is a much better movie that "Croods" (who came up with that name?).

Probably several psychologists and focus groups.

Same as who wrote a chunk of the story.

Re:Easy way to save time

[frank_adrian314159]

Maybe the "actors" available today were not lifelike enough...

How can that be? I heard Keanu Reeves was available!

Re:Easy way to save time

[Opportunist]

Whoa!

this is meaningless

[shadowrat]

This is a worthless statistic. Maybe they assests were all bloated and inefficient and the movie took way longer to render than it should have. Maybe they were incredibly efficient and every texture and model was optimized and the movie actually took half as long to render as it would have for anyone else. Maybe the hardware was a couple of pentiums in a warm basement in southern california.

At any rate, the time it takes to render a movie is about as interesting as the average histogram from all the frames.

Re:this is meaningless

[Anonymous Coward]

Your top of PC Gaming systems can easily renders 2560x1600 "3D world" for a video game in real time. So let say 4K display (let's make it 4X # of pixels of PC game) and 2X frames for 3D, so that's 8X more pixels to push.

What are they rendering exactly that requires 6 orders of magnitude more computing time in a ~2 hours movie than a typical PC game?

Re:Learn the truth ... apk

[Llamalarity]

G. Rover Cripes! Slashdot needs a minus 10,000 mod so no one is ever subjected to this again.

Leaped by 30%? *YAWN*

[flargleblarg]

I don't wanna sound like an ass, but "leaped by 30%" is not a leap. At the rate hard drive sizes have been increasing over the past 30 years, a 30% increase (e.g, 1.3x) is simply 7 months of industry progress. Wake me up when something leaps by 10x in size, not 1.3x.

Re:Learn the truth ... apk

[meerling]

You have to use fire, otherwise they just regenerate :p

Prejudice...

[mapuche]

I guess your comment is the variant of "haven't read the article, just the summary".

The script is very well done in terms of human relationships and interactions. It's not a movie about fart jokes, the characters are fairly complex (for an animated movie). It is worth to watch it before forming any opinion.

Re:Prejudice...

[war4peace]

Maybe. But they're ugly as a rhinoceros's butt. And that turns me off completely. Plus they act like they're on dope all the time.
Aliens on dope trying (and failing) to mimic human beings, that's what I got from it.

Re:Prejudice...

[pitchpipe]

Yeah! Give it a shot, they've been working on this since 7120 BCE (at least the computer has been running that long!)

Re:Prejudice...

[gl4ss]

yep..

it looks like crap, took a long time to compute and it's debatable how many "computer hours" it took to complete because "compute hour" isn't an actual unit in any way.

Re:Prejudice...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is worth to watch it before forming any opinion.

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2397643

250TB?

[Guano_Jim]

I'm amazed that a full-on Hollywood production can fit in 250TB.

That's really not all that expensive any more. Unless my math is wrong that's well within the budget of a medium-sized post-production facility.

Re:Compute hours? WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

...running low on those pixels though. Send a runner down to MGM see if thay've got any going spare, and while he's at it see if he can pick up a left handed screwdriver and a tin of tartan paint too.

Progress

[sootman]

I've heard that the average time to render a frame has stayed around 3 hours, from "Andre and Wally B" to now. May or not be true, but it's probably close. It's amazing to look at the differences between "Toy Story" and "Toy Story 3", which makes a particularly good test case because they have the same characters but they're 15 years apart. I remember being amazed at how things looked in Toy Story, from Rex's bumpy texture to the messed-up paint at the bottom of Andy's door, but if you watch the first right after watching the third, you'll be amazed at the differences. I'd say it's most noticeable in the human characters but if you look closely you'll see it everywhere.

I'll bet ...

[PPH]

... a good chunk of that was the animators surfing the web while their rendering ran.

Re:I'll bet ...

[DigiShaman]

I've seen video production work in progress before. For advertisements that is. You have a director or two, followed by a few guys behind Avid workstations. They constantly loop video and audio over and over just to "get it right". It's monotonous! But that's what they do. Once they finalize on a CGI basic render (wire frame or flat shaded), they produce the final video and let it bake all night or until the render is complete.

I'm guessing these guys breakup the work load and stage production. While one segment is rendering full time, the animators are working on the rough cut of the next one.

Re:I'll bet ...

[Anonymous Coward]

This, with animators.

http://xkcd.com/303/

Re:250TB? = about $350K.

[attemptedgoalie]

After you figure in licensing, support costs, it's about $350K.

I say that because I use the same gear, and that's how much it costs for 300TB. We have to add that every so often, so the number stuck. :-)

Certainly they get a better discount than I do.

Intrigued by the numbers

[jay508]

80,000,000 hours is 476,190 weeks or 109,516 months or 9,126 years or 912 decades. Can someone familiar with this type of processing comment on the type of hardware it would take to run this in 3 years? Also, given the processing time I'm really surprised at the low amount of storage that was used. 250TB isn't that much. Makes me curious what kind of throughput was used on their storage arrays. Even if you had the kind of processing power required to process 9,126 years of data in 3 I'd imagine it would be very I/O heavy. The IOPS on the disk arrays are equally impressive as the processing power itself.

Re:Intrigued by the numbers

[O('_')O_Bush]

IOPS are more important when recording a raw feed, than when rendering. Rendering is CPU/RAM heavy, and compared to the data being generated by the render, what actually gets stored to disk is miniscule and low bandwidth.

At a rate of tens of hours per frame, even with thousands of machines, only a few dozens frames per second are being written to the storage arrays.

Re:Intrigued by the numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

For reference, my PhD dissertation in Astrophysics has taken so far about 25 million CPU-hours, mostly as low-priority jobs on a university supercomputer with all recent-Xeon nodes. All of these simulations were single thread (ODE integrators are not easily multitreaded), but for Monte Carlo statistics, I needed ~10,000 of them.

What's 3D, high rez good for

[Opportunist]

...if they still only have 2D, low development characters?

Seriously, could they maybe start spending a few of those millions they pump into special effects and more shiny into scripts that actually, you know, make me WANT to watch the movie? Or at least make me want to stay longer than the 10 minutes it takes to know how it is going to progress and end?

Re:What's 3D, high rez good for

[omnichad]

If you want dumb kids, stick with the status quo. Have you watched a Looney Toons cartoon in adulthood? There's loads more depth behind those cartoons than anything coming from Dreamworks today. You can enjoy it while you're young and when you're old. Sure beats all the sex jokes in Shrek - which really didn't need to be there. There's plenty of ways to be intelligent, funny, and still appeal widely to kids.

Re:Leaped by 30%? *YAWN*

[dbIII]

I've got some 6GB SCSI drives in a cardboard box behind me which were in a storage array not many years ago, so I think you'll get woken up with 1000x in not very long.

Re:250TB? = about $350K.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's for the slow storage--I'm guessing SATA drives. For SAS based it's 3-4x as much.

Captcha - Approval, because that's exactly where in the purchasing loop I'm stuck now

~600 8 core systems, if it's 80,000,000 core-hours

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, 1 year has 8780 hours in it, so 3 years is 26430 hours. Given that you're not running continuously (slower ramp at the beginning of the project), figure 2 years, which is only 17560.

80,000,000 hours divided by 17560 is only 4556 computers, for whatever value of computers you use. If you're talking core-hours then you only need about 600x 8 core systems. Still, a farm of about 4.5k systems isn't that huge.

CGI was the problem with Tin Tin

[Anonymous Coward]

Tin Tin had a great story, the voice actors were fine, but the CGI cartoon really put me off it. The characters were very realistic, almost as if they were human, so you watched it as thought it was a *movie* not a *cartoon*.

But then the movements and micro body language was all weird. So you'd constantly notice this terrible body language instead of the movie plot. It was like they'd hired a bunch of weird bad actors and made the movie with those.

So DreamWorks has spent another bucket load of money on the CGI? Fools!

Re:CGI was the problem with Tin Tin

[Hognoxious]

I felt the same watching Polar Express.

There's a name for the phenomenon - uncanny valley. Live action is one ridge and cartoons that look like cartoons are the other.

Re:Images do not compress well

[AK Marc]

Images compress well. Compressed images don't compress well. Compressed images don't take kindly to repeated editing.

Re:250TB? = about $350K.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if it was >SATA and cost 1 million ... That's chump change compared to big movie budgets. And it's not like it all goes in the trash when production is complete.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi does it compare with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within? It was known for photorealism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy:_The_Spirits_Within

Re:Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

[omnichad]

Uncanny Valley hell. That's what that is. There's a reason you stop at a certain point of realism and keep it a "cartoon." That's why they stick with impressive things like hair animation and pretty lighting effects.

Still look like crap though

[Anonymous Coward]

And the characters still look like shit... I'm sorry no amount of technology can cover art that looks like a piece of crap to begin with.. yes I know they're meant to be cavemen but if studio ghibli were to do it I'm sure it will be simple yet pleasing without needing bazillion cpu cycles.

I'm a screenwriter.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, seriously, I am.

Let me tell you about the Hollywood screenwriting process as applied to the vast majority of screenwriters.

First the new script is tossed on a pile with a hundred others waiting to be read by one of the teenage intern scriptreaders enslaved at every studio and production company.

When they finally get to your script, these readers skim through page one, looking for that Big Grabber. Hollywood's Writing-by-Numbers bible stipulates that every screenplay have a Big Grabber on page one. That usually means EXPLOSION. (Hollywood's standard screenplay format requires that caps be used for sounds, significant action, and events.)

So the teen skims page one for words such as (but not limited to) EXPLOSION, GUNFIRE, STEAMY SEX, or DECAPITATES. If they do not see those words, they usually toss the script on the huge Of No Interest pile.

Sometimes they'll keep reading in the hope that the next Hollywood stipulation is met: Something Big by page ten. If they don't see Something Big by page ten, they toss the script.

Very occasionally, the teen will keep reading, desperate to see the next stipulation fulfilled: Something Shocking on page 17. Note I said "on" page 17; It has to be page 17. Not page 16, not page 18. It has to be page 17. Why? Because it's in Hollywood's Writing-by-Numbers bible, and who can argue with that?

Well, if that Page 17 Something Shocking requirement is ignored by the worthless writer, who has also not done his or her duty by meeting the page one Big Grabber and page ten Something Big demands, the script will be tossed, as you can imagine.

However, a reader may keep reading once in a blue moon, clinging to the belief that the writer will redeem him or herself on page 30. Page 30 is the last chance. It's where Things Change. There is a chance that the otherwise-ignorant writer has not forgotten the holy Hollywood Writing-by-Numbers bible and has saved something great for page 30. Something Different. Something that Changes Everything.

If it's not there, the script is tossed. End of story in 99.9% of instances.

Some other points: Dialogue is Bad. Dialogue is Boring. Anything longer than Die, muthafucka! is unacceptable. Dialogue puts the teenage intern scriptreader to sleep, and if it puts a teenage intern scriptreader to sleep, it will put everyone to sleep. It just stands to reason. So dialogue is out.

Story is also bad. It just gets in the way of the movie. Remember, it's EXPLOSION, CAR CHASE, BARE BREASTS and other important visual imagery that make or break a true Hollywood classic in the 21st Century.

As long as you have, say, a psychotic serial killer, a hot chick in danger, a popular lead from a hit TV show, exploding helicopters, super heroes, almost-but-not-quite-gay hot guy Vampires (who have some very close male friends), at least 25 zombies, and an ending from which no one walks away alive except maybe the lead and the hot chick (-zombie clause-), you have a Hollywood movie.

Re:I'm a screenwriter.

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, great movies are still made.

How to explain this in your cynical world of movies-by-numbers?

Watch 'Winters Bone', and come and tell me that all movies have to have explosions in the first five minutes. Or 'The Limits of Control'. Or 'The Skin I Live In'. Or one of the other fucking masterpieces that appear year upon year.

Maybe you're just a shit writer?

Re:I'm a screenwriter.

[Anonymous Coward]

How are those indy pics the same as a Hollywood film?

The OP was talking about Hollywood studio flicks, not independent Spanish Jarmusch arthouse type films of the kind you listed.

The OP is basically right on the money and I can barely recall the last time I saw a Hollywood movie that wasn't just explosions and vampires.

Re:I'm a screenwriter.

[serviscope_minor]

BARE BREASTS and other important visual imagery that make or break a true Hollywood classic in the 21st Century.

Now I *know* you're not a Holywood screenwriter, because that's in the bible for French cinema.

Re:I'm a screenwriter.

[ewenix]

Remember, it's EXPLOSION, CAR CHASE, BARE BREASTS and other important visual imagery that make or break a true Hollywood classic in the 21st Century.

Okay, so I wasn't going to go see the Croods movie because the trailer looked awful.
But based on your comments as an industry profressional, you say I can expect to see at least one car chase, some explosions and bare breasts.
If you can assure me that it's not a bunch of man boobs, then I promise to reconsider my decision.

Re:I'm a screenwriter.

[omnichad]

Watch 'Winters Bone'

How can a movie with that title not have BARE BREASTS

Re:I'm a screenwriter.

[fatphil]

You are clearly not a screenwriter. You have demonstrated no actual insight into screenwriting at all. All you write is what any outsider knew already.

Re:I'm a screenwriter.

[Rakarra]

You are clearly not a screenwriter. You have demonstrated no actual insight into screenwriting at all. All you write is what any outsider knew already.

He could be a screenwriter but he also sounds like he's taking one or two real examples and generalizing it into a "this is how it works everywhere in Hollywood" screed.

He could also be an embittered screenwriter who wrote a bad screenplay that wasn't considered and blames it on the action crowd rather than his own work, but without seeing the original product there's no way to know.

Re:I'm a screenwriter.

[Anonymous Coward]

What was that successful movie that was made in Europe after it was rejected by everyone in Hollywood?

It was only a small dialog driven story but it got rave reviews and did okay in theaters, then went on to earn a fucking fortune in DVD sales, something like 10x its production cost.

The US studios rejected the screenplay because it was "all talk and no action", which was a bullshit claim from what I remember. Was it 'In Bruges'? Something like that.

Mainstream American movies seem to be nothing but mindless action from beginning to end with next to no plot and some really embarrassingly bad dialog.

GP sounds right about the assessment of the people reading screenplays in Hollywood and their expectations.

No way something like 'Amadeus' could ever get made in Hollywood now, not unless you added some explosive horse and carts chases and musket shootouts.

Re:I'm a screenwriter.

[Rakarra]

Ok, so In Bruges was rejected. There are many small-scale movies that are produced and made in the United States. You and the OP are giving examples where a certain type of movie was rejected and making the claim from that that those types of movies do not get made anymore -- but the weekly releases would tell another story. This last weekend, five out the top 10 grossing movies were on somewhat small (under $30m) budgets: The Call, Admission, Spring Breakers, the Incredible Burt Wonderstone (that's pushing 'small' though), and Silver Linings Playbook.

What -HAS- greatly declined is the mid-scale movie, the non-blockbuster. They don't have costs low enough to be small productions, and they don't go all out like the big blockbusters. When they are released, it's in the slower points of the year, like February or March (John Carter's problem is that it was released in the mid-range timeframe and made mid-range business, but it cost ultra-blockbuster dollars to make).

Re:I'm a screenwriter.

[Anonymous Coward]

The small indy pics aren't the point. The point is that everything else has to rigidly adhere to a formula just to get a recommendation from those "teen intern scriptreaders." Even if a script is favorably reviewed by one of those people it's still a long way from being picked up by any producer. But it's formula all the way.

Outside of tiny indyland, a script will not become a movie unless it adheres to every Hollywood formula. It's absurd to try to equate some $50 b&w digicam indy project with anything from Hollywood. Even comparing an Almodovar or Jarmusch flick with anything mainstream is ridiculous. They are completely different things.

The OP said "dialog is bad" but Hollywood also believes "new or different is bad" because they fear it won't appeal to the core audience they've created in the last decade or two, namely 14-year-old boys. Hollywood won't produce anything that isn't like everything they already produced. So it's more 300, and Avengers, and Battleships, and lame Matrix clones and all the rest. Just not anything worth watching.

Re:I'm a screenwriter.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I thought it was just me noticing this evolve in movies over the last decade or so. You have provided me with the proof I needed to convince my crap-loving friends that this has been happening. Michael Bay and other purveyors of celluloid dog shit that is any movie today have a lot to answer to.

When I put on my Blu-Rays of Gone With The Wind, Ben-Hur, Blade Runner and Out of Africa, I mourn for the now-dead movie industry.

Sad, sad, sad :(

Oh, they're around...

[Anonymous Coward]

Search the "Fantasy" genre.

Re:Oh, they're around...

[i kan reed]

I'd like to say this, but seriously. The Christian religion has as many good seeds for fantasy as ancient greek, norse, or egyptian religions do. If there weren't so many people taking it so seriously, we could get some awesome movies out of the bible.

After the movie...

[AnotherAnonymousUser]

What happens to all of the assets, models, and 3D work that was put into the film? Does it go into some massive archive for the studio, or some kind of common repository? Projects like that, it's easy for files to get lost and lose all of the work put into it. I'm curious to know what the life-cycle of the digital assets is once a movie is completed. Anyone got any light to shed on the subject?

Re:After the movie...

[spire3661]

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. At some point in the not too distant future, games and moves are going to SHARE art assets. Will we be able to remix the assets on our computers and make new adventures with cinema quality props??

and the movie could have been

[Anonymous Coward]

hand drawn in korean or chinese animation sweatshops for next-to-nothing and the movie would have turned an even bigger profit...

bigger isn't always better ---- or more profitable...

subject

[Legion303]

"The Croods took more compute cycles to create than any other movie they've made."

Does this mean they've finally managed to change the expression on character faces from their usual open-mouthed stupidity?

So many computations, so much emptiness.

[master_p]

I saw the preview trailer...excellent graphics, top-notch animation, very good voice acting...but it failed to grab my attention. There was a void.

On the other hand, the movie 'Up' was a lot cruder, in terms of technical aspects, but so much more moving than 'the croods'.

Gotta love the lack of imagination here at /.

[metalmaster]

It's been said that as we grow older we lose our sense of wonder about the world. That's certainly true of the slashdot crowd. Here we have an article talking about the technology behind creating an animated movie, and I see a bunch of comments bashing the script and progression of the movie. Face it folks, this movie isnt for you. Dreamworks wasnt trying to make it for you, and as long as youre older than 14 Dreamworks wont try to cater to you with this genre ever again. Let the kids have their fun with fart jokes, bright colors and possibly some cartoon violence. Take them into the theatre, cuff them to the seat then go down the hall to enjoy your movie with mile deep character development and a plot that takes 1:30 to make sense of.

Re:Gotta love the lack of imagination here at /.

[omnichad]

When you get to the point of calling an animated film "a kid's movie" you're part of the problem. Dreamworks has a big tendency to put out pretty-looking drivel. Sometimes as a kid or even as an adult you want to turn your brain off and watch something mindless. I enjoy Hannah Montana now and then. But when you get to the point of taking all the art away from a movie just because it's a kid's movie, you're breeding a generation of dumb people.

Just compare something like Kung Fu Panda with Finding Nemo or Wall-E. Both equally adored by kids, but not equally adored by critics. I still look forward to each Pixar movie, even though I'm no kid and have no kids and even though Brave wasn't very well written. They usually try to achieve some depth and come out with something that appeals to all ages.

Worst. First. Post. Ever.

[geoffrobinson]

Dear me that was awful.

obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/303/ - Compiling

Nostalgia hides failures.

[jellomizer]

Once every few years we get a really good movie. And we get a bunch that are either Crap or mediocre, Sometimes the really good ones don't make it big in the box office, however become popular later.
So we come up with an example of 5 or 6 movies that you consider gems of the decade, with nostalgia filters on you say it was a great decade because of movies 3 or 4 out of 6. Not realizing how much crap was released then too, because we have forgotten the movie, because it was just that boring or never seemed to watch it then.
Usually stuff you watched when you were a kid to a teenager was considered new and exciting and interesting, then by the time you get in your 20's it becomes more humdrum.

30% is tremendously?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Maybe it's just me, but the fact it's not a doubling is actually a little surprising. I can picture it - the models are 3D all the way though to the final rendering, where you need to pick between 2D and 3D (2D is probably a single eye view of 3D). But at some point those shared models need to become pixels, and a 3D rendering seems a 2x increase in storage. Or are the models so complex now that the end rendering filesizes don't dominate storage needs?

That said, the trailers don't make me want to watch this film. The sloth saying "dun dun DUNNNNNN" seems to be the highlight, as verified by it's greater prominence in the second wave of trailers.

If only they had used ElectricImage...

[RogueWarrior65]

It would have been completed in half that time. LONG LIVE EIAS!

what a waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the output of all this amazing work and infrastructure is ... a movie. Who cares! It's just mass entertainment, not the Space Shuttle, DNA research, or a SuperCollider, for chrissakes. Imagine we used this for something that's not 100% pap that, in 100 years, won't matter one iota. Get a life, people!