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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%."
... 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.
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.")
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.
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
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
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.
This signature is false.
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.
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.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?