Surprisingly enough, most of TS2 was rendered on a network of 4096 iMacs. We had the Blueberry Cluster, the Strawberry Cluster, etc. You could get a tan in the machine room from all the CRT radiation!
Seriously, the renderfarm this time around consisted of around eight dozen 14-processor Sun Ultra boxes each with 8 Gb of memory and about 36 Gb of disk. Rendering times (using Renderman) ranged from 2 to around 20 hours per frame.
Sorry, Linux was really not used at all on TS2. Pixar managers use Macs and animation/technical people use SGIs, mostly Octanes these days. Suns are used only for the fileservers and renderfarm.
BTW here are the theaters showing TS2 in digital projection. It looks absolutely stunning and, because of the digital transfer from the original image files, it blows away 35mm film. You owe it to yourself to make the trip.
AMC 1000- Theater 2 1000 Van Ness Avenue at O'Farrell San Francisco, CA 94109 (415) 922-4262
El Capitan 6838 Hollywood Boulevard Hollywood, CA 90028 (800) 347-6396 or www.elcapitantickets.com
Media Center North-AMC Burbank 201 East Magnolia Boulevard Burbank, CA 91502 (818) 953-9800
People not familiar with X-10 should be aware that it uses a very slow bitrate; it takes almost a second for devices to respond to a given command.
The slow bitrate is what lets them get away with having the Firecracker computer interface toggle serial port lines in real time to send each bit (instead of using a UART).
On the handheld remote that comes with the Firecracker kit, there is an LED that blinks out the bit pattern as it's being transmitted to the receiver. It is so slow that you can see the individual bits being sent.
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Seriously, the renderfarm this time around consisted of around eight dozen 14-processor Sun Ultra boxes each with 8 Gb of memory and about 36 Gb of disk. Rendering times (using Renderman) ranged from 2 to around 20 hours per frame.
Sorry, Linux was really not used at all on TS2. Pixar managers use Macs and animation/technical people use SGIs, mostly Octanes these days. Suns are used only for the fileservers and renderfarm.
BTW here are the theaters showing TS2 in digital projection. It looks absolutely stunning and, because of the digital transfer from the original image files, it blows away 35mm film. You owe it to yourself to make the trip.
AMC 1000- Theater 2
1000 Van Ness Avenue at O'Farrell
San Francisco, CA 94109
(415) 922-4262
El Capitan
6838 Hollywood Boulevard
Hollywood, CA 90028
(800) 347-6396 or www.elcapitantickets.com
Media Center North-AMC Burbank
201 East Magnolia Boulevard
Burbank, CA 91502
(818) 953-9800
Edwards Irvine Spectrum 21
65 Fortune Drive
Irvine, CA 32718
(949) 450-4900
Pleasure Island AMC 24
1500 Buena Vista Drive
Lake Buena Vista, FL 32830
(407) 298-4488
Legacy Cinemark 24
7201 Central Expressway
Plano, TX 75025
(972) 517-2444
The slow bitrate is what lets them get away with having the Firecracker computer interface toggle serial port lines in real time to send each bit (instead of using a UART).
On the handheld remote that comes with the Firecracker kit, there is an LED that blinks out the bit pattern as it's being transmitted to the receiver. It is so slow that you can see the individual bits being sent.