Why It Takes Pixar 3 Years To Render A Movie 

"Saying the computer does all the work in 3D animation is like saying the oven does all the work in baking" -Someone much smarter than me

When Sam started talking about a hypothetical Pixar movie with stock footage of a wall, I was sure he was going to suggest they make a film about bricks.

I once met a guy in university who studied game design, where they learn movie animations as well. The guy reserved the academy's special computer over night. He was proud to render just a couple of seconds of a patch of grass perfectly moving in a breeze in that time.

The lighting work they did in Toy Story 4 was OUTRAGEOUS.

My daughter is an animator (not with Pixar) and she said this is all pretty spot on. (And that “rigging is THE WORST! Don’t go into rigging (as a job)!!”)

Honestly the tech behind computer generated stuff like this is incredibly fascinating. Even "live action" movies have huge amounts of it at this point, to the point where the things actually shot often look almost nothing like the finished product. Unfortunately a lot of the details are kept rather tightly under wraps, so it's hard to learn most of the interesting details :(

My respect for animators has skyrocketed.

Wanna know the best part? We don't just render films once in the film industry, in fact most shots for a film will have been rendered 10/20/100 times before we (or the client) are happy with everything. Plus, all of the departments that lead up to those final shots usually have to do their own renders too. I'm a lookdev artist (Part of surfacing) and it's very normal for me and most other artists to send renders every single night :D

It's funny rewatching Toy Story 1 after watching Soul, Turning Red, & Lightyear then noticing how the humans in that movie look like mannequins when compared to these more recent films.

Thank you for the hotdog explanation. There is no possible way I could have comprehended the comparison if its not for the hotdogs. My gratitude is insurmountable.

It's actually a multiple of that number of pixels, since many renders these days are done in layers that are then composited, so if something goes wrong you only have to re-render the wonky elements instead of having to rerun the calculations for every single element in the image. Also gives them more freedom when they're fine-tuning the color grading and other things later on.

Even though you didn't explicitly say something incorrect about it, it's worth mentioning that the "p" in "1080p" doesn't stand for pixels, it stands for "progressive scan" (i.e. draw each row every frame), as opposed to 1080i, for "interlaced" (i.e. draw every other row each frame).

I remember seeing that Mainframe Studios, the people behind the show "ReBoot" were able to render in super-high detail & HD, but it just took way too long, so we ended up with much smoother & less-detailed sets. I saw a couple of the promo HD shots that they had rendered & they were pretty sweet. Allegedly, if the master files still existed, the whole show could be remastered, but, also allegedly, the master files have gone missing.

The stat about dying from extreme hotdog consumption was incredibly funny. I love Sam’s stupid jokes

I have studied animation for years and this is the first time I feel like I understand what ray tracing means. Good stuff.

This is one of those things I’ve never really thought about but makes instant sense. I do architectural renders and they can take 24+ hours for a single photo. Even if I send it off to a cloud service it can take a couple. Crazy what goes into everything.

Wow! Just 3 yrs to render a film, imagine how much time it takes to just even make everything before it!

Then accidentally someone presses "stop rendering"

i was in a CAD class in high school, and at one point we convinced the instructor to use some of that year's budget to buy what was effectively a box of multi-core Xeons with an ethernet port. being able to just Let It Simmer overnight was a huge morale boost

Sentient socks talking about nihilism is something I would definitely watch. Take notes Pixar!

For everyone who has seen Coco, remember the scene when they are going over the bridge, specifically the moment where Miguel looks up and sees the other side. When it was all put together, but not yet optimized for rendering, one frame took 22,000 hours to render alone. Each one of those lights is impacting the color of each pixel, and there millions of tiny lights there.

I think that after this video the animators deserve to be fed as a reward

3:35 Better yet, talking socks overcoming "nylonism"

3:09 thanks for finding the perfect stock footage for the average expression of an animator. i felt every emotion that made me drop out of my 3D animation degree just looking at the screen

Wow, that's amazing. This is one of the best HAI videos in a long time. It's funny but still super duper informative. I NEVER understood ray tracing, but now I do! And I feel like a fool for not having understood it previously! And the insight into the 3D film process. It's a delight. What an excellent video. I hope Jet Lag gets the gold play button.

The hot dog analogy absolutely took me out 😂😂😂

listening to books on audible is my favorite way to protest pixar's rendering inefficiency, it amazes me you know your audience so well!

I love the idea of rendering can be turned into the phrase, “What color is this pixel?”

Also, sometimes scenes are rendered multiple times for different countries, usually to swap out textures on billboards, newspapers, etc., but sometimes models get swapped as well. For example, in Inside Out they changed toppings on pizza to reflect different tastes in those countries.

It was only a matter of time until we got "the logistics of" videos on HAI as well.

Today's fact: A small population of Mammoths survived on the Wrangel Island until 1650 BC, about 900 years after the construction of The Great Pyramid of Giza were completed.

The title should be the insane logistics behind 3d movie rendering

One thing you forgot to mention, When they came back to do TS3 all of the original models from TS1&2 were obsolete and had the muscle/joint points wrong, the models were so low on detail, the physics behind each character needed to be re-done. Andrew Stanton i think said it took them just a year of reworking the old models before they started the motion tracing or animating for 3. With 4, because of that work they were able to do on 3, they were able to subsidize a lot of the time normally spent on character creation/design into getting high resolution details and background objects. Albeit the technology from 1/2 to 4 has changed and grown considerably so take it as a grain of salt.

a minor detail is that movies generally use path tracing and not ray tracing. They are similar but not really the same

0:49 HD is 720p (1280x720), whereas 1080p is called Full HD for clarification.

I was so excited to see this topic, I literally centered my college capstone project on basically this question! Pretty much spot on

Honestly not a bad explanation of the basic path tracing algorithm for the layman. good job sam! Did a course as part of my masters covering how to program these things. Really fun to play with, if a bit frustrating with all the subtle ways you can mess it up.

0:50 correction: HD is 720p, FHD (Full High Definition) is 1080p, Technically 1080p is "HD" but its not commonly known as "HD"

Out of all the hundreds of people who do the extremely hard and complex work that goes into making an animated movie, the highest pay in the millions goes to the few movie stars who read out their lines in front of the microphone while making funny faces, arguably the easiest job there was in the whole project.

Love your videos. Currently learning some basic coding. Nowhere near this level, but it’s still helpful.

I'm a visual effects & CG generalist, this video gets the basics of it very well. But, with everything, it's a deep rabbit hole.

1080p technically stands for 1080 pixel height progressive scanning (video/monitor ). Not a resolution like 1920x1080 or 1280x720.

This is a great summary, though there's so so much more depth that breaks down why Pixar takes several years and gigantic teams of artists to make these movies happen. Just the surfacing part alone is fascinating. Surfaces are broken down into many many different qualities, so even after an object has been modeled they might add displacement maps to add height to very fine details that would be impractical to model by hand like scales or wrinkled skin, normal or bump maps that add subtler texture like the surface of an orange or pores on skin, specular reflection & roughness, metalness, subsurface scattering (like how red light transmits through skin) and many more. Each of these qualities is applied with a particular function with different constraints you can manipulate, you can actually apply black/white or color maps to most of them to get variation in specific parts of a surface. So the computer has to calculate all of this and how it influences the color of each pixel - and that's before lighting. Pixar movies will have many lights in a scene, often a sky dome/diffuse lighting and several area or spot lights. Each of those has a different color, intensity, shape, and size that will influence the environment around them differently. And when you render, the camera has many settings, there's a million render settings (you can set sample values for several qualities. Like upping subsurface sampling by 1 greatly increases render times), how you output your image varies (raw, sRGB etc colorspaces, Gamma), the type of file (for things like transparency), and finally after all that they have to open it in another software to color correct it for different display types because computers, TVs, theaters, etc all have different color spaces and they need to basically recalibrate all of those rendered images for each of those display types. And then after that when it's all being edited, there is even more color correction and effects added in post. And even this is a gross oversimplification

0:56 Man, never thought I'd have to say this. You described FHD here, HD is 720p, and FHD is 1080p. It's hard to understand, bullshit and I genuinely can't blame the sweatshop worker you have locked up in the basement for getting this wrong.

Even rendering photos takes ages. I turn portfolios into slideshows for my school art gallery's digital frames and the number of times I have to explain that, unless the school wants to buy me a really nice computer, there is no possible way I can get them a slideshow in 3 hours is astonishing

It's nuts that we get to do a cut down approximation of this stuff at 60fps in videogames - throwing seemingly-infinite compute offline at something is impressive but to me I'm always astounded by what a laptop can kick out at a stable frame rate, especially as the industry is beginning to adopt proper raytracing even

2:41 I’m dead dude😂 I love those little notes hahahaha

you never really respect the writing of this channel until he simplifies something you understand in depth. this is a great explanation of an incredibly complex process that honestly anyone could understand

Nice video Mr. Sam! Can you make a video (either half as, or, fully interesting) on how ILM rendered the ABBA on stage? I enjoyed your hops, jumps and chases throughout Europe! Regards from the UK, Anthony

As someone offering freelance rendering services but who has dabbled with it with architectural designs in college way back as well as for personal projects, it's pretty nuts both how you can make tons of detail, but inversely that detail can start to add up. Crank all the settings and layering to the extreme for big movies and it's no wonder they take so long to render.

You just told me all the stuff I’m learning about blender in like 5 minutes

You want a NASA computer? Na.. *You want a Pixar Rendering PC*

Interesting video, my respect for the animators in the industry definitely rose after looking into this.

the answer to the question is really that thats how long they decided was a reasonable amount of time for the new movie to take. if the higher ups at pixar wanted it to only take 1 year they could cut down on some of the effects or use 3x as powerful a computer there are probably things they could have done to slightly improve quality which would have resulted in it taking 10 years rather than 3 on current hardware but someone decided that wasnt worth it

I finally understand what ray tracing is. Thank you.

Wait, wtf?!?!?! Since when did 720p get downgraded from HD to not HD?! And 1080p FHD to normal HD??!!!! Dafaq?!?!?!

Loving the animations in this video!

I know from experience that managing a render farm is really fun. And by really fun I mean excruciatingly time consuming and the sort of thing you will lose sleep over because if you don't something is gonna break the render farm

Pixar also shares data centers with ILM and Disney animation, and has also has started to use cloud computing (don't know if I can say which provider)

2:30 I also refuse to smile until Jet Lag reaches 1 million subscribers as it's the best series ever created

HD is 720p, Full HD is 1080p

Correction Pixar usually use BxDF but most shader use BSDF(reflection and refraction) there some particular shaders having only BRDF(only reflection) and very few having BTDF(refraction) only. After rendering there is compositing which is like photoshop but for many frames.

Bro thats alot of work for a 1 hour long movie, mad respect for animators.

The advancement of Graphics cards when it comes to rendering time from Seconds/minutes per frame to Frames per second which is a huge improvement.

Thanks for the Blender tutorial, much appreciated

Adam getting a W outside of Jet Lag by making Sam say "ooey gooey sticky icky"

Recently, render times have been improved by machine learning algorithms called denoisers that can drastically reduce the samples per pixel needed. Rather than needing enough samples for each pixel to individually average out to a correct image, denoisers use data from surrounding pixels (as well as additional data provided by the renderer) to guess the missing samples. This is also the technology that makes real-time raytracing possible, since raytraced games can only afford to use a few samples per pixel.

Fun fact: Pixar recently made its rendering engine Open Source.

This video is spot on, especially the part about the hot dogs. But honestly, despite being an animator for over a decade I learned something 😉

5:22 - Something else to add is that from THIS frame that you just rendered, you have to take that state info into the next frame, because it affects that frame too. So, every frame of the movie affects perhaps the next few frames after it. At almost 8 million frames for a hour and a half movie, That's the whole 280 billion calculations times ~8 million frames.

I often render images in 16K for use in digital illustratuons that will be later downscaled to 4k, and a single image takes approximately 30 minutes for a cycles render in Blender, and thats with a high-end graphics card thats only 1 generation old, and 64 gigabytes of RAM.

That hot dog analogy really did help put the number in perspective, thank you

"If I ate 268,738,560,000 hot dogs, I would die." Sam does not have what it takes to become the Trombone Champ. 😔

When a video about logistics is too short for Wendover

WRONG! at 0:54 you refer HD to 1080p, but colloquially 720p is referred to as HD, and 1080p is referred to as FHD, or Full-HD. "But wait!" I hear you say, "HD can technically referred to either 720p or 1080p!" And well yes, you're correct, but we all know that definitions shift all the time and the fact that no one means 1080p when they say HD in fact means HD does not mean 1080p. Checkmate!

As for 1920x1080P in the video. The P doesn't stand for Pixels, it stands for Progressive. Once upon a time, video was interlaced with every other line as the laser beam blasted the tube per frame. This switched back and forth given the illusion of a full frame image with no gaps.. Now the tech for outputting video has come so far, that interlaced is a thing of the past, now full-frames are rendered. Every modern video is progressive and monitors and TVs support this as well. Basically the P is a relic, but saying 1080P is still correct if you are referring to Progressive video.

0:15 - in SOUL they mastered black people lol

Whats is way more crazy though, that Unreal Engine 5 or Omniverse (Unity soon too) are able to deliver like 98% of the final image quality in real time. Many movies are actually shot in Unreal Engine currently, so we will see a lot more real time stuff in future. Only a few special effects require the big render farms, but you can reduce that just to the essential parts and put this in post pro on top of UE5 renders.

When are the fuzzy brown doods going to be available on the store as plushies?

268 billion pixels for a movie is honestly less than I expected.

Thank you for the subtitles

Seeing you all in tag across Europe and videos like that make me like videos like this one a lot more because I got to see who the people behind the screens are…

To clarify for anyone who was slightly misled, the p in 1080p does not stand for pixels. It means progressive. As opposed to 1080i, interlaced.

Don’t overlook the cost of calculating and adding up multiple pixel samples during one frame time (samples at random times from 0 to 1/24 second) to get realistic motion blur. This gets rid of the artifacts like those generated by stop motion animation that make things look jittery or stroboscopic, at the cost of the additional computations required.

I never really realized just how much two-hundred-sixty-eight-billion-seven-hundred-thirty-eight-million-five-hundred-sixty-thousand is until now.

I just learned that a lot of online retailers have shipping area exclusions. The usual ones like PO Boxes, AFP, overseas territories, etc., but there is one exclusion in there that I find odd and I can’t find info on… El Paso, TX. Video idea?

3D Designer here, this is well explained. They used cineme4d as modelling software in the beginning of video. 3 years is insane though, they must be doing lots of revisions and extra rendering for sure.

I refuse to smile until jetlag gets a gold play button 😭😭😭😭

I can imagine Pixar making us cry over talking socks at some point

Another important thing to keep in mind is that the render farms are responsible for rendering lots of different frames at the same time which drastically reduces the render time. If they rendered every frame of Toy Story 4 one after the other every 30 hours it would take about 26,000 years to render the whole movie.

1:24 So 268,738,559,999 hotdogs is the limit... okayy.

Breaking news: Pixar makes a super computer which beats NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer in order to render movies 1 day faster.

The title is misleading. The acutal rendering doesnt take 3 years. They have as you said huge renderfarms that renders several frames at the same time. The making of all the things you mentioned takes years yes. modeling, texturing, lighting, animating.

🎶 268,738,560,000... 🎶 Nope. You can't make a bad musical out of that number!

1:24 lmao this was brilliant 😂😂😂

They could just use an Amazon EC2 instance. Amazon has an endless supply. Each time I click create I get a new one.

One thing you missed is that just because a movie takes a year (e.g. 365 days) to render, doesn't mean that they do. If you just split the workload into 365 machines, then it will render in a day. Split it into 3650 machines and it will be in an hour. There is a sweetspot where it makes economic sense. So, we call it GPU-years instead of just years. ChatGPT for example most likely took thousands of GPU-years to train.

The hotdog "I would die" actually did make me laugh.

The one thing that annoys me is: 4:09 It's not ray tracing it's path tracing ugh!

Things are changing rapidly however now with real time rendering like NVidias RTX technology + game engine software like Unreal Engine 5 wich when combined can do the rendering in miliseconds (realtime) and still achieve totally realistic looking results. Just look at all amazing Unreal Engine 5 demos out there now. Also the latest 5.1 version of Unreal just got some really big upgrades regarding movie production. Also this amazing software is free to use. Im using UE5 myself a lot and have amazing moments with it + Blender, setting my crazy imagination free.