Rendering Shrek@Home? 345
JimCricket writes "There's an interesting piece at Download Aborted about using distributed computing (a la SETI@Home, Grid.org, etc.) in the film industry. With the recent release of Shrek 2, which required a massive amount of CPU time to complete, one must wonder why the film industry doesn't solicit help from their fans. I'd gladly trade some spare CPU time in exchange for the coolness of seeing a few frames of Shrek 3 rendered on my screensaver!"
Doubt it'll happen... (Score:5, Insightful)
Difficult to police... (Score:1, Insightful)
copyright (Score:3, Insightful)
Very cool idea nonetheless.
Would it be worth it???? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would they want to do the distributed??? They are using 10Gbs etho and blow your mind away servers to render at amazingly high rates. Probubally several times faster than something like the SETI network could imagine.
And hell, those sysadmins have the most owerful systems in the world. Who would give that up? They even get whole new systems every couple years.
Re:I had this idea a long time ago :) (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot BLOG advertising... (Score:5, Insightful)
how much did it cost?
unschedulable resource (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, I could totally see a use for a 'render pool' catering to independent filmmakers, students, and nonprofits for whom cheap is more important than timely.
reality used to be a friend of mine. (Score:1, Insightful)
But alas, reality sets in and one must realize how this will never ever ever ever work.
Ever.
do you really want this? (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason why..... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many variables in distributed public computing such as:
*Different CPU capabilities.
*Different OS capabilities
*High/Low use Systems
*People's 'uptime'
*Users leaving the project before its completion etc.
Another risk is that another movie-house could start a production which everyone sees as 'cooler' and your entire userbase decides to up-sticks and render for them instead.
How cool would the other way be? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you realize just how many gigabytes of... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an I/O problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Why bother? (Score:3, Insightful)
From what I've read, Seti@Home works well because users heavily process a small amount of data and return a small solution. If we were processing frames, it would require the user to take in large amounts of data and return even larger results.
Re:I doubt it... (Score:4, Insightful)
The simple answer is to see if you can. It's
Duh (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no way a studio could send a scene's model to a compute node encrypted, process it encrypted, store the interim image encrypted, then send the whole mess back encrypted. At some point in processing the information must be in plain computer processable formats.
What that boils down to is that a competing studio could sign up hundreds of compute nodes and get a preview of the story line and animation. Anyone who could gather enough images could piece together clips from the film and release them in full digital format. Imagine a nefarious group of nodes all collecting the images they generate and later piecing them all together in to perfect digital non-DRMed copy of the movie; before release and before the DVD is available.
Hollywood can't stand the idea of people copying DVDs to the internet, could you imagine what they'd think of full film resolution copies of their films floating around? The heads bits: on the walls.
No... this is just a stupid suggestion from the point of view of the studios. At least until there's and OS is produced where a user it prohibited access to certain portions of RAM, and can't intercept the network traffic to/from the box.
Re:Slashdot BLOG advertising... (Score:3, Insightful)
if you want to spend your time rending frames of animations, check out the Internet Movie Project [imp.org]
Who said it would have to be frames? (Score:0, Insightful)
Rendering is essentially a gazillion calculations. Divide those calculations up among a few thousand Joe Dialups and you potentially have a nice render farm.
But don't fool yourself with this notion that any individual machine should do any individual frame. Not only would it take the gigabytes of models, textures, etc, it would take the average machine years to render just one frame from one of these movies. Am I the only one who watches the documentary portions of these films??
Clif
Re:Doubt it'll happen... (Score:5, Insightful)
the film studios I'm sure have crazy fiber/multi-gigabit interconnects within their rendering farms.
While the amount of data to move around probably is too much for dialup, gigabit ethernet is certainly fast enough, and dirt cheap as it's integrated on motherboards. If you look at the top500 list, you see that weta digital (the company which did the CG for lord of the rings IIRC) has a couple of clusters on the list, and they have gig ethernet.
Basically, while rendering is cpu-intensive it's not latency sensitive, so there's no point in blowing a huge amount of cash on a high end cluster interconnect.
Why it's appropriate for SETI and not for film (Score:3, Insightful)
Umm...No (Score:3, Insightful)
ILM's render farm: The Death Star (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6783 [linuxjournal.com]
People have been saying that even if the studio didn't care about the security issues, there are bandwidth issues that would keep this from really working. There are a few quotes in the article that confirm this: all the rendering machines make a sort of denial-of-service attack on their NFS servers, for example. And the article talks about their VPN, which they call the ILM Conduit; it sends everything double-encrypted with Blowfish. They really are worried about security.
The coolest thing, to me, is that ILM has rolled out Linux all the way across their organization; people run Linux on their desktop computers. When people go home at night, their computers get added to the render farm!
steveha
Render Times (Score:5, Insightful)
He said that for Finding Nemo today, render times were about...7 hours per frame.
More machines and faster processors let you cram much more detail and technology into the same package. Working in commercial advertising, digital editing and graphic workstations are fantastic and powerful...but their advantage isn't speed. We spend the same amount of time making a commercial as 10 years ago...but now we make 7 versions and change it 30-some times along the way. Power gives you the ability to change your mind....and that's a creative force which people gladly pay for.
Re:I had this idea a long time ago :) (Score:4, Insightful)
Bandwidth. (Score:3, Insightful)
In the making of Final Fantasy, it took longer to send the information to the nodes than it took the nodes to process it. That is with dedicated gigabit networking.
too many unknowns for money (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Making things worse (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that hard--especially when you consider that old-school cartoons had people drawing every freakin' frame of a feature-length movie by hand...
Not exactly "no real actors" (Score:4, Insightful)
Bandwidth/Administration Hell (Score:5, Insightful)
Added to that are huge bandwith problems. In order to render a 2K image, you may need dozens of texture maps, some of which may be even larger than 2K because you zoom in or something -- meaning to get a 2K frame back, you're sending the render box probably 10-20 times that amount of data. With a nice gigabit internal network, that's not a huge problem, but shipping them down a DSL line is just not gonna happen.
Re:I suspect you're wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a very good point. Procedural elements of rendering could be distributed quite efficiently. Shrek 2 had some awesome smoke looking effects that I bet was very CPU intensive. That's exactly the type of thing that could be distributed.
Re:Hold it there for a second (Score:5, Insightful)
People pay to wear shirt that advertise mult-million dollar companies. : (
-Colin [colingregorypalmer.net]
I'd rather... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I suspect you're wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:...a whole new world (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but your pool is WAY more open.
In the days before TV, ugly people with great voices were stars. Today, it's a lot harder for that to happen. (it does happen, but they aren't playing romantic leads.)
An independant filmmaker can find an actor with a great voice, and it doesn't matter what he looks like, what his physical capabilities are, etc.
A quadrapeligic could play James Bond.
Re:Would it be worth it???? (Score:3, Insightful)
The security and copyright issues are too big, compared to the low cost (for them) of a render farm. The other costs of a movie outweigh the headaches of distributed rendering with "the public".
You can't have the release date of your movie slip because the latest internet worm is loose, and took out 50% of your "farm" users.
Re:Doubt it'll happen... (Score:5, Insightful)
SETI and Folding@Home work because of the massive asymmetry between the amount of data and the CPU power required, and although you _perhaps_ could find subtasks that could easilly be "offsourced" so to speak, that made sense performance wise, I very much doubt that it would interface very nicely with the way the artists work, or make any sort of economic sense.
Re:...a whole new world (Score:1, Insightful)
And that doesn't even touch distribution issues...
Is this really likely? (Score:3, Insightful)
right... (Score:3, Insightful)
next i won't be able to play the dvd legaly (which i had to pay for again) on my linux box.
can't wait to start...
Re:Sounds like imp.org (Score:4, Insightful)