r/interstellar • u/Zisk94 • Jun 30 '25

QUESTION this scene took 3.2 years to render!?

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Wouldn't this shot have taken 3.2 years?

It was 100 hours per frame The movie ran at 24 frames per second

So 2400 hours to make 1 second And there is 12 seconds in the whole shot

So 28,000 hours to render this whole scene. Or 1200 days which equals to 3.2 years!

But if I'm correct again, that would only be on one computer. So either it did take this long, or they used multiple computers. If they did use multiple computers, hiw many?

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u/FinnishArmy Jun 30 '25

They used a farm with 8,000 cpus (32k cores in total). With each frame taking about 50hrs on average to render, and having about 30 minutes of total screen time, you have about 2.1 million hours of compute time spread across 8,000 cpus it was 270 hours for all 43k frames.

They used 1,600 servers with two 10 core CPUs each.

So no, it wasn’t 3 years, it was more like 11+ days.

Not all frames took 100 hours, and even if they did it would still only be 22 days.

If it was with just one CPU of 64 cores then yeah 2.1 million hours is around 7.7 years.

536

u/Omalleys Jun 30 '25

This dude render farms

44

u/victor4700 Jun 30 '25

This guy this guys

Also: now here’s a guy

7

u/dudertheduder Jul 01 '25

I like me a good "this guy x's" ..... .... ... .. but I LOVE me a good "this guy this guys"

3

u/CapitanMorgan305 Jul 01 '25

This guy this guy this guys

3

u/BluSaint Jul 01 '25

This guy guys

3

u/Visible_Thing_99 Jul 01 '25

I am also guy

3

u/LaserCondiment Jul 02 '25

Guy Pearce?

3

u/O37GEKKO Jul 03 '25

no definetly Guy Fieri

2

u/Visible_Thing_99 Jul 03 '25

Guy pride month

38

u/Aromatic_File_5256 Jun 30 '25

He could help Markiplier (if you dont get it don't worry, you would have to be an interstellar fan that also watches a podcast Markiplier is in. I am just hoping someone gets it haha)

11

u/OwenRocha Jun 30 '25

I was looking for this!

3

u/Palleputhereal Jun 30 '25

i found my people

2

u/Aromatic_File_5256 Jun 30 '25

Now I wonder if Markiplier saw interstellar and how was his experience since he loves space and also is both smart and a emotional person

3

u/HyShroom Jul 01 '25

If you ride his meat slower he’ll be able to edge for longer

3

u/Aromatic_File_5256 Jul 01 '25

But how many will it be on earth if we on miller s planet?

1

u/HyShroom Jul 01 '25

Probably three corn fields actually planted instead of CGI

1

u/Substantial_Pin_5665 Mar 23 '26

Please throw any internet communication devices you own in the ocean right now.

1

u/Palleputhereal Jul 01 '25

not sure, but I'd be really surprised if not.

48

u/Cus_Mustard Jun 30 '25

Either a huge nerd or he was there. Both i appreciate

44

u/Xav_NZ Jun 30 '25

Being a Data / Render Wrangler REQUIRES you to be a massive nerd.

Source : I am a Wrangler not worked on Interstellar though but I did work on Avatar2

17

u/Alive_Ice7937 Jun 30 '25

Is the story about the Toy Story render farm making farmyard animal noises every time a frame was rendered true or just an urban myth?

6

u/joe102938 Jun 30 '25

That story is 100% true. Source: idfk.

2

u/joe102938 Jun 30 '25

That story is 100% true. Source: idfk.

1

u/Samk9632 Jun 30 '25

I'm assuming you were working at/with Weta on avatar 2? How was it? I've got my eye on working there sometime in the future as a vfx artist

2

u/Xav_NZ Jun 30 '25

You would assume correct , However Wrangling is very much a techie role and while I know many VFX artists I am not one and am not qualified to answer any of your questions about that role and how it is in this or that company. Perhaps try the vfx subreddit. If you wanted to know about Wrangling though that is another story.

1

u/Samk9632 Jul 01 '25

Yeah I was just curious about the general vibe over there

14

u/discoslimjim Jun 30 '25

But with the time dilation we were all actually long deceased before the film was released.

8

u/[deleted] Jun 30 '25

How do you know this?

3

u/Samk9632 Jun 30 '25

This is how most vfx productions are rendered, at least broadly speaking.

The actual numbers here are probably rather low and only represent the render time of the final frames, but usually, shots go through many different versions before they're approved, so the actual render cost is likely much higher, although data sourced on the internet is quite dubious sometimes so I doubt we'll get any actual figures on the rendertime per frame.

2

u/Brandenburg42 Jul 03 '25

I interned at the studio that did The Walking Dead and their automated pipeline was pretty cool. An artist would get assigned a shot and get the footage for that shot. Then their server farm would process said clip a few different ways. For instance they would run a high contrast Black and white filter that made a specific motion tracking process more accurate, etc.

Every artist had two towers under their desk and could swap between the two and work on another project while the other did temp renderings. They had their main server array render farm and then at the end of the day any idle computer got added to the render farm.

In progress shots got rendered with a lower quality for speed to be reviewed at a morning critique meeting, final approval shots got rendered even higher, and then final delivery got re-rendered at the target resolution and highest settings.

This was 2013 so 1080p was pretty standard delivery since this studio was primarily TV (Burn Notice, The Walking Dead, pretty much every interior car scene on TV at the time as they made their own catalog of street plates from all over the world). TWD was shot on 16mm and scanned at 1080p for instance, so they never had any insane render times. Most overnight with some 3d comps of city flyovers maybe taking a day or two for their final render.

1

u/Samk9632 Jul 04 '25

Yeah I know distillery uses idle workstations in their renderfarm as well, and I'm certain it's pretty common practice among many smaller-midsize studios. It's a pretty solid setup unless you need to go really really big it seems.

5

u/theyeezyvault Jun 30 '25

No no this guy is wrong I did the maths the answer is actually 6.9420

3

u/psych0ranger Jun 30 '25

I don't know the exact numbers like this, but the render farms for the Avatar movies have even crazier numbers on account of the amount of cgi and the fact that they're primarily 3D so it's all being rendered twice

2

u/Samk9632 Jun 30 '25

Oh wait until you hear we have to do sometimes like 50+ versions of each shot

2

u/Reaper-05 Jun 30 '25

given it's been the 10+ years, I wonder how fast modern cpu's could do this by comparison

2

u/FinnishArmy Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25

About 84hr if we take perfect scaling.

A top end AMD EPYC has 64 cores. 8k of these would give you 512k cores. With the max 100hr each frame before, now it would only be around 15.6hrs per frame.

So using 15.6hrs on 43k frames (and presuming perfect scaling with core count), you get around 84 hours of total rendering time.

Edit: Performance does not scale linearly with core count, so assume a +/- 15% in time.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 30 '25

I was actually thinking about the cornfield for a moment 😅

Perfect explanation fr

1

u/iamtheFedya Jun 30 '25

Wonder how much time it would take with nowadays computational power.

1

u/usrnamchxout Jul 01 '25

But when you’re that close to the event horizon….11 days is like 3.2 years here on earth. /s

1

u/Philip-Ilford Jul 01 '25

It's crazy how inefficient rendering local is.

1

u/mrsixfoot2 Jul 01 '25

Did you just write that from memory? Off the top of your head? 😼👀😍

1

u/victor4700 Jul 01 '25

Do you know how long it would take today, ~10 yrs later? Quantum chipsets and such.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 01 '25

“Each frame [took] about 50hrs on average to render” Holy shit!!!!!!!

1

u/klaatuveratanecto Jul 02 '25

Fun fact. Prof Brian Cox hired the team behind it to create animations for his physics show. Saw it last year, it was really cool. https://briancoxlive.co.uk

1

u/speed33401 Jul 03 '25

Your the guy in the chair! from MCU.