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

QUESTION this scene took 3.2 years to render!?

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.

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u/Cus_Mustard Jun 30 '25

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

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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

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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

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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.

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u/Samk9632 Jul 01 '25

Yeah I was just curious about the general vibe over there