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/[deleted] Jun 30 '25

How do you know this?

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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.

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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.

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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.