The Render
What rendering is, and how it almost destroyed us before we began.
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So, Here’s The Thing About Rendering
Before a computer animation is finished, it needs to go through a process called rendering. This takes the simple computer geometry and adds layers of reflection, refraction, focus, blur, and other realistic lighting properties. I could keep writing, but never has the ancient expression “a GIF says a thousand words” been more true.
Even for the best computers, rendering is a complicated task that takes a lot of time. A lot, lot of time. How much time? Let’s do the math:
Adventures in Mathematics!
Buckle up.
There are 24 individual image frames for every single second of animation. For every minute of animation, we need to create 1,440 frames:
24 frames per second × 60 seconds = 1,440 frames per minute
Each frame takes at least half an hour to render:
1,440 frames × 30 minutes = 700 hours, or 29 days
Our final animation is about 7 minutes long, so…
29 days × 7 minutes of animation = 203 days
It would take 203 days of my computer running non-stop to make the 7 minutes of animation we need, even with the top-of-the-line Macbook that the TELUS Storyhive grant money afforded us. And please keep in mind that this is a highly conservative estimate, it would likely be tens or even hundreds of days longer. Damn.
We feared that we would need to pay extra money to online rendering services, which exchange computer processing time for money. We needed a lot of processing time, so they were asking for a lot of money.
That’s what we call a problem.
And here’s what we call a solution
Thankfully, Cybera, a wonderful Alberta not-for-profit organization came to our rescue.
Cybera is a not-for-profit organization responsible for overseeing the development of Alberta’s cyber-infrastructure — the advanced system of networks and computers that was created by and for university research and now supports government, educational institutions, not-for-profits, business incubators and entrepreneurs.
Essentially, in our case, it was the beautiful union of desperate filmmakers with a do-good organization looking to learn more about the technologies of rendering. Cybera’s whole shtick is to have reems and reems of computing power, and its part of their organizational mission to support ventures like our own.
Looking back at the time before Cybera approached us… I don’t even know what we planned. I think we thought that we could do a mix of rendering it ourselves and paying web services.
We’ll have an extended look at Cybera’s process and experience in one week.
