How Many Frames A Week?

[wetworx]

rather generic question, wanted to know that in a feature production environment...How many frames/sec of animation is one expected to "churn" out in any given week? Or is it measured by some other means? (at all?)

I understand that this expectation may fluctuate depending on scene requirements (action, dialogue, etc.) and experience/title of the animator. But i'm looking for a broad range. Thanks.

[fortner_mike]

If you're talking about animation... who nows, i dont think that its measured, people just have to work every day for arranged duration, and they have a deadline when they should finish. But think about it, 1second= 24 (sometimes 30) frames...any work done in a week should be at least...5minutes long maybe, so 5*60=300seconds. 300*24=7200, or 300*30=9000. But it would vary a lot because every project is different.

If you mean rendering...not possible to count. You may render in the poorest quality a single simple body and that would take very short time per frame, thus producing many frames per week. If you render in high quality the frame count reduces, because every frame takes longer to seduce. Some of pixar's cars frames actually took 16 hours to render on their farm (16 hours per frame).

[joojaa]

Simple stuff, liek camera flytroughs plane flights. MAybe some dynamics, mostly styatic andor premoved stuff. 10-45 minutes a week. (thats realy dependent) However thats only if you can modell it in 4 days.

Deadbeat quality character animation 15-25 mins a week. (includes autiomatic lipsync etc)

Intermediate tv quality aniamtion 7-12 mins a week

Good quality stuff about 5-7 mins a week.

But thing is it realy waries a good simulation can take 2 weeks to produce but might churn up 20-40 minutes of animation no problem. Offcours ethets booring stuff mostly so it will be cut down to minimum)

Howevre it realy derpends on LOT of stuff. If for exampel you had a pipeline design doen VERY well and have a motion capture facility, you might with 3 mothns preplanning get to speeds that are much much faster than those outlined above.

But basicaly if it takes you 1 min to render a frame then and you have a 25 min wekly cartoon to make your going to spend 625 hours renering it. Menaing youd need a farm of 4 computers to mange it, just (this leaves no margin for error).

At 16 hours per frame pixar needs 3225600 days tio finish on one computer, asuming all frames would be that hard. That would mean roughly 9000 years but offcourse pixar has thousands of computers to do the calculation. (mind you 16 hours per frame isnt rendered with a cheap ass computer)

[wetworx]

wow, thank you both for the unexpected reply....definitely some good information there for me to consider...

hehe...i didn't word my question right, I wanted to learn how many frames not in terms of rendered images, but in the animation of a scene. Like if i were to produce a 3min short, how many frames should I expect to complete animating per week if I were following a studio's schedule. Separate from the time needed for storyboarding, rendering, etc.

as stated before i understand the context of the scene will determine time needed, such as an action sequence or lip sync, any information would be appreciated. thx.

[fortner_mike]

QUOTE
At 16 hours per frame pixar needs 3225600 days tio finish on one computer, assuming all frames would be that hard. That would mean roughly 9000 years but of course pixar has thousands of computers to do the calculation.

Let me explain what i mean: SOME frames take 16 hours on their renderfarm, that is using all power they have. Think of the huge resolutions(necessary if you want to go to the cinemas), and then al thse effects, high polycounts, multithreading, and did you knew that often they can not use hdri, because they get the refleactions from surrounding objects. Visit their site if you dont believe me. .

P.S no need to mention simple things like GI, FG...

[joojaa]

QUOTE(thirt33n @ 01/04/07, 05:15 PM) [snapback]256363[/snapback]
Let me explain what i mean: SOME frames take 16 hours on their renderfarm, that is using all power they have.

i know that i just said how loong it would take with one machine if every farme teake 16 hours. A quick guestimate ia that most of their farmes render in 30 mins to 4 hours.

QUOTE
Think of the huge resolutions(necessary if you want to go to the cinemas), and then al thse effects, high polycounts, multithreading, and did you knew that often they can not use hdri, because they get the refleactions from surrounding objects. Visit their site if you dont believe me. .

Umm they use PRman it does not do polycount it does do shadingrate (which is like polycount gone mad with steroids, coupled with a alot of stuff). In fact in versions before 2 years ago you wouldn't have sent prman a single polygon because youd get the same stuff rendered as ultra smooth subdivision urface for SAME PRICE.

And yes cars is the first of the movies to use multi threading renderers. Prman was multi proc scaling but not multi threading. If youve never used prman you should take a peak sneak of mayatomr wich is like prman for dummies does a lot well but its no proserver.

[fortner_mike]

QUOTE
i know that i just said how loong it would take with one machine if every farme teake 16 hours. A quick guestimate ia that most of their farmes render in 30 mins to 4 hours.

I dont get it . from 30 minutes to 4 hours? How can that happen if it takes much more on the renderfarm.

And about polycount...so you mean that either a scene with 1 polygon and scene with 10000000 polygons has no difference...then i really have to get that renderer.

[joojaa]

Im talking of the item to render one average frame, not the time to render one frame with all processors. of the rendrfarm. Furthermore its not totally obvious what constitutes render time for a prman render, for example there might be some caching involved in a 16 hour render that might become a accelerator to next frame. How long does the state machine take to populate, ive had frames that take 3 hours to populate is taht part of the rendretime (i calculate it to be).

Besides they nowhere actualy say the 16 hour render time used all their power. they just said they had 16 hour renders.

And no pr man does not really care what the polycount is thats why ist so damn beautifull. Basicaly you never send polygons to prman as it creates then itself on fly on demand so you only send it parametrics.

[wetworx]

i think i had my post jacked...haha

here is a quote i found from another resource...

QUOTE
The clip is about 8.4 seconds long. That projects out to nearly 17 seconds of halfway decent quality animation per week. And that's one of my main areas of focus. The adage is true, The best animation you do is the one you finish. At work we have a production quota of 18.5 seconds of approved animation each week. For comparison our good friends working on feature films often have quotas ranging from 4-9 seconds per week. In short, we needed to develop a way for myself and our team of animators to create alot of good footage quickly. Additionally we wanted to allow the director the opportunity to see the thrust of the animation as soon as possible so as to reduce the number of fixes needed after the animation has been submitted for approval.

-keith lango
http://www.keithlango.com/tutorials/old/popThru/popThru.html

[fortner_mike]

one last time and i give back your post

Than this renderer is really cool. Any demo versions available?

[joojaa]

Film quality work is much siower to do tahn most tv quality stuff you ever see. Mainly because so much is recyled in form of clips etc. But thing is the amount of work your producing is going up each year so while i expected to do 1 minute of stuff in week (without couning set up) a year ago , i would up that by a factor of 5 today. mainly beacuse the recycling tools are o much better.

Film work has a additional advantage of needing loong times to render so it does not really matter if it takes long to animate when the render time is equally long.