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9 hours / frame.

Not so long ago, we were doing camp productions, welcome-tea vidz, and some event vidz. At the end of the video editing phase, there was always the long wait for the video to be rendered. A 5-7min video took about 1hr to render. Assuming we used 25 frames per sec, thats about 2.9 frames per min. I thought that was real damm long, till I read this article.

10 hours/frame! Pixar's new animation, "Cars" used 300 times more computing power than "Toy Story". We were always wondering where was the bottleneck for the video rendering, was it the CPU too slow, or not 'nuff RAM? Now the mystery is revealed. The NFS file systems which Pixar used to feed data to the rendering system was hampering the process. And guess what, each of the file server head already had a GB of cache (not 'nuff?). They needed around 32GB! The solution, 8 Linux SAN based boxes to feed the data. That, cut the rendering to 1 hour/frame. A few rounds of tea break, go home to bathe, catch some sleep, go do some shopping (GSS is going on!), come back relax and watch some movie, take another nap, no its still not done yet!

Okay, these nitty gritty technical details are all pointing at one direction, "Cars" looks promising! I seen the trailer, not bad. I think these animated movies are usually big time in their effort required to produce, so they are definitely worthed watching. Yeah, I am gonna catch it! Btw, I missed "Da Vinci Code". Partially due to last two weeks of work. But I watched "Over The Hedge" before that. Really funny show, with the good old family theme, great character building and fantastic performace from its cast. 3 1/2 outta 5 stars for that. Will the "Cars" beat that?
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