Sora is here - Hackdot

Re:Sora is here by throwup238 on Monday December 09, 2024 @02:36PM (#42369654)

VFX heavy feature for a Disney subsidiary. Each frame is rendered independently of each other - it’s not like video encoding where each frame depends on the previous one, they all have their own scene assembly that can be sent to a server to parallelize rendering. With enough compute, the entire film can be rendered in a few days. (It’s a little more complicated than that but works to a first order approximation)

I don’t remember how long the final rendering took but it was nearly two months and the final compute budget was 7 or 8 figures. I think we had close to 100k cores running at peak from three different render farms during crunch time, but don’t take my word for it I wasn’t producing the picture.

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Re:Sora is here by dist-epoch on Monday December 09, 2024 @03:07PM (#42370004)

Are they still using CPUs and not GPUs for rendering?

Weren't the rendering algos ported to CUDA yet?

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Re:Sora is here by jsheard on Monday December 09, 2024 @03:45PM (#42370387)

GPU renderers exist but they have pretty hard scaling limits, so the highest end productions still use CPU renderers almost exclusively.

The 3D you see in things like commercials is usually done on a GPU though because at their smaller scale it's much faster.

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Re:Sora is here by fc417fc802 on Monday December 09, 2024 @06:26PM (#42371747)

I'm not sure how well suited GPUs are to the workload. They're also rather memory constrained. The Moana dataset is from 2016 so it's not exactly cutting edge but good luck loading it into vram.

https://www.disneyanimation.com/data-sets/?drawer=/resources...

https://datasets.disneyanimation.com/moanaislandscene/island...

> When everything is fully instantiated the scene contains more than 15 billion primitives.

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Re:Sora is here by throwup238 on Monday December 09, 2024 @08:09PM (#42372535)

There's plenty of GPU renderers but they face the same challenge as large language models: GPU memory is much more expensive and limited that CPU memory.

A friend recently told me about a complex scene (I think it was a Marvel or Star Wars flick) where they had so much going on in the scene with smoke, fire, and other special effects that they had to wait for a specialized server with 2TB of RAM to be assembled. They only had one such machine so by the time the rest of the movie was done rendering, that one scene still had a month to go.

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