We averaged 3.76 hours per frame on NextGen - some sequences rendered a lot more quickly, some took a lot longer (think: water effects via Alembic caches, 20-30 VDB’s in a single shot for smoke, fire and explosions, etc). There are obviously many redo’s and artistic retakes involved, but if you eliminate those, here’s a rough breakdown:
- 93 minute movie == 133920 frames @ 24 FPS
- We rendered 5 different versions of the movie: English mono, English and Mandarin Stereo (for the Chinese market), so this is 669600 frames
- Each frame took 3.76 hours on average
- One machine would take 2517696 hours, or 104904 days to render the movie. We had around 2500 nodes working on it, which equals roughly 42 days
In reality, the Mandarin lipsync was only done for the shots that warranted it for facial animation, which was about 350’ish shots. Those renders were done by using an animated render region, targeting just the mouth, so those renders tended to take 1/4 to 1/2 the time of the full renders. These regions were then composited on top of the English renders to replace the lipsync.