Shrek II blows away TerraServer

Wow. It's official. Shrek II took a whopping 20 Terabytes of storage to create according to Benny Evangelista of the SF Chronicle, using "...a 3,000-processor render farm of Hewlett-Packard servers and more than 300 HP workstations equipped with dual Pentium 4 processors running on Linux". This beats Microsoft's Jim Gray's TerraServer project for sheer hard cold processor power and complexity.

Of course, Jim is just storing and transmitting images - not rendering them. Professional production is always done in raw video format until final, which means huge files, and animation add complexity as sheets of detail are overlayed and removed in the course of frame-by-frame creation. As Shrek himself says "Ogres are like onions...Ogres have layers." So it is with modern animation techniques.

Thus, rendering times are about the same as for the earlier film, even though processes have been sped up and raw power increased, with crowd scenes taking "30 to 40 hours per frame to render". This is because as more power becomes available, more detail can be created, so a movie may become more rich and nuanced, but it doesn't become cheaper.

For those folks who like to DIY and think animation is "child's play", take a good look at what it takes to do a real movie. And if you're still interested, maybe you ought to work at PDI/Dreamworks where they do serious fun.