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Avatar: The Way of Water was rendered in Amazon Web Services

datacenterdynamics.com

30 pointsgeox32 comments

I rarely see this discussed, but in this case, and many others, I think a large portion of AWS's adoption stems from how taxes work.

Because AWS can be written off as an "operating expenditure" immediately, it is far more tax advantageous than a "capital expenditure" that must be depreciated/amortized over several years.

I'm not an expert on movie financials, it could be that the way graphics/vfx houses and production companies are compensated to do films this doesn't actually matter. But I feel like this point is generally under discussed for how much of an impact it has on companies choosing whether to go cloud or buy their own hardware.

That's not how that works at all. CapEx is more advantaged than OpEx. OpEx does not get written off at all. CapEx can be depreciated.

Surely this is not the case, otherwise I wouldn't hear the constant refrain of "opex > capex" over the past decade, as sung to argue SaaS is the best thing.

Apples to apples CapEx is better for the reason I described. The shift to OpEx and the rise of SaaS is more attributable to short-term budget flexibility. Taking depreciation is a tax advantage but only because the thing you own is depreciating. It's not free money. Capital expenditures usually require a large upfront cost, slow time to market and unpredictable scaling and maintenance. SaaS is usually turnkey, can scale up and down to match usage, and has less lockin. The benefits frequently outweigh the tax disadvantage.

Opex is "better" than capex, because cash is king. Capex in general means you pay upfront and reap benefits later. Opex in general means you reap benefits now and pay later (via invoice or credit card bill).

It may be an important component that movies have moved to a “corporation per movie” model. There are other structures on top of course, but the point is that making a movie often starts with the incorporation papers being filed.

I hope this kicks off a trend of more HFR movies. Imo people are just used to movies looking like 24fps like they are used to interviewees sounding like AirPod quality mics but after the adjustment period it’s pretty obvious that higher frame rates just look better.

Years later i still disagree. But I also don't like HD.

I could maybe see someone say they don't like 4K, but HD? You prefer 4:3 and 480 lines? really?

Man if you saw me on YouTube, you'd be shocked. I willingly switch down resolution. Only if the subject requires high precision i switch higher. I miss my pixels. Also most of today's content doesn't need HD so there's no waste.

Ps: i also have this strange relationship with audio. I prefer FM quality sometimes. To the point of being disappointed after buying a CD.

You are a crazy person, film is HD.

The xvid/dvd era got the best of me. Also I grew up on VHS so resolution is rarely what I'm after.

The Hobbit movies looked wonky with due to whatever number frames it was running per second.

"looked wonky" isn't very scientific though. I've observed that high frame rates are astoundingly different and it's very noticeable, I just think it's quite clearly better once you get over the adjustment.

60fps video is semi common on youtube these days and looks great. Especially for panning shots which look very stuttery on low frame rates.

It looks better for doc, information, sports, etc but the realism is a significant detraction for narrative fiction. Sets look worse, acting looks more fake, the story telling downsides are significant and even children raised on 60p notice the inferior suspension of disbelief (not that they'd use the term).

for me even 60 fps videos look "wonky" cause it feels unnaturally fast (for the lack of a better word), to me.

They looked odd for about 10 minutes, then they just looked SMOOTH.

HFR movies never worked on my eyes, and I'm the kind of person who can instantly tell when windows sets my monitor back to 60hz from 144hz.

It feels like the lower frame rate engages the imagination in deeper ways than HFR. The obvious gaps in information are filled in by your brain in subtle ways. Yes, some types of action are almost certainly made better in an HFR setting, but then all other action has to go along for the ride.

If the experience is interactive, then yes by all means - Give me the most FPS you can. But when I don't have control, slow those picture elements down a bit. Give my neural net some time to deal with each one so I can properly enjoy it.

24fps is a completely arbitrary standard that is really the lowest possible usable framerate to save on film costs. It makes no sense at all to still be using it in the age of digital cameras.

You open the door to something interesting: variable frame rate films.. Personally I would love to see certain action scenes in 120+, and think there could be interesting artistic choices about when to change the frame time and how quickly...

I think you'd have a nightmare of a time getting this adopted into any standards body. Constant frame rate is so fundamental to a lot of pieces throughout.

Definitely. Plus I suspect there are almost zero theatre projectors that could handle VFR

24 is a multiple of 120, so you can repeat frames 5x on the 24fps parts, and play the whole video at 120fps.

The question is what the on/off time is of a 24fps film. My TV has black frame insertion to make 24fps content look better; I am personally a huge fan of black frame insertion so I would imagine that theater projectors do it or something equivalent. If so, that will go away with your "play the same frame 5 times" algorithm. (Old style film projectors did it as an implementation detail; the sample and hold nature of LCD screens is a new "problem" for 24fps content.)

Info, and a demo, about black frame insertion: https://www.testufo.com/blackframes

That might work. Directors would easily have access to 24, 48, 72, 96, and 120fps

I too hate 24fps, it is FAR to low. I'm really baffled by the resistance to higher frame rates since movies have had two much bigger technological improvement already, sound and then color. I wonder if it had taken 80 years for movies to be in color people would have resisted it the way they are resisting HFR.

My personal opinion is that in the “old days” when people were experimenting with HFR (The Hobbit?) there was actually a visual loss simply because exposing the frame for less time let in less light which led to a slightly flatter colours and lower dynamic range.

Now that we can do HFR in software, we’re not bound by that limitation.

I might be wrong though: I’m not in the movie industry, I just enjoy them.

Also: does anyone know if Bullet Train was HFR? I can’t find hard data, but it felt nicely smooth in theatre

And in other news, Amazon charged them $720 million for egress ;)

Be interesting to see if Wētā becomes a bit more cavalier in their subject matter given that they can command a larger amount of compute.

Is there any actual information in this post? What did AWS do that GCP or Azure couldn't? What optimizations did they make to their rendering code? Why not GPUs? 0 info on anything.

From the article it seems as if it just got them more compute in a timely manner (not compared to the other cloud vendors but compared to local government bureaucracy).

That info won't be coming out for a while...

I can say though, that Manuka's a CPU renderer only (it used to be a GPU renderer as well, but that functionality was removed years ago).

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