Toy Story 3D Double Feature

Available in theaters now is a double feature of Toy Story and Toy Story 2. This time, they've been re-rendered the entire film from the original 3D mesh data. When the first Toy Story movie came out, the huge computer grid that they used to render (calculate the 3D imagery of each frame) took over an hour for each frame. Considering there are 24 frames per second in a movie, that's over a day of waiting for every one second of final footage. And that was not for a 3D display. OK, OK, so this gets a little confusing... The original was 3D, but it wasn't 3D? Yes. You see, the computer was "aware" of a 3D scene and 3D objects and calculated the lighting, reflectivity, transparency, etc... to display each frame of the movie. Each frame is a 2D image (just like a photograph is a 2D image). Even if what you're taking a picture of is real life 3D, the photograph itself is only 2D. That's how the original Toy Story movie was. It was a 2D representation of a 3D environment, but when you watched the movie, you saw it in 2D (just like any movie).

Today's new release of the old Toy Story 1 and 2 is different. They rendered all of the frames again, this time with MUCH faster computers (more on that in a moment). Then they told the computers to do it all over again, but this time from an angle about 2 virtual inches to the right. So now, they've got TWO versions of both movies, each version shot with a virtual camera a couple of inches to the right (or was it to the left) of the original camera.

When you go see this double-header in the theater, the projector will be projecting BOTH the left camera image AND the right camera image onto the movie screen at the SAME TIME. Without 3D glasses, the images will look fuzzy with both images overlapping each other. Put the 3D glasses on and the left lens blocks the right-eye image so your left eye sees ONLY the left image. Vice versa for the right eye. The result? Your brain interprets the scene as true 3D space. You'll experience woody and crew right up in your face or waaaay back, sunken into the screen. Everything will have the perception of actually "being there".

How fast does it take Pixar's computers to render a full length feature film? Well, in 1994 and 1995, when the first Toy Story movie was created, their multi-million dollar bank of computers took over an hour per frame. With 24 frames per second and a feature length of 81 minutes, that's 116,640 frames and even more than 116,640 hours to render all the frames. But, that was in 1995. Today's computers are MUCH faster. In fact, they're SO MUCH FASTER that their new set of computers were able to render the movie at one frame every 1/24th of a second. For those of you not doing your math, that's REAL TIME. In other words, the computers are able to render the movie as fast as the movie plays in real time. So, in 2009, it took them 81 minutes to render the 81 minute movie. That's 86,400 times faster!!! But WAIT! Remember when I said they rendered TWO frames for each frame for the new 3D versions? (one for the left eye and one for the right eye)? So DOUBLE that speed to 172,800 times faster in 2009 than in 1995!

How's THAT for progress??

But, you'd better hurry! It's only going to be in theaters for 2 weeks and it started on October 2, 2009!