The brain likes to learn. Over the summer the company I worked at was responsible for recording a lot of TED talks. If there's one thing I learned from sorting through and watching these lectures it's that the best TED talks are quick, informational, and usually have an endearing personality attached to them. Recently I've stumbled across a YouTube channel that takes these same principles and combines them with sleek and beautifully animated graphics.
I found myself tearing through these videos not only because they were so interesting, but because each poignant snippet of scientific jargon was elegantly matched by equally beautiful images. It just goes to show how eager one really is to learn when the information is presented to them in an engaging way.
I'd love to see how a video like this comes together but from what I've heard videos such as the one above require more over 200 hours of work so for now I'll settle for cutting up digital paper.
So I decided to make this post about something that Arturo mentioned towards the end of the class that really sparked my attention: Render-farms. It peaked my interest because I LOVE computer stuff and hearing it made me think about it and want to look more into it. So away we go.
Doing some research online about what a Render-farm is, I come across a slew of images.Taking a look at these, clearly the range in size from small enough to fit into filing drawers or large enough to blow your mind. That's what they would look like. However, when you hear the words "render-farm," I'm sure you're curious to know what it actually is. The simple definition is a large number of computers all wired together in order to render large videos. A more technical definition, according to Wikipedia, the higher the quality of the images and videos, the more processing they would need to keep that quality. When an image needs more processing, clearly more time is going to be needed. So in order to shorten that time, having more computing power does just that. The more computers you have and the more power you have in each of said computers, the faster the rendering will be completed WHILE keeping the quality that you want.
So in retrospect, if you want a feature length film that is shot in 1080p to be finished by a deadline in a week, a Render-farm is most definitely going to be in need.
