Why most movies are still Rendered and Mastered at 2K

[James Freeman]

My post from the Superman vs Batman thread.

Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith

Seriously 400 million dollars in 2016 isn't enough for a 4k finish?

The movie is 95% CGI.
We'll be waiting till 2017 for the whole building of super computers to render that.
350 million for the electrical bill alone...

Studios use large server farms to render animated movies. As an example Despicable Me 2 required around 20,000 computers and 680 terabytes of memory for the HD version (2K). Studios could potentially use much faster flash memory to speed up the process, but it is still too expensive.

s usual, Pixar is pushing boundaries when it comes to the CGI in Cars 2. Making the film required a render farm containing 12,500 CPU cores. And on average, it took 11.5 hours to render a single frame. (2K master)

From the Wikipedia article for Frozen
Fifty effects artists and lighting artists worked together on the technology to create "one single shot" in which Elsa builds her ice palace. Its complexity required 30 hours to render each frame, with 4,000 computers rendering one frame at a time.

The CGI black hole in Interstellar took 120 hours per frame (5 days)
Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, the computation overtaxed by the bendy bits of distortion caused by an Einsteinian effect called gravitational lensing. In the end the movie brushed up against 800 terabytes of data.

The more quality CGI the movie has, the better the chances that it will be rendered in 2K, thus mastered also.
No, the smurfs is NOT at that level of CGI, realistic CGI is not an animated cartoon like Smurfs or Despicable Me.

As we all know, the studios rush the production so that they can make MORE MONEY FASTER.
That explains why 2K is still dominant in Hollywood movie production, while Drama series (with no CGI) on Netflix can be created in 4K in a heartbeat.