[HN Gopher] Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
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Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
Author : feross
Score : 123 points
Date : 2022-10-26 14:47 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thenextweb.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thenextweb.com)
| dingosity wrote:
| This is a great example of why it's a good idea to always test
| your backups.
| pstuart wrote:
| In the olden days when I was the admin for a small shop we
| would immediately restore the backup to a second system to be
| used as a playground. Win/win: verified restore and a place to
| test/train with production data.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| I came to make this snide comment as well! Nobody tests their
| backups though, I've only ever seen it done inadvertently when
| the backups were used as part of the development process.
| yakubin wrote:
| BTW how do you test a personal workstation backup? I don't
| have backup workstations to rotate between by backing one up,
| restoring on the other, working and then cycling between them
| in this manner. How do you test the restore procedure without
| risking destruction of the original?
| opencl wrote:
| You can buy an extra storage device and swap them out
| (either physically or swapping the boot order), as long as
| your workstation doesn't have soldered in storage.
| jen20 wrote:
| Even if it does, you can usually boot from an external
| volume anyway.
| bbarnett wrote:
| md5sum using a bash script and find, then compare on live.
| l33tman wrote:
| Most backup systems allow you to explore backups and
| extract individual files. Testing a bunch of files for
| restoring is at least better than completely ignoring it..
| however it's difficult if it turns out part of your backup
| is simply missing, maybe an erroneous exclusion entry or
| some path miss (happened to me, I was without backup for a
| home folder for a year before I noticed it, the /home/user/
| was a symlink to another volume that mostly had tmp data
| and so wasn't backed up). You might not even notice this
| even if you restore the whole backup, because you can't
| really be expected to go through everything every time
| either..
| vikingerik wrote:
| You don't need backups. You need _restores_.
| haswell wrote:
| Generally speaking, I think this is what testing a backup
| means.
| [deleted]
| geocrasher wrote:
| My favorite part of this account isn't the "test your backups!"
| lesson. It's the "Have an amazing team" lesson. In one weekend, a
| team of actual humans sorted through _thirty thousand files_ by
| hand.
|
| Surround yourself with amazing people, and you will find amazing
| solutions.
| outside1234 wrote:
| and then make sure those amazing people are testing their
| backups. :)
| brainwipe wrote:
| It's 2022. Test your backups.
| haswell wrote:
| While yes, backups should be tested, this all happened over two
| decades ago.
| raldi wrote:
| I'm reminded of the time I was on the InfoSec team at a company
| you've all heard of where all software development was done on a
| handful of Unix servers with a shared network file system.
|
| I reached out to the Systems team to suggest they look into
| mounting the home directories with the no-setuid option, and one
| of them invited me over to pair at their desk. They explained
| that there was a trick, where you could leave the existing mount
| point as is, with its existing mount options, and then mount the
| same device somewhere else with different options. So they got a
| root shell, went into some scratch directory, mounted the
| homedirs there, and we tested things out.
|
| I forget how that went, or what happened next, but it seems that
| we neglected to clean up after this experiment, and at some
| point, another Systems engineer was looking around the scratch
| directory and perhaps ran something like `du -ak` (forgetting to
| specify the option that disables crossing onto new devices),
| finding what appeared to be a gigantic copy of everyone's home
| directories.
|
| So they started `rm -rf`'ing it, and made a pretty huge dent
| before the phones started ringing and they realized that what
| they were erasing was not a copy on a local scratch space, but
| rather the real thing over on the NFS drive.
|
| Fortunately, this company _did_ have great backups.
| LanceH wrote:
| I was one ROLLBACK away from the Users table in production. Mid
| 90's, we fixed things in production all the time, and I left
| the where clause out. There were no soft deletes back then, we
| just deleted the row, and that would trigger the deletion of
| user resources elsewhere...
|
| I'm sure we had backups, but it would have been bad and
| resulted in a lot more fixes in production. I guess the upside
| of the "seat of the pants" days is that there was poor
| referential integrity, so it wouldn't have taken out anything
| else like billing history.
|
| edit: I never typed anything so carefully as I typed that
| rollback. I almost want to say there was an autocommit when
| closing the session, but my memory on that is fuzzy. MS SQL
| Server, if anyone knows. From then on, when called on for
| sketchy but necessary actions, I write the where clause first,
| run it as a select, see the number of results, wrap it in a
| transaction, etc...
| tomcam wrote:
| Good story although there were indeed soft deletes in the
| 90s.
| bluedino wrote:
| >> Galyn mentioned she might have a copy at her house. So we went
| home to get that machine, and you can watch the video for how
| that went...
|
| DLP software hadn't yet been invented
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _A baby saved 'Toy Story 2' from near complete deletion (2021)_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330740 - Feb 2022 (121
| comments)
|
| _Toy Story 2 files wiped by accident, restored thanks to work-
| from-home employee_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23022717 - April 2020 (2
| comments)
|
| _How Pixar's Toy Story 2 was deleted twice (2012)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20271179 - June 2019 (2
| comments)
|
| _Toy Story 2 Got Deleted Twice, Once on Accident, Again on
| Purpose (2012)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265328 -
| June 2019 (4 comments)
|
| _How One Line of Text Nearly Killed Toy Story 2_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16621848 - March 2018 (1
| comment)
|
| _How Pixar's Toy Story 2 was deleted twice [] (2012)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15978145 - Dec 2017 (1
| comment)
|
| _Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production?
| (2012)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13417037 - Jan
| 2017 (253 comments)
|
| _How Toy Story 2 Got Deleted Twice, Once on Accident, Again on
| Purpose_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500467 - April
| 2016 (1 comment)
|
| _Rm -rf nearly killed Toy Story 2_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326831 - March 2016 (1
| comment)
|
| _How Toy Story 2 was nearly lost_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9739675 - June 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _Pixar's Toy Story 2 was deleted twice (2012)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8786790 - Dec 2014 (2
| comments)
|
| _How Pixar's Toy Story 2 was deleted twice once by tech & again
| for its own good_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4001714
| - May 2012 (1 comment)
|
| _How Pixar Almost Lost Toy Story 2 To A Bad Backup_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972798 - May 2012 (75
| comments)
| joezydeco wrote:
| I used to flag duplicates from the new page, but realized it
| goes nowhere. Maybe a different flag to downgrade dupes?
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| I kind of wonder if deduping posts would be good. I find it
| really annoying to see reposts and if definitely makes it
| feel like there really isn't all that much content out there,
| at least much content that has enough viral potential. I
| suppose it's possible for a company to fingerprint content
| easily enough to stop dupes. Maybe it would block the post
| but allow a repost of the original content? But is that
| really good for the company? Plenty of people haven't seen
| that content anyway, so maybe it's working for those people,
| and sometimes you do want to see the repost if it's been long
| enough. I personally think it might just seize the entire
| ecosystem if you prevented it because the volume of content
| would go down, and the vitality of things would go down too.
| Not to mention the people reposting are kind of keeping the
| whole thing alive for their virtual points, and if they can't
| do it at scale by posting the same video in 20 different
| places anymore things might just stop. I feel like a lot of
| social networks are relying on a an orbiting cloud of garbage
| that just recirculates constantly. I'm surprised no one has
| started uploading, upscaling and posting America's Funniest
| Home Videos clips.
| joezydeco wrote:
| I don't think people are karma farming here. They're just
| too new and/or don't recall when certain posts have been on
| HN before.
|
| Dang has a pretty good list of links that keep showing up
| every 90-180 days on a continual basis (e.g. "The Story of
| Mel")
| vlunkr wrote:
| > I feel like a lot of social networks are relying on a an
| orbiting cloud of garbage that just recirculates constantly
|
| This is definitely true of mainstream social media, but I
| don't think it's that bad on HN. Based on the list of
| duplicates, this has been posted 13 times in 12 years,
| that's really not that bad. Things don't live on the front-
| page that long, someone reasonably could have missed it
| every time. If people are engaging with the post, what's
| the problem?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Yes please.
|
| This is hardly news, even if it prompts discussion, most of
| it is repeating the same discussion from all the previous
| discussions
| dang wrote:
| Flagging from the new page doesn't go nowhere - it's handled
| the same way as flagging from any other page.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Of course. But I'm guessing that dupes aren't flagged as
| heavily as something illegal/inappropriate/ads/etc. So they
| survive more often, correct?
| onionisafruit wrote:
| It looks like you're saying you've had this conversation
| before.
| dang wrote:
| 'Related' lists are just for people who might be curious to
| read past related threads.
|
| (Arguably this one is dupey because the last major discussion
| was already this year, but I decided to let it slide in this
| case)
| cnorthwood wrote:
| Early in my career I was working for a well-known anti-virus
| firm. They had a crash of their Perforce servers and it turns out
| the backups were not good and the most recent good one was
| several months old. They painstakingly restored it from the good
| backup and forensic recovery of the drives, but there were
| several files that were still missing to fully restore the
| archive. They did know the hashes of the files, so what they did
| was push out a bunch of custom virus signatures to the dogfooding
| (internal testing) environment which flagged any files with those
| hashes as viruses, and then asked anyone who had a hit to send
| the file into central IT to get it resolved. It was fairly clever
| I thought!
| jfb wrote:
| I remember learning that when Pixar did a pan-and-scan version of
| one of their movies, they wouldn't just use a floating 4:3 frame
| over the 16:9 original -- they'd _re-render the movie_ , moving
| items around as necessary, to get a better framing. The
| perfectionism was palpable when we'd meet with them.
| acuozzo wrote:
| Disney did this with "Lady and the Tramp". Cinemascope and an
| academy ratio versions were animated individually in order to
| make the best use of the frame shape.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This seems like a huge advantage with mostly-digital movies.
|
| I wonder how easily a Marvel or Starwars movie could be re-
| rendered like this. Technically there are actors of course, but
| they are usually the main focus of the scene anyway...
| hondo77 wrote:
| > I wonder how easily a Marvel or Starwars movie could be re-
| rendered like this.
|
| Fortunately we don't have to worry about 4:3 anymore.
| Keyframe wrote:
| There's wider adopted 16:9 aka 1.78 aspect target and then
| there's everything from 1.85 to 2.39 and ridiculousness
| like 2.44. Most common three today being 1.78 (aka 16:9),
| 1.85 and 2.39 (2.35 instead sometimes). 1.85 to 1.78 is
| usually a fit frame type of crop and call it a day, but
| 2.39 to 1.78 for home/TV release is same story all over
| again - do you do the letterbox or are we gonna play re-
| frame this shot game?
| gabereiser wrote:
| For green screen shots this would be fine. For VFX LED wall
| shots, this wouldn't work. However, movies and shows today
| are shot in a high resolution that you can crop/edit into
| most formats.
|
| Green screen shots lend itself to resizing better due to the
| ability to fill in more of the scene while pulling the
| subject matter away a bit to fit the format.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| VFX shots are not pure CGI, it's a whole lot of layers
| composited on top of each other, think Photoshop but video.
| So making tweaks to any given shot would not be as easy.
| [deleted]
| DefNotMe wrote:
| Is kottke.org operated by Daniel Kottke?
| jonhohle wrote:
| Jason Kottke, unrelated - https://kottke.org/99/06/dan-kottke
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| I think there's more background and detail in this version:
|
| https://thenextweb.com/news/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-delet...
| dang wrote:
| We've changed the URL to that from
| https://kottke.org/12/05/how-pixar-almost-deleted-toy-
| story-.... Thanks!
| naikrovek wrote:
| this is insane to me because individual frames for a Pixar film
| are around 1GB in size.
|
| recall how large laptop hard drives were before Toy Story 2
| (2002)...
|
| I have an extremely small amount of experience writing shaders
| for RenderMan (BMRT, actually), and those aren't large. animation
| data typically isn't HUGE, but models sure as heck are, and a
| frame you send to RenderMan is concrete (it used to be, maybe it
| isn't anymore?) meaning that all geometry was present in the file
| you gave to RenderMan, only the compiled shaders were referenced
| from it, because they were procedural and could not be statically
| included. so I guess the frames the renderer sees are sort of
| like the binaries of what I would now view as a software
| compilation process.
| raldi wrote:
| I think this story is about the models, not the rendered
| frames.
| naikrovek wrote:
| well that's my point. I always thought that what was lost
| were frame definition files, and not the models. surely every
| animator had copies of the models; you can't animate without
| them, and the movie was in production when the data was lost,
| so they had those models, or certainly most of them.
|
| I think what was lost was the animations, and not the models
| or the frame/scene files.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| > In order for her to work on the movie while out, they had
| plugged the machine up to the local network and copied the whole
| file tree over.
|
| Now image the same situation in 2022:
|
| - there is no acceptable backup for the whole movie (or let's
| say, app)
|
| - only you know there is one acceptable copy... but it's on your
| personal laptop. You did copy it back in the day because, well,
| let's say you wanted to run the app in our local machine
|
| There is no way you would tell your team/boss: "Hey guys, no
| worries! I have a perfect copy of it!", because why on earth did
| you copy work material into your personal laptop?! That's the
| rule number 1 of every modern tech company: don't mix work stuff
| with personal laptop (and the other way around: don't use work
| laptop for personal stuff).
| asciimov wrote:
| - If you can trust an employee with a $25K ($50K today)
| computer, trusting them with a complete source tree isn't a
| stretch.
|
| - I'd be more pissed off that somebody didn't have a complete
| backup somewhere, even if it was a personal laptop they used
| for work.
|
| - Back then, most people didn't have home computers. Hell
| nowadays a home pc isn't a guarantee, as most of my (non-
| engineering) coworkers only have cellphones and ipads at home.
| And while I agree don't mix work and play, most of these people
| do.
| serf wrote:
| > Back then, most people didn't have home computers.
|
| you had a much different perspective of 99 than I did.
|
| That factoid might have been true _for-the-public-at-large_ ,
| but certainly not for the offices of large CGI or dev firms.
| hinkley wrote:
| Animated movies take years to make.
|
| > The story likely takes place in 1998, though Jacob admits
| he's foggy on the exact date.
|
| In 1998 we were living in Internet Time. The amount of
| stuff that changed from '97 to '98 and from '98 to '99 made
| people's heads spin. Google incorporated in September of
| 1998. Napster had been out for 5 months when Toy Story 2
| debuted in theaters, and Java 1.2 was just about to exit
| from beta into general availability.
|
| People were still introducing each other to WinAmp when
| they started storyboarding this movie.
| asciimov wrote:
| > for-the-public-at-large
|
| True. Most of the people I knew with computers back then
| had them provided by their work, or bought them for
| university.
|
| But then I lived in a small city in Texas not near a major
| metro. Most people there didn't buy a home pc until the
| DotCom boom brought those cheap emachines.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| I decided to look it up. In 2000, 51% of households had a
| computer a 41% had internet.
| https://www.infoplease.com/math-science/computers-
| internet/u...
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Susman was the Supervising Technical Director and the machine
| was a Silicon Graphics workstation. Certainly sounds like she
| was given a work machine to do her job.
| jefftk wrote:
| More details on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Pixar-company/Did-
| Pixar-accidentally-d...
|
| The ending is sad -- that intrepid recovery mostly didn't end up
| used:
|
| _And then, some months later, Pixar rewrote the film from almost
| the ground up, and we made Toy Story 2 again. That rewritten film
| was the one you saw in theatres and that you can watch now on
| Blu-Ray._
| diskzero wrote:
| I think we made How to Train Your Dragon three times at
| DreamWorks. So many rewrites, director changes, character
| redesign, etc. If you ever wonder why a feature length animated
| film can cost over $300 million dollars, this is one reason.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| It is good to hear that big up front design sucks as much for
| movies as it does for software.
| coding123 wrote:
| The dragon looks exactly like one of my cats. Thank you for
| iterating.
| hinkley wrote:
| I have since seen a number of voids named Toothless. Some
| of them weren't even bitey (which seems like false
| advertising to me).
| davidferguson wrote:
| Oh you worked on _How to Train Your Dragon_? That 's my
| favourite movie in the world!
|
| Really random follow up question - there's a How to Train
| Your Dragon advert that I assume played before the first film
| in cinemas, advertising the cinema's popcorn and other
| concessions, but the only two copies on YouTube are in really
| terrible quality. (one in English
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f37fI14Ne0I, the other in
| Finnish I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Hr4mD3G1Q).
| I really really want a high quality version of this, and I'm
| wondering if you know of anyone at DreamWorks who I can
| contact about this? I've tried tweeting at a couple of people
| but unsurprisingly heard nothing back, so I'm maybe looking
| for someone in marketing?
| diskzero wrote:
| You could try reaching out to Kate Swanborg. That sounds
| like some sort of partnership deal that she may have been
| involved with. Worth a try!
| hinkley wrote:
| Thanks for nothing, you useless reptile.
|
| Seriously though, did they have to record the voice acting
| three times, or partially again several times?
| diskzero wrote:
| Yes, the recordings get done over many times. Sometimes we
| lose someone due to story changes or some other
| circumstance. This is a bummer, as there is more than the
| voice that is lost. While it is easier for some stars to
| drive over to Glendale from wherever they live in LA, they
| still "perform" the part and that performance is recorded.
| The video of the voice over work is referred to by the
| animators and influences a lot about the how the animated
| character behaves. I suppose in less expensive productions,
| you could just try and plop a voice over in, but all the
| top studios will use the video reference and ask the talent
| back for voice fixes.
|
| In general, I found the talent to be really fun to be
| around and no-one just phoned it in. They really liked to
| work on the films. I ended up sitting next to Gerard Butler
| at the employee screening of Dragon at the now non-existent
| Universal Amphitheater. He stayed for the whole film.
| Unlike me, he hadn't seen it in thousands of tiny chunks
| during dailies, and had a blast.
| pkulak wrote:
| Worth it. Love that movie.
| skunkworker wrote:
| In college I remember hearing from one of my animation
| professors that DreamWorks switched between NURBS and
| polygons for How To Train Your Dragon, I'm unsure which
| direction it was but I don't envy the artists tasked with
| that if true.
| diskzero wrote:
| I don't know about that. I would need more info. The PDI
| tool chain used for Dragon used the same clamped p-blend
| curves that had been used for several generations of
| movies. Technology was almost never the issue for delays.
| It was usually story, direction, editorial, etc. If you get
| more context, maybe I can find out more.
| haswell wrote:
| I don't know about sad necessarily - if the earlier iteration
| was necessary to realize they needed to make the changes that
| brought us the final version, it's all part of a larger
| journey. I can see how this could be frustrating for people
| involved, but reshoots / rewrites are part of the process.
|
| And I suspect that the recovery of character models and other
| assets was still instrumental in making the final film, if not
| the actual shots/sequences themselves.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| This seems to be par for the course for Pixar. I remember many
| of the deleted scenes from the _Inside Out_ DVD were prefaced
| with explanation from Pixar that they were from a much earlier
| draft. They realized after working through the first draft that
| they now had a much better understanding of the characters, and
| then rewrote the narrative to match.
| chx wrote:
| Zootopia was also rewritten.
| https://lostmediawiki.com/Zootopia_(partially_found_pre-
| rewr...
|
| > This decision came fairly late in the process, as animators
| had been working on the film for almost a year with only 17
| months until it needed to be completed.
| hinkley wrote:
| Nobody comes into a digital movie with all of their tools
| already written and running at top speed, right? Isn't this
| typically a process where frames per hour is pretty low at
| first and ramps up as you go?
| trynewideas wrote:
| Considering how good Toy Story 2 was, "sad" is an odd way of
| putting it, unless you're talking about the ensuing crunch.
|
| There are a few more details about that side of the story
| elsewhere:
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...
|
| https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/toy-story-2-disasters-almos...
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| The sad part is that the thing they saved didn't actually get
| used and was just thrown out. So it wasn't exactly the big
| save it's made up to be. But if it wasn't framed as a big
| save maybe it wouldn't be posted every week or so.
| haswell wrote:
| If the thing they saved hadn't been saved, it makes me
| wonder if they would have remade it as written, and then
| either have to throw _that_ out or release what was by all
| accounts not a good first pass.
|
| I suspect some character models were reused, and recovering
| what they did enabled the rewrite that came after.
|
| I think it's still fair to characterize this as a big save
| even if it wasn't used as-is. They arguable needed the
| first version to decide to move away from it.
| [deleted]
| locallost wrote:
| I remember the stories from Ed Catmull's book Creativity Inc.
| Although not that they tossed the movie out after almost deleting
| it anyway, like it's said in the article. The story about
| starting from scratch was that they left the team that did it
| alone, but it was their first movie and it fell flat. Reading
| about it then felt like a dick move and kind of questionable, but
| even more so later when I'd read that Lassiter, who was the most
| critical one, is a certified creep / jerk. So I don't know, but I
| guess if you're successful in the end your opinion is never
| questioned.
| navels wrote:
| Do people not search HN before posting?
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