I see posts all the time talking about the million dollar special effects and such, but isn’t it just a team of people using software? Why and how do (decent) special effects have such a high price?
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It’s not *just* a team of people using software.
It’s a *large* team of highly-trained professionals, usually with some sort of higher education qualification or degree, along with experience in illustration, animation, special or practical effects, and art in general who, as a kicker, are generally part of a union… using software that costs several thousands of dollars per license, that needs to run on very high-performance computers to meet deadlines.
It’s not like Special Effects/CGI artists are becoming instant millionaires, but they can live comfortably in the LA/SF Bay area where the cost of living is pretty ridiculously high.
Also unlike most other areas of technology: Faster tech makes special effects work move slower; in the early days of 3d rendering, a character model would have a few hundred to a thousand or so polygons to render, and on 1990s-2000s hardware, that took months to render at a rate that was still too slow for most peoples’ tastes.
Now, though, instead of rendering low-polygon graphics quickly, they take roughly the same rendering time to render high-definition graphics, textures, models, etc; but that higher definition means more fine details that take more artists more man-hours to get meticulously right where some shortcuts may have worked in the past since the display quality wouldn’t even show the slightly sloppy methods, now you have to be extra-careful compared to what you did on your last project.
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