1EQQ8ZzGD

failed renders, backup directories on animator's machines,
some heads of source history that were left untouched, verbose
test renders, and other random stuff we could find via
nFS elsewhere in the building.
We invited a select few members of the crew back to work
straight from Friday to Monday morning. We took rolling
shifts to sleep and eat and kept plowing through, file by file,
comparing each of the files in the "to be checked" list from A,
B, and C, doing the best to verify and validate them, one at a
time, by looking at them in xdiff.
In the end, human eyes scanned, read, understood, looked
for weirdness, and made a decision on something like 30,000
files that weekend.
Having taken our best guesses at those suspect files, we
assembled a new master of Toy Story 2. Many source histories
were lost as a result, but we had the best version we could
pull together. We invited the crew back, and started working
again. every shot went through a test render, and surprisingly,
only a dozen or so failed.
I know full well that the following statement will likely
blow people's heads up, but the truth is that more than several
percentage points of the show (as measured in numbers of
files) were never recovered at all. So how could Toy Story 2
work at all? We don't know. The frames were rendering (other
than that dozen shots), so we just carried on, fixed those
shots, and charged ahead. At that point, there was nothing
more that could be done.
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 BluRay.
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