Before you tell me, yes, I know:

But this statement actually comes from a very common problem that we encounter in our VFX world, and concerns the production side.

It’s all about time

Time is our best ally and worst enemy, it doesn’t compress, doesn’t comply, and we have to deal with this. Nowadays, the movies and series’ way of producing is mainly about quantity. We need more content, because if we don’t, others will, and they will get the market. Hence, we need to produce more, as quickly as possible; worst case scenario: with less money. But it turns out, even money won’t always save us.

More money usually means more resources. More people, a bigger render farm, enough god-damned NukeX licences. The thing is, even with all the money needed, things still take time.
As VFX artists, we want to make the best shots that we can, get every frame perfect, have the best CG as possible. Good VFX aren’t just expensive, they also take time. Even if you can gather a team of thousands of the most talented artists in the world, it’ll take months if not years to deliver a show with thousands of top quality VFX shots.

Parallelism isn’t for everything

I was discussing about this with my dear colleague Adrien. Adrien is the kind of passionate and creative genius (shhhh, don’t tell him) that you wanna have in your team, but you won’t have him as he’s already in ours and we won’t let him go ! As we were struggling delivering a consequent amount of shots in a few months, he gave me this analogy (I know it’s not from him, but I got it from him, so for me this actually makes it « from him« ), pointing the whole non-sense of what we’re trying to achieve.

One woman can have a baby. From the day she’s pregnant, it’ll take (usually) 9 months until the child is born. But you can’t reunite 9 women and ask them to make a baby in 1 months.

My response to this was that it’s very similar to why GPU can’t fully replace a CPU, every task cannot be divided into infinite subtasks which can be done in parallel. At some point one step needs to be done before the next one can proceed.
« What do you think the average person is more likely to understand« , he replied, « the GPU or the pregnant woman ?« . He’s got a point, but I got mine, pregnant women aren’t GPUs.
Nodals softwares are really helpful to understand why you can’t just compute all steps in parallel, in Nuke, Roto -> Blur(Alpha) -> Premult won’t give you the same thing than Roto -> Premult -> Blur(Alpha); order matters as each step uses previous results as its inputs.

Back to our pregnant lady, it seems so obvious from this point of view, but we have so much struggle explaining this to our clients. You can’t comp before the CG is rendered, you can’t render before the scene is lighted, you can’t light before layout is done, and shading, etc… All these steps take time and, most of the time, can’t really be divided and given to multiple artists to fasten the process.
I can’t remember how many times I had to explain that, yes I can key this green screen while waiting for the background to be ready; but a big part of keying is the despill, and I can hardly despill correctly if I don’t have the background, or at least a precise idea of how it will look (bright ? dark ? colorful ?). So no, when the BG is ready, I won’t « just have to plug it and hit render », I’ll need to adapt my despill and.. this will take time !
Don’t get me wrong, more money will lead to a faster production, but to an extent. An extreme example would be to say that you can offer a quadrillion dollars to Weta (how did you get all this money btw ?), it won’t be able to make a new Avatar movie in a month.

J’ai raté, mais je veux pas qu’on dise que j’ai rien foutu, parce que c’est pas vrai.
I failed, but I don’t want people to say that I didn’t do anything, because that’s not true.
Arthur, Kaamelott

We are artists, we don’t have our word to say on deadlines, and usually, neither does our production team. We just want to do our job as best as we can. But the show just have to be done on time, and there might be good reasons as to why it’s decided like this. But in the event where we’re in a position where we have to explain that, this won’t do.. what will be delivered on deadline day won’t be as high-quality as it could be, that we’ll have to be a bit light on QC, etc.. ; just remember to explain to your producer/client/coordinators or anyone who’s waiting for your explanation, that we still need a CPU in our computers; and if they still don’t get it, tell them that pregnant women aren’t GPUs.