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Render Farm Script?
Im looking to see if there is a script written that will break your master build comp into pieces to send out to a render farm.
an example would be to take your comp which is 30 seconds long and make 3 new comps each 10 seconds long to send out to machines to render.
Im thinking that this MAY be a quicker solution to just rendering an image sequence and recollecting the image sequence on one machine after the render is complete.
the only downside to this that i can see would be that if your farm has 10 machines, and you only cut your comp into 4 other comps, then your farm will have 6 machines doing nothing instead of them all working on rendering the image sequence.
i think there would maybe be a benefit when rebuilding the rendered pieces back together since you would be going from the native codec to native codec rather than re encoding from jpg’s or tifs to pro res or animation.
thoughts?
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4 Replies
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“i think there would maybe be a benefit when rebuilding the rendered pieces back together since you would be going from the native codec to native codec rather than re encoding from jpg’s or tifs to pro res or animation.”
I am unclear what you mean by that- AE can render in pretty much any format you want it to render. What native format you are referring to?
The whole idea of a render farm is that it will render out individual frames and collect them in one location. I do not see any benefit in splitting your comp and rendering out whole parts of it.
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist -
hmm i was told that we have two choices to rendering on the farm.
1 would be to set the final comp to render as an image sequence as either jpg’s tiff’s, iff’s or whatever. This method will use all of the power of the render farm using all machines to render out the frames. However what you get out isnt a complete .mov file which is what we want here. Im told you still need to take the image sequence and manually put them in a comp and re export them in your mov file.
the 2nd choice is to just set up your final comp to render as the mov file in the codec you want. This doesnt get split up over the machines on the farm and only one machine is working on rendering out your mov file. This method, as explained to me, isnt really beneficial other than the fact that your AE on your machine isnt tied up.
so basing on those two explanations i was just thinking of maybe a different way to make the render farm more efficient for rendering out single files.
I assume that there are some details im missing?
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For best quality you need to render from AE in an uncompressed codec like Animation or a file sequence- tga, png, uncompressed tiff…
Then you either include that in u=your final cut in a editing soft or if it is a finished piece you encode for playback/delivery.
Even if Animation is a .mov it is not a playback format, as most machines will have a hard time handling that much information, so that will be need to be compressed as well. On the other hand, it is not recommended too render compressed delivery formats from AE, since the compression it is capable of is not the best.
What the best workflow is, is to render uncompressed out of AE and then use a software like Adobe Media Encoder to compress for final delivery.
A render farm will work only if you render individual frames.
As a side note, Media Encoder does not see sequences of files- the workaround is to import the sequence in AE, then open that comp in Encoder, and render from there.Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist -
[Jm Chadillon] “1 would be to set the final comp to render as an image sequence as either jpg’s tiff’s, iff’s or whatever. This method will use all of the power of the render farm using all machines to render out the frames. However what you get out isnt a complete .mov file which is what we want here. Im told you still need to take the image sequence and manually put them in a comp and re export them in your mov file.”
You don’t need to do it manually. You can use a post-render action [link] to stitch the movie for you.
Let’s say you have a comp named NETRENDER IMG SEQ. Nest NETRENDER IMG SEQ in a new comp named NETRENDER MOVIE.
Add NETRENDER IMG SEQ to the render queue, and use the Multi-Machine render settings and output module. Modify the output module, changing the Post-Render Action from “None” to “Import and replace usage.”
Add NETRENDER MOVIE to the render queue, using whatever output settings you’d like, and start your network render.
All the machines will work on the image sequence. Once that is finished, AE will replace the NETRENDER IMG SEQ comp within your NETRENDER MOVIE comp with the image sequence you’ve just rendered. The next available machine in the the watch folder render will pick up the NETRENDER MOVIE item from the queue (which again is now a comp containing the image sequence that just completed) and render it out as a movie. The other machines on the watch folder will sit idle (or move on to the next item in the queue).
If you’re concerned about recompression, you should avoid JPG (which uses lossy compression), and use PSD, PNG, or TIFF (all of which are lossless). AE’s multi-machine settings default to PSD.
One last note — AE’s network renderer is pretty naive, with no centralized control or coordination. It needs a lot of network bandwidth and fast shared storage for the best results.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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