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Renderfarm for AE?
Hello everyone, for my job I asked to do a little bit of research about Render farms.
I came across some blade servers and i was wondering if this is ideal to render AE projects with? I have a lot of 3 hour render time projects and im looking for ways to speed this up. If my google-ing research is correct, bladeservers contain a series of computers working together to render a certain project.
Well the big question (I really can’t find this on the internet) is, if it is possible to render .AVI/.flv/.mov or another codec with the bladeserver/crossplatform (assuming the blade server is cross platform). Or is it limited to just image rendering (.tiff/jpg?
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1 Reply
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[Joe Den Helder] “If my google-ing research is correct, bladeservers contain a series of computers working together to render a certain project.”
Blade servers are just essentially small, networked computers. They don’t work together by themselves to render collaboratively; it’s up to the application or render manager to use them together.
AE benefits from a pretty high-spec system for improved rendering performance. With multiprocessing, a single machine can render multiple frames at the same time, provided it has multiple cores, a lot of RAM, and fast disks.
There is significant overhead involved with network rendering, so you have to spend a significant amount on infrastructure to mitigate that.
What are your system specs like now? You might benefit from a faster workstation more easily than you would a few render nodes of comparable cost.
[Joe Den Helder] “Well the big question (I really can’t find this on the internet) is, if it is possible to render .AVI/.flv/.mov or another codec with the bladeserver/crossplatform (assuming the blade server is cross platform). Or is it limited to just image rendering (.tiff/jpg?”
No, you must render to an image sequence with a network render — but see my post on automatically stitching image sequences with AE [link].
Also, see this recent thread on Network Rendering [link] for my stock answer explaining how network rendering works (and what you need to really benefit from it), as well as some additional discussion about the economics of network rendering.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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