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Going mobile! help!!!!
I have to travel out of town this weekend and make graphics to be played back at a convention on monday. They want me to create a quicktime movie dimensions 2290×1050. The only portable machine i have is a 1GHZ/1GB RAM powerbook G4.
Im rendering out a 5 second clip in AE- 2 layers, background is a1920x1080 stretched jumpback, and the second layer is an EPS file with some basic 3D movements.
5seconds = 20 minutes render time for 2 LAYERS! this is not practical. this machine is not helping my cause. does anyone know the rendering times on a well equipped notebook PC? i could ask my friends if they could loan me a fast notebook if it will be worth it. i bet it will.
my other question is if im forced to use this machine what can i do to optimize it for rendering?
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7 Replies
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wow, 20 mins sounds like a dream :), i’m sitting here with 4×36 hour renders, and a deadline a week away.
if i were you i would no doubt try to borrow another laptop as well and set up a render fram, if that borrowed machine have render engine installed that is… never tried either to mix pc and mac in a farm, but i’ve heard it should be prossible. a watch folder will save you though 🙂 good luck – d
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what in the world are you going to use to playback a 2290 * 1050 movie??? that’s nearly 7MB/frame
compressed png or jpg that’s between .7 and 2 MB/frame or at 24 fps 12 to 48 MB/s Isn’t it about 15% bigger than HD?
I’m not really curious. The biggest I’ve successfully played back from my powerbook is 720P H264 HD quicktimes. The 720P qts won’t playback from an external USB2 drive. The will most of the time from an external firewire drive. I have to admit my external drives are the little bitty two and a half inch ones.
The 1080I HD qts studder and won’t play back smoothly even from the internal driveby the way the 770P stuff looked amazing on a 30′ screen.
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the render farm is a great idea. i just got a hold of an imac G5, so that will definitely help. there will also be a dual 500mhz g4 there to add to the farm. thanks!
im delivering the A/V guys quicktime movies, and they are only about 30 seconds each, so i will be able to deliver files via DVD-ROM. i believe they are using a WATCHOUT system to blend multiple projectors together to take full advantage of the screen resolutions. Their computers? i have no idea but am eager to see their setup . its for an event in las vegas, so there no telling what expensive crazy system they have.
i am gonna get some RAM for the imac g5 pronto. ive never used a render fram before. will i have to load all my 3rd party plugins to the other computers too?
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Yes, it raised questions in my mind as well. You need to know how these clips are playing back and being fed to the Watchout. Someone might have asked someone, “how big is the screen?”, and gave you those dimensions as a direction without knowing exactly how the clips were playing back.
My nose tells me there’s something missing here and you might get royally burned at the end. I think you should talk to everyone involved to find out exactly what kind of system is being used to play the clips. If I understand a bit of Watchout, it users SD sources and synchronizes them to play on screens. So you might need to make SD DVDs for playback — I don’t know. At any rate, a clip of that size will need some kinda fast disk hardware to play at any kind of quality.
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Okay Bobby, here’s the deal. I’ve done Watchout design work all over the world, and the main thing I’ve learned is you need LOTS of render time and render power. Forget your Powerbook, and forget render farms. The network will fail just when you need it, and you’re talking about a bunch of ill-equipped machines connected in a line. 3 machines equals 3 sets of headaches.
Rent yourself the most powerful desktop system you can get, preferably a Quad G5. You’re working in Vegas, there are plenty of options. Here’s the first link of many I found with a Google search:
https://www.iccrents.com/apple-computer-rentals.asp
Treat your Powerbook as an emergency backup machine.
Give yourself plenty of time to set the rental machine up properly. Clean install the whole OS if you have the time.
Speak to the Watchout guys well in advance. Find out EXACTLY what files they require for playback. You can simultaneously render an uncompressed full-res version, and all the split files they require for each playback scene. Create multiple templates for the output modules you require, using the Crop tool in the output module to separate each split. Make sure you understand the overlap concept of Watchout, or you’ll mess it up. This way you will provide them with the exact files and dimensions they require, and they won’t need to do any conversion. Odds are you will need to generate numerous Quicktimes using Sorenson or similar compression. If you set everything up properly you can render everything in 1 pass. The more time you save the Watchout guys, the more time you’ll have to render.
Make sure you have a fast Firewire drive that is PC compatible. Forget DVD-R’s, they’re too slow and flaky. Put all your output files on the firewire drive and just hand it to the Watchout guys.
So long as you get your maths right with the Watchout guys, the job will work smoothly.
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thanks for all the input guys, i really appreciate it. I have rendered videos for watchout before, this isnt my first time. It IS however my first time without my trusty dual 2.5 powermac. The dimensions are 2290×1050 with blending. And motion JPEG compression is going to be fine, so i think a loopable 30-sec .mov on DVD will be fine.
What is your feedback on renderfarm, does it help workflow dramatically? will i gain a lot of time by setting up my machines? anything to watch out for? i asked earlier if i needed to have all the same plug-ins on all machines. What kind of renderfarm performace will i get out a dual 500mhz g4 powermac and a 1GHZ G4 powerbook while composing all my work on a 1.8 ghz imac G5?
now that has raised another question for me… how would i deliver to them my file if it was larger than 4GB? i couldnt format a firewire hard disk in FAT32 since it wont allow large filesizes. and im sure their PC with watchout on it does not have software that can read HFS formatted drives. the only way i can think of is to do a network transfer, but what if that is not an option?
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[Bobby Mosaedi] “The dimensions are 2290×1050 with blending. And motion JPEG compression is going to be fine, so i think a loopable 30-sec .mov on DVD will be fine. “
Not sure if I was clear in my previous post. You should either:
Provide UNCOMPRESSED quicktimes to the Watchout guys, so they can create the split files with compression themselves.
Or:
Get the split file requirements and render the splits yourself WITH compression.
If you compress the full size Quicktime and the Watchout guys then have to split it up, the resulting files will have been compressed twice, compromising the image quality of your work.
[Bobby Mosaedi] “What kind of renderfarm performace will i get out a dual 500mhz g4 powermac and a 1GHZ G4 powerbook while composing all my work on a 1.8 ghz imac G5?”
At the risk of repeating myself, FORGET render farms for live production work, unless you have hardware that makes it worthwile. Stringing 3 low-end processors together will not dramatically increase your render time, plus you will have the added headache of having to re-render the final image sequence back into quicktimes before delivery. (Render farms can only render image sequences, not Quicktimes) Plus all the network administration, making certain you have licenses for every plugin on all machines, font management on each machine, etc.
If you don’t want to take your own desktop Powermac, rent one.
[Bobby Mosaedi] “now that has raised another question for me… how would i deliver to them my file if it was larger than 4GB? i couldnt format a firewire hard disk in FAT32 since it wont allow large filesizes. and im sure their PC with watchout on it does not have software that can read HFS formatted drives. the only way i can think of is to do a network transfer, but what if that is not an option?”
Buy a copy of the software utility called MacDrive (50 bucks), and get the Watchout guys to install it on their production control machine. This will allow the PC to read any Mac-formatted drive faultlessly.
https://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/
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