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AE 6.5 networking mac
I have a G5 1.6 PowerBook 1.25 and thinking about getting a mac mini. If I network these 3 cpu would these cpu’s increase AE’s performance?
Note: I do not know that much about the netwoking software that came with AE 6.5.
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6 Replies
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Good luck. The network render engine and process that comes with the Production bundle is a piece of crap! It’s more trouble to set up and figure out then it is just to go ahead and render it out.
Gridiron makes a pretty good network render app that’s a bit pricey but works well and is easy to use. Here’s the website. https://www.gridironxfactor.com
BTW – I DON’T work for Gridiron. -
I thought that was what came with AE 6.5 production
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It does come with AE… and currently only supports RAM previewing, not actual rendering. At least to my knowledge.
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It does come with AE… and currently only supports RAM previewing, not actual rendering. At least to my knowledge.
Matt -
Its really not that difficult, as long as you install the render engine on each of the machines, and point them all to a shared folder on one machine. Then its as simple as collecting the files to that folder. I would be leary of this in your situation though. I would suggest just letting the G5 do all the work, and spend a little extra time on it. I haven’t done any net rendering in a little while, but I do know that in the past, you would get color shifting by mixing processors in renders. For a while I ran a cross platform network render farm, but, there were differences in the frames. I even noticed color shift differences from just the P3 and P4 computers. So, long story short, give it a shot if you want, but I would suggest maxing the ram in your G5 and work on that, unless its rendering, in which case, you can still work on one of the other machines.
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AE network rendering is problematic, as the other posters have indicated. Yes, it can be done, but, it’s is very finicky. I run a small render farm, mostly used for 3D, but when there’s a render that will take long enough, we’ll use the AE render engine. I’ve actually have a comp rendering on 3 G5 cluster nodes right now- it would have been a roughly 20 hour render on a single machine, but will only take about6 1/2 hours across the network. Our rule of thumb here is if it won’;t take more than 1 1/2 – 2 hours on a single machine, it’s not usually worth it. The side benefit is if you’re churning out lots of work, you can render on the network, and work on other comps on your machine while the renders happen.
I looked at the Gridiron product, and in our calculations, it wasn’t worth the money, YMMV.
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