AE Renderfarm Hardware Specs

[Danny Princz]

the law of diminishing returns applies greatly to AE renders.

the more machines you throw at it quickly decreases the benefit of each machine added, especially when you are talking about renders that are for short durations of animation.

first i would not use g4s. if you are thinking about using them to save money i would definitely look at picking up a few cheap PCs (i know you said all mac but if its just for rendering it doesnt matter)

from your description it seems like you are mainly doing processor and memory intensive rendering since you didnt mention any footage. this does for render farms as then you dont have to worry about multiple machines accessing footage or keeping multiple copies (these is a new tutorial on multi machine rendering here on teh cow)

if it must be all mac then i would go no lower than a dual g5

have you also looked at optimizing your comps? (as to why its taking 1-2 mins per frame to render?)

who is that masked man…

[Richie Grasso]

I am sure there are ways I could optimize my comps and for the most part I try to do this. I render out to 16-bit image sequences which increases the processing quite a bit. Lots of 3D space with high res, layered PSD files, blurs, depth of field and lights seem to be the culprits. I do not have too much of an issue with footage rendering slowly.

I’d rather buy G5s than PCs. Maybe I should start out with 2 and build from there instead of getting 6 right away. What I am unclear of is whats the minimum RAM I should out in them? 4 GB? Do they need to render to a shared RAID or does that even matter?

[Danny Princz]

if you WANT to buy G5s thats great but you WILL be wasting your money. If the only use for these machines will be rendering why pay the premium of a G5? you can get dual core PCs for under $500 when which are fine to render on. (though if you’re not used to it the maintining the PCs might make up for the cost difference) If you plan on using AFX multirender then they have to render to a shared folder. it doesnt have to be a RAID, but with multiple machines accessing the drive it couldnt hurt. Id probably start with 2gigs of ram

—

who is that masked man…

[Richie Grasso]

Thx for the advice.

[Erik Lindahl]

I’d look at getting Nucleo for your single system setup.

If you’re running multiple systems, AE multi-render might do it or look into getting X-Factor (not sure it that works for AE7 though). To speed AE up you can have multiple rendering engines per system, this is how Nucleo works and it does work good for rendering nodes.

As you I’d very much prefer going the G5-road eventhough currently a dual core Wintel-system is cheaper. It all depends on if you’re confortable with them (I wouldn’t be). A Quad G5 system is a lot more bang for the buck.

On a Dual system I’d say about 2GB RAM is sufficent. On a Quad I’d go for about 4GB (quad’s can run more things at the same time if you want, more apps need more RAM).

Have a look at my Quad G5 review and see what speed’s we’re talking about there:
https://www.fcpug.se/forum/showthread.php?p=1337#post1337

When it comes to rendering a central folder is required, yes, but a G5 system over gigabith will generelly give you 30 or so MB/s over the network and concidering you’re doing 1 hour per second on the renderingside, network speed really isn’t your issue 🙂

I’d start off small and grow if I were you. Two more rendering slaves is a good start.

[Richie Grasso]

Thanks Erik. I am not really interested in buying Wintel hardware to save a few bucks. I also would prefer having the ability to keep all my drives and hardware compatible if I need to take one of the slaves off the render and use it for production on something else. I have also heard that AE is still optimized for the G4. Thats why I ask if the G4s would be worth anything.

As far as Nucleo goes, I already use it. I think it works well in many circumstances. Nucleo Pro sounds even better but I would rather push this off other machines and keep the workstations working on designing and animating.

I was thinking of buying a couple DP 2.5 G5s – just some refurb models – and putting in 4GB of RAM in each of them. I could start off smaller on the RAM. Would it be more beneficial to build an XServe renderfarm or is that really overkill for the money?

[Erik Lindahl]

xServe only has one benifit over the G5 tower and that is space and HD-storage. They make more noise, they are slower, they have much worse GPU capabilities etc etc.

If you have the space for G5-towers, go with them.

I agree with you’re point in gettings a OSX-only environment too. I wouldn’t go with G4’s however. They are a lot slower than G5’s, make a lot more noise, have a lot worse upgrade path for RAM etc.

[Richie Grasso]

totally agree on noise. ive got the space. thanks for the tips.

[Danny Princz]

you could always buy a couple mac mini’s , and run the AE renderer under win xp until adobe releases a native version. then switch back to os X (and the mini’s proc is upgradeable too) 🙂

who is that masked man…

[Erik Lindahl]

That is actually quite an interesting approach. The mini’s have gigabith now as well and you get at least 2 mini’s to a G5. Heat and noise should be quite low as well.

They are somewhat limited when it comes to drivespace and RAM however, but with 2GB of RAM they should do quite good work.

I was a bit “knocked off my feet” by how slow the iMac Core Duo was at compression however (h.264 via QuickTime and Compression Master). But in WinXP and AE they should do quite fine I reckon. Probbably alot more bang for the buck compared to a G5, but you are stuck in Windows then. Also, WinXP isn’t cheap.