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After Effects render farm
We’re trying to build a render farm for AE. I have some serious questions!
1. Can we run the AE render engine on the new Mac mini even tho’ it’s not “native” for Intel?
2. If so.. will it be faster than if we bought original 1.42 Minis?
3. I have been told that AE doesn’t address multi processors. If this is true, what’s the point of a super fast, multi-processor Mac?Help! thanks.
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5 Replies
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The intel macs run anything AE TERRIBLY slow – until 2007 when adobe creates native versions. So – it will run – just slow – slower than the original mac minis.
AE does address multi procs – does it best with something like Nucleo from Grid Iron. https://www.gridironxfactor.com/products/nucleo_overview.asp
Hope that helps!
// jayse
Ultimate After Effects Video Training CDs
Free Photoshop CS Video Tutorials -
the gridiron solution is expensive compared to the free “-m” switch. start aftereFX.exe with the -m switch from a commandline (or put the -m in your icon) and you can run After Effects multiple times concurrently. Why is this useful? 2 render engines on one machine means you can max out dual cpu’s.
Believe me, after building out a commercial renderfarm, i got real intimate with all oif AE’s quirks.
Alpay Kasal
Admin/Engineer
https://www.NYCRenderfarm.comps: Prepare to drool, I’ve got 28ghz worth of cpu power in a small enclosure sitting in front of me, upgrading my cpu’s soon, I think I’ll be hitting 40ghz by next week. all within an 18″ aluminum case. It’s a beautiful thing 🙂
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I second the “m” notion. Here’s what I have in the target for my second AE icon:
“C:\Program Files\Adobe\After Effects 6.5\Support Files\AfterFX.exe” -m
… with quotes intact.If you want full processor usage, this is the way to go. Render to a TGA sequence, then reimport and quickly compress to a movie if you want.
On a mac, you just duplicate the app icon.
For more info, search the COW on “instances”. You may need to search the archives.
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Not trying to say that the -m approach isn’t useful, I do want to point out a couple things that you can’t do using -m versus what you can do with Nucleo, while maxing out your CPU’s.
1. Previews – RAM, Shift-RAM and Spacebar Previews
2. Full support for the entire render Queue (render to movies, sequences, post render actions etc)
3. RAM Management (Running 2 instances using -m will attempt to use more RAM than you probably have, causing system sluggishness and performance degradation. Nucleo will prevent this from happening, while not affecting the instance of AE that you actually want to use…)
4. Disk Management (Running multiple instances can overload many disk types as each instance writes its files)
5. Performance Priority (Nucleo can dynamically set priority of background instances if other applications are attempting to use CPU)
6. Temporal dependent plugin detection – if rendering to a sequence using watchfolder between instances, temporal plugins will break. Nucleo automatically detects and reacts to this situation.
7. Does all this Automatically. No scripts, No config, No re-imports / exports
8. Its not that expensive….Again, if -m works for you, then thats a good thing. Just don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that all Nucleo does is the same thing.
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
ABSOLUTELY, the -m switch is not the most efficient way to do things (you are after all, just running AE twice), it might make life easier for your machine if you were just using the renderengine with -m (which is what I do on my dual xeons boxen).
Steve’s points should be looked at carefully because there is a lot of value in the msg above. When X-Factor was first announced, just reading about the technology knocked my socks off. very cool stuff.
Quick question Steve, is there a product dev’ment person or someone who otherwise handles partnerships at Gridiron? I’d love some contact info. feel free to send it to me privately at “alpay at nycrenderfarm dot com”. Thanks.
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