can i run both gridiron x-factor AND nucleo?

[Steve Forde]

Short answer – yes you can. Currently X-Factor is shipping for AE 6.5, but we do plan to ship X-Factor for AE 7 right around the same time as we ship Nucleo Pro (coming soon…)

Here’s the scenario how you could use X-Factor and Nucleo in the same shop.

You have a total of say 10 workstations running AE – all connected via Gigabit Ethernet. During the day, all 10 workstations are …well…being used. This is where using Nucleo makes sense. Nucleo will give speedup on the local workstation by using all available CPU in the appropriate manner.

However, in this case, one of the poor AE artists is under massive deadline, and his comrades have completely abandoned him for the evening. The good news is, there are now 9 idle workstations potentially just sitting there doing nothing. This is where you could use X-Factor and turn all those 9 machines into an ad-hoc render farm for the 1 AE user still hard at work.

Unfortuntately, you can’t run both Nucleo and X-Factor simultaneously. During a render or preview, you must choose which one is most appropriate given your hardware and infrastructure.

That does not stop you from having both installed at the same time. There are no conflicts with having both installed on the same machine.

Please keep in mind that X-Factor is not for the faint at heart when it comes to setup and installation. Everything must be working correctly to achieve the benefit of X-Factor. This means that networking, storage, permissions, etc MUST be in a good state for X-Factor to properly see all machines, and distribute work for them.

In many cases, this can be non-trivial, and expensive (dedicated render farms usually need special power and air conditioning etc). Therefore, if you don’t have any experience with IT and networking, or don’t have an IT team at your disposal, the benefits X-Factor can provide may be minimal (and perhaps frustrating). In this case, I would highly recommend sticking with Nucleo or Nucleo Pro (shipping soon).

Hope this helps…

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Scott G]

thanks for the quick and detailed reply!
one more question though: in my particular work setup, there are three full time afx compositors, 1 on a mac, 2 on pcs, and we have a spare box we use for rendering. the spare box is hardly used at all, except for rendering finals or the occasional test.
during the day (when the other two guys are here) would i get greater performance from running gridiron with this spare box, or just nucleo on my own?
obviously gridiron would be better if i’m working late, but that doesn’t happen often, thank goodness.
we have an infrastructure already set up with ethernet and all work residing on central servers / permissions are taken care of already. so setup is not a worry for me, i think i’m tech savvy enough to handle it. 🙂

[Steve Forde]

What is the spec of the spare rendering box vs. the spec of your workstation?

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Scott G]

well, this may sound stupid, but they’re identical. but your previous reply seems to indicate that all networked workstations are used – ie, mine AND the spare render box in this case, whereas nucleo would only be maxing out my own.

is there any point to installing x-factor on only one additional box? surely the same result could be achieved by queueing a render with “skip existing frames” on both boxes?

[Scott G]

thanks steve for your previous help and advice.

i’ve downloaded and installed nucleo to trial, and it doesn’t seem to be affecting my render time at all.
i have a dual 2.4 xeon running winXP with 2gb of ram. the nucleo render popup window is telling me that it’ll take 1hr 20 mins to render this 20sec comp. this is the same time taken when i DON’T use nucleo.

my comp consists of a large tiff file with an unsharp mask, 5 adjustment layers of varying opacities, all of which use a different magic bullet looksuite grade (to get the grade i’m after), a adjust>shadow highlight adjustment layer, a tinderbox lens blur using soft light, and standard after effects film grain. yes, all very render intensive plugins.

does nucleo work well with tinderbox and magic bullet products?

also, my other issue is that even though the time elapsed is ticking up and the est remaining is ticking down, the % complete has sat on 10% for the past 20 mins of this 1hr20min render.

i’ll wait for the render to complete nonetheless, and see if it actually renders without an error, or stays on 10% forever.

[Scott G]

it doesn’t seem to be making any great use of my processors either. check out the gif file. processors seems to reach a max of 25%.

https://scott.geersen.com.au/nucleo-sg-01.gif

i don’t understand. so many great reviews… seemed to be the miracle cure for slow renders. 🙁 is there anything i can do?

[Scott G]

just as i suspected, the time run out and nothing happened… it just stayed on 10% forever. stayed for half an hour on “1 second remaining”. i was forced to stop it.

i read a similar thing happened to someone else on the forum. there was no solution posted though…

[Scott G]

perhaps the slowness does have something to do with my plugins. i’ve just tried rendering my showreel with nucleo, which is normally a 2hr render. it’d done it in about half an hour. groovy!

pity about my other project though, i was hoping nucleo could help me on that specific project, as rendering 200 stills with camera moves and the grade is going to take a long time at around an hour per still. argh!!!

[Steve Forde]

Scott,

Please make sure you update your Magic Bullet. There was a bug (fix was released about a month ago) with how certain parts of bullet would use CPU’s. This left nothing for Nucleo to use, as Bullet would artificially use all CPU (without actually doing anything).

I am not aware of any tinderbox issues, but we almost scale linearly with Bullet (on your dual should cut time in half), once you run the most current version.

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Scott G]

thanks steve, i wasn’t aware of the bullet upgrade. i’ll test it out asap.