Distributed rendering without a server

[Tony Silva]

everything will still work without a dedicated server, it just won’t be as fast.

I’ve always found the “watch folder” method a PITA. The problem being collecting huge projects. I like running the renders in batch mode better.

[Walter Soyka]

I’ve posted a little information on network rendering with AE recently.

You could share one of the external drives over your network, but it might too slow to give you any real benefit once all the machines start accessing it. Without fast shared storage, it might actually be faster for you to consolidate your project and put an identical copy on local storage on each machine, then manually render a different segment on each machine and recombine them.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Peter Stenhouse]

Thanks for the response. In my preliminary experimetns I have already encountered the PITA that is project collection. What is the Batch method you use, is it more than simply queuing a bunch of comps to render.
Thanks again
Peter

small flowers crack concrete

[Tony Silva]

I just set up the render queue with a “multiple Machine render” and use a command line render script on each machine. check out “aerender” i the manual.