Tiny ‘render farm’ worthwhile?

[Craig Wall]

I intended to write cs3.

Actually I declared to myself previously–and I need to go back to my resolve: for my purposes I ‘m going to call it AE8.

[Virtual Light]

Depending on the model (MacBook or MacBook Pro) it’s unlikely you’d experience any signficiant speed-up. Remember, you’ll have to purchase another copy of AE to test this and additional licenses of any plug-ins required for the render. A new Santa Rosa MacBook Pro with 4GB of ram wouldl probably show measurable improvement in render speed. But I don’t think it’s worth the expense.

You won’t need Nucleo Pro since multi-processor support is already built into CS3 (I’m assuming that CS3 is the version you referred).

Jim

[Craig Wall]

Huh.

Years ago you didn’t need to buy additional licenses to install render nodes.

Are you sure?

[Craig Wall]

This is verbatim from the adobe after effects 8 docs:

“If you have a full licensed copy of After Effects, you can set it up to work with render-only versions of After Effects called render engines. Your license entitles you to install as many copies of the render engine as you want on your network, as long as one activated copy of After Effects is installed on that network.”

https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/help.html?content=WS3878526689cb91655866c1103a4f2dff7-79a2.html

A downside:
You cannot use a watch folder and multiple render engines to simultaneously render a single movie file. However, you can use multiple render engines to render a movie as a sequence of still-image files. You can then use a post-render action to create a single movie file from that still-image sequence. (See Use a post-render action.)

Plus the setup is extensive:
Make sure that you install all fonts, effects, and encoders (compressors) used in the project on all computers monitoring the watch folder. If a computer monitoring the watch folder can

[Rhett Robinson]

Okay, so I have zero experience with Nucleo, but I think it would be worthwhile to set up as a render engine, if you don’t have plugin licensing issues. I have 2 older machines set up with the render engine, and depending on deadline, I usually just assign them to render, and use my primary workstation for something else. If it’s big (and I know the manual says not to have a machine render and serve), I have all 3 work, with one of the slow machines hosting the files. I get a lot done that way, and can keep tossing projects to the 2 slow machines and never stop working for a render.

[Brendan Coots]

Using the Watch Folder option is quite a pain in my experience, and I doubt the effort would be worth the minimal gains you would experience having one extra laptop rendering your project. Here’s a few reasons why:

1. Since the second render machine is connected to your master via ethernet, you will need gigabit for it to even be worth the effort. Even then, projects with large assets (like uncompressed movie files) will move slowly on the render machine as it pulls data in from the master machine.

2. If you’re like most artists, rendering multiple times (even dozens of times) during a project is par for the course. Given that you have to “collect files” and place them in the watch folder every time you want to render, this adds an extra process you have to go through every time you render.

3. The need to have the same plugins, fonts etc. on both machines is a cost concern. While you can install the AE render node on other machines for free, you can’t legally do that with your plugins or commercial fonts. If you intend to be within the law, the cost could be prohibitive considering what you’d get out of this setup.

4. As Adobe states, you will need to render image sequences for this setup to work, since multiple machines cannot contribute to building a movie file. This adds yet another kink in your workflow (unless you currently render out image sequences) since you will need to build a QT/AVI file from the resulting image sequence. This process alone will likely eat up any speed gains you might get from having this two-machine render setup.

Needless to say this is just my opinion and others may have differing views.

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Nicholas Toth]

If you own AECS3, you can put it on 2 machines, being your laptop and tower.

Set up a shared network storage. Collect your folder there, and set your output folder on the server also.

Open the project on both machines, and set the output to skip existing files. Run it through nucleo and you’ll be creating 6 frames per pass, not too shabby.

Thats the long way to do it, as stated earlier, the simiple ‘watch folder’ command can be easier, but sometimes it just acts stupid, and if you’re collecting big projects to a server and re-doing it, its a pain. I’d do it the manual way, I was setting up 4-5 machines in a studio to render the old fashioned work around way in around 15 minutes….its not hard….

[Henry Garrou]

I wanted everyone to know, beenieweenie is way off on this one. He’s just wrong, an AE render farm blows a one machine render AWAY!

Using an AE render farm and watch folder reduces my render time dramatically on any shot over 60 frames. I have 5 PCs all watching and waiting. You only have to install the Render Engine version of AE and you do hgave to have uniformity of plug-ins from machine to machine. You also have to install needed fonts on a per comp basis, but AE’s html-based feedback tells you which fonts are needed if it fails. Same goes for plug-ins. If you’re wondering if it’s worth it, it totally is.