[Tom Lee]

Thanks Walter. That cleared up a lot of things.

[Walter Soyka] “As other render nodes join the party, they will see that “Frame 0000” already exists, so they will skip it and look for “Frame 0001.” If “Frame 0001″ already exists, they’ll continue sequentially until they find the first frame that doesn’t exist, create a file for it to claim responsibility for it, and begin rendering.”

So in the end I’ll have x number of rendered frames to compile into a video container right?

[Walter Soyka] “Unless you have at least a gigabit network and a fast RAID on your Mac Pro”

Would 3 drives in my Mac Pro’s Hard Drive bays configured into a raid 0 or 5 be considered a fast raid?

My Mac a gigabit card or two. I have a gigabit switch and most of my core two duos have gigabit cards. Will the network suffer if I have a couple of the nodes using 10/100 connections? Or maybe they should not be a part of the nodes network at all.

The broader question I’m trying to answer is can I use this processing power in my possession for faster or improved work flow or should I try to get what $ I can from selling them all to put toward something much more effective? That being said I do long for faster render times so I’m secretly pulling for improved work flow.

Thanks
thanks,
Tad

Thanks,

Tom Lee
tomleejr89@gmail.com

[Tom Lee]

[Walter Soyka] “After Effects has a built-in network renderer that uses watch folders. It’s somewhat naive compared to a full-fledged render manager, but it does work. There’s a list of caveats: it requires fast shared storage and a fast network; you must manually load all fonts and plugins onto the render machines, some of which may not be licensed for distributed rendering; differing cross-platform file and path naming conventions can be difficult to work around.”

Walter thanks for your response. I’ve been digesting the ‘network render’ link you gave me. In it it says ‘ “Do not use the same computer to serve a watch folder and to run After Effects in Watch Folder mode.”

So can I serve the watch folder from my Primary CPU the MacPro? In more words, I’m working in After Effects CS4 on the Mac Pro, Creating the project, then I need to render or Ram Preview. Do I have to save the project the watch folder then it renders? What triggers the render? What part does my Mac Pro play in the render?
Does it help render while not in Watch folder mode?
Thanks
Tom

Thanks,

Tom Lee
tomleejr89@gmail.com