Render farm for DCP creation

We are starting to get more and more requests to make DCPs for clients and we need to speed up the process. Currently doing a DCP through the Wraptor AME plugin takes around 20 hours for a feature length film. It's a bit faster if we do tiffs through AME and use OpenDCP for the rest but even then it's still taking a while. When we are doing work for festivals etc we are simply running out of time where we need to do dozens of films.
Is there a way to use render farms to speed up the AME processing? And if so, any advice about setting it up?

Rather than a farm, if you can find out from Adobe or the Plug-in maker how well the code threads you might consider a single computer with multiple CPU's llike the Xeon E7 v2 chips that can have up to 15 cores and up to 8 sockets. Here is Harm's picture on his Tweakers Page. To run a beast like this you have to us Windows Server OS which not officially supported by Adobe but apparently should work. Of course the pricing is astonomical.each CPU chip (15 Cores 8-way) is $6841.
I would suggest contacting Eric ADK and see if they can build you a Super Workstaion for your processing. If it can be done they are the one's to do it

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Render Farm for FCP 7 PLEASE HELP ASAP!

I have been searching all day for a way to get a render farm going on FCP. Problem is, any of the places that have any type of remote answer are from at least a year ago, and apply to FCP 6.
I have no experience with setting up a render farm, but I need to render out a lot of footage with effects ASAP to meet a deadline.
If anyone out there could A. tell me if it's even possible to set up a render farm on FCP 7, and B. how to do it, in dummy's guide terms, because I am setting this up for the first time in desperation.
PLEASE HELP!!!
~ Sean

Just as well; deadlines are not where you want to try to attempt unknown hardware hacks.
When you get time, after your deadline has expired, tell us about your project and how you allowed your effects to go unrendered for so long. We can help you not do that again.
bogiesan

DPX export settings for DCP creation

I have a short film that's been accepted to a major festival that requires a DCP, and I want to create the DCP professionally. I would like to provide a true 24p DPX master to the DCP company.
My final film is a 4K sequence at 23.976. I have duplicate 24 fps 5.1 audio wav stems that were output from Pro Tools, so audio isn't a concern.
Okay - so I export my sequence and choose "DPX". I'm presented with several options: 24p Full Range (max bit depth), 24p Over Range (max bit depth), 24p Standard (max bit depth), and 24p Video (max bit depth). Huh? I'm a Jack of all Trades indie filmmaker, and I can't find a word about these options anywhere - not in the Adobe manuals, not in tutorials, not even via a Google search. And, although these options are all "24p", my output still clearly shows as 23.976.
What option should I select? Why the variables? And can I simply change the frame rate to "24" under the video tab?
Finally, will I be able to import this image sequence back into a new sequence in Premiere Pro to check the 24fps audio tracks for alignment and sync?
Thank you geniuses in advance. I don't know how I would do this without you.

I just heard that DPX/Cineon was the best format to use for lossless colour grading. I also was starting to learn speedgrade, which uses DPX as it's main format. This is the first time I've attempted using any codecs specific to colour grading before. I used to export as AVI or quick time and grade that...
One of the problems i'm having is that I'm shooting on the 5D mk ii, which doesn't have anything near the colour depth of somethig like the scarlet..
I did figure out however, how to get rid of those lines. In AE down the bottom of the project tab, where the new compositions button is, there's also a colour settings button where you can change the sequence bit rate and output settings. So I got rid of the lines, but not I'm having issues with the output being over exposed in some places, and under exposed in others. But that's probably becuse of the limited colour space of DSLR's..

Render farm for after effects and premiere

Hi,
Is there a solution for network rendering for after effects and premiere? I have a Renderfarm active for another solution (two Windows nodes).
Best Regards,
Card

yes i plan to buy 64 GB 1600mhz, Kingston HyperX Blu 8GB
and for HDD i select this WD Black 4 TB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, 7200 RPM, SATA III, 64 MB Cache, 5 Year Warranty - WD4001FAEX
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A2IM76K/ref=ox_sc_act_title_4?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=AQ2KN WSHKTD2T
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Hardware recommendations for render farm?

Hello,
what would you recommend for a small render farm for mixed AE projects (mostly HD content, short projects with only a few seconds and layers and bigger ones with multiple HD layers and up to 15min or longer.)
is it better to have more cores (AMD opteron servers with 48 cores for example) or better more performance per core but less cores (Intel Xeon servers)?
And how much memory would be optimal?
What can you recommend for network connection to the shared storaged, how fast shall this be?

I like Harm's analogy better then mine. One prize cow vs. 20 regular cows. The imagery is very clear. In a production environment, where volume counts, more is better then a single top notch one. A single cow can only produce so much mik per day, no matter how extraordinary it is. But 20 can theoretically produce 20 times more (practically, maybe 17 to 18). Quantity, not quality. I'm not saying that you should get crappy hardware. Just good hardware, not high performance ones.
As you know, it's not because you buy a computer that costs twice as much, that you'll get twice the processing power. First of all, forget dual CPU computers for a render farm, it's not worth it. Get a regular quad core. As you compare prices vs. performance (do a chart), get the CPU that gives you the best bang for the buch (just before the price curve goes up).
I personally think 32GB is overkill in a render farm environment. 16GB is way more then enough. Remember that you're not doing a RAM preview farm (if such a thing exists), but rather, fractioning the render process to various computers. While 16GB is good, 2GB isn't. But 8GB can be an nice compromise. Remember, you're trying to drive the cost down of a computer, so you can buy many computers. But RAM is cheap, so, best bang for the buck, 16GB can be possible. Then again, it depends on other overall factors to keep the price for the computer down.
Network speed. Yes you could get 10GB NICs and a 10GB switch. But that can drive the price up substantially. If you can get a good price on them, great. If not, stick to 1GB. Get a motherboard that has 2x 1GB NICs on board, so you can aggregate the network connections together to get 2GB. You could eventually add a quad 1GB PCIe card down the road. The computer that has the project assets should have an aggregated quad (or more) NIC inside. You want to be able to push the media as fast as possible to the render farm.
Other things to consider... or rather, not consider. Graphic card is a non issue on a server farm. AE is all about CPU. Some mobos come with on-board graphics. Usually, it's cheaper, and consumes less power. You also want to drive the energy costs down when you multiply by X number of computers. Just get a KVM solution that will be able handle X computers. You don't need a RAID on render farm computers. A regular hard drive will do. I'd even go with a green drive that consumes less power.
And depending on how many computers you have, to reduce the footprint, you might want to get low profile rackmount casings and put them in a rack. Plus think of putting it in it's own room, because it'll be very noisy!

Render farm between multiple os

Hi All,
I have a question about setting up a render farm for After Effects CC. Basically my main computer runs on OSX Maveriks, and I have two more Windows computers that I would like to help out rendering After Effects compositions. I have set up one of the machines with the After Effects CC render engine, and the Mac and other Windows machine have After Effects CC installed as part of the 2 machine license.
When I setup a watch folder render from the first windows machine to the second one, everything works fine, but what I want to do is setup the render from my Mac to both the windows machines who are monitoring a network watch folder.
Permissions are seemingly all in order, but if I set it up from the Mac both PCs give me the message: "Render control file not valid".
I have searched all over the Internet for a solution, but there seems to be nothing there. Also, I suspected it might have something to do with the way a Mac does line endings in files compared to a Windows machine, so I rewrote the RCF file on the Windows machine itself, making sure it was in the right format, but this did not work either.
Any help?
With warm regards,
Daniel

hello fastlane, for firefox you can use firefox sync to share bookmarks, passwords & history between your three OSs - [[How do I set up Firefox Sync?]]
& for keeping your mails synced it's possibly the easiest way to use a mail-provider that offers IMAP, which keeps the mails on the server so that your mail program on any OS has the same data when it's connecting...
(but we're not specialised on thunderbird here, you might head over to https://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/ for more detailed questions).

Do I need extra AE licences to setup a render farm?

We actually have 5 workstations with 5 full CSS5.5 licences. We would like to have 6 more computers to use as a render farm for AE. Do we need extra AE licences to do that?
Thank you very much
Andy

So is it 1 licence per 2 render nodes or one licence per 2 computer total?
5 workstations + 6 render nodes = 6 licences? I would need just one more.
or
6 render nodes = 3 licences? I would need 3 more.
Thank you

FCP 2 / Maya Render Farm

I'm setting up a render farm for one of the labs I manage at my University. I currently have 10 2GHz G5's on a gig switch behind an 8-core MacPro as the controller. I want to know if its possible to set up the 250GB drives that is in those 10 machines as a single share drive mounted to the controller? If not by native software, what about 3rd party software?
Is this there anything I should know about the newest version of Maya with Tiger and would it need to be installed into each of the nodes if they are in a dedicated render farm?

I dont know anything off the top of my head to answer your first paragraph. You should use a file server and mount the volume on all the nodes, which is easy.
And yeah, every node needs to have Maya installed. The good thing is they dont need to be licensed to do command line rendering, unless you use mental ray renderer.

AE CS6 with Render Farm

Hi
I have 5 "blade" to do a render farm for After Effect CS6. We have a Creative Cloud license. How a can do my render over the network or do the render by my farm.
Thanks
Yannick

Read the documentation on network rendering. If you have specific questions after you've read the documentation, let us know.

Question on potential configurations for resource cluster as virtual machine server / beowulf / render farm

I am looking for a starting point on where to focus my efforts in researching a desired configuration. Of course anyone who spends anytime researching in forums knows that one thing that people hate is for people
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to as a Beowulf Cluster, or a Render farm but I believe as the name suggests that this is more dedicated to a single task of rendering. I like the idea of a virtual machine server where I would never actually locally use this machine but rather set up
many virtual machines that I can remote into. I started to compile a ProxMox Server, and this was the right idea, however when running a VM, that VM is constrained to the hardware resources of the single node that it is assigned to. If there is
a way to be able to have a machine that would utilize the 20 some odd cores that I would have in the cluster, along with the 40-50 gigs of ram, well that would be ideal but sounds too good to be possible. Also, ProxMox isnt quite there in compatibility for
a home/home office user. I understand that the programs that are used have to be written in a way where the architecture allows for such, but if it could even be used for speeding up my render time with Adobe and Autodesk (which I know do have such functionality)
that would be wonderful.
So without writing a whole book I am looking for suggestions on how to proceed. Can I literally build a "super computer" that is not really that super... more mediocre super... or am I better off just consolidating the hardware but not the
OS's and programs. Also, I do currently use three or four different distros of Linux, mostly for ethical hacking and security type work like pen testing. One thing I have never been a fan of though is dual booting. Perhaps investing
in a hot-swap HDD chassis that I could load all the different OS's on where I could just pop in whatever OS I am looking to use. As you can see I am far from knowing where to spend my efforts in research.... THANK YOu for ANY help.
I was recently suggested Microsoft HPC Pack as a platform? Anything?
Here is what I currently have:
these are all fully built)
Intel i5 3.7 quad core
Nvidia (ASUS) GTX-760
16 Gb DDR3 @ 1600 Corsair
ASUS Sabertooth Z87 MoBo
Autodesk - Inventor, Revit, 3Ds Max, Maya, Fusion 360, Flow, etc.
Adobe - PhotoShop, After Effects, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, etc.
Basically as you can see this is used for my work in 3d modeling, rendering, and drafting along with 3D printing.
Sys. #2
AMD 4.7-5.0 8 Core
Nvidia GTX 760 (Same as sys #1)
16 Gb DDR3 @ 2400 Mhz
ASUS Crosshair V Formula Z
Various programs for programming, app development, gaming, etc. (This is my daily driver)
Sys #3
AMD 4.5-4.7 8 core
16 Gb DDR3 @ 1600 Mhz
Asus Crosshair V Formula Z MoBo
Not currently using this one but is fully functional.
Sys #4
HP built i5 3.4 quad core
12 Gb DDR3 @ 1600
Nothing Special - this is the one I was using for school work but being that school and programming became one and the same I have all but abandoned it.
THANK YOU AGAIN TO ANYONE WHO HAS MADE IT THIS FAR in reading this.

The cluster works only for standalone webcache and httpserver installations types.
If you want to do this you have to use dcmctl command to change from one farm to another.
try checking with dcmctl command with out options an dyou will get a full list of options.
then run dcmctl usage(orhelp) option to see what you need.
As far as I remember
you have to check the farm id of the server you want to be the master
then in the second, you have to run dcmctl joinfarm or something like that.
Regards.

Hardware Encoder for H.264? Encoder for Flash? Render Farm?

I use Compressor to create H.264 QuickTime files, and have setup Qmaster to use a 8 core cluster to expedite the process, but it is not reliable, and fails quite often. I have a total of 3 Mac Pros in my facility which can all share their resources to help this process be quicker. I was wondering if anyone knew of a hardware encoder that will encode H.264 files very quickly? I have a bid on a project that if granted, I will need to encode a VAST amount of H.264 QuickTime files. Is the best solution a dedicated Mac Pro render farm with a Qmaster setup?
Next, on to the Flash. I currently use Sorenson Squeeze 5 to encode 2 pass VBR flash files, and it takes forever even on my 2.8ghz Octo with 10gb of RAM. Does anyone know of a piece of software or hardware that can expedite this process? Maybe a Flash render farm? Maybe a gnome with a wand?
Thanks in advance.

Keep your eyes open for when the Matrox CompressHD goes on sale.
While it probably won't be available to use on the job you've just bid on (tentative sale date is May 2009 but who knows if that can be trusted), it otherwise seems like the answer your prayers - it speeds up h.264 and Flash encoding. It will, supposedly, list for $495.
Otherwise, as mentioned, the Turbo264HD is the way to go for now.

Render Farm PowerPC

Hello!
I need to convert a ton of files from .dv format to .m4v .mov or similar. Since it will take years to do it (almost 3TB of videos) with my current Mac Mini (first Intel version) I was thinking to set up a render farm with all my desktop PowerPC Macs. I've never tried this before, so I don't know how to do it. I've heard that Apple uses Qmaster to do that. I've also read something about Xgrid, but Xgrid seems to be for different tasks (I would like to know wich ones, because I want to do something useful with my old PowerPC Macs and a distributed computing solution may be the answer).
My macs:
- PowerMac G3 B&W (400Mhz)
- PowerMac G3 B&W (450Mhz)
- PowerMac G4 PCI Graphics (450Mhz)
- PowerMac G4 Digital Audio (733Mhz)
- PowerMac G4 Quicksilver (933Mhz)
- PowerMac G4 Mirrored Drive Doors (Dual 867Mhz)
All of them with at least a bootable partition of Tiger 10.4.11. The PowerMac G4 MDD also has Mac OS X Tiger Server installed.
Thanks!

I think your best bet is simply to schedule it yourself. Set up a simple automater script that reads from a folder and performs the conversion. Simply drop a bunch of files into the watch folder and let it run. You can experiment with how many concurrent processes you can run on each machine before it bogs down.
Don't expect much out of the G3's.

Converting PowerMacs to a Render Farm?

Perhaps like many of us, upgrading over the years, I've accumulated a collection of G4's and now a couple of G5s, and I'm reluctant to part with them...their resale value being minor, at best. I would be more interested in finding uses for them. (well, one may become an iTunes jukebox - to replace my CDs and player eventually)
I remember once learning about something called a 'render farm' and how several computers can be linked together to take advantage of their combined processing power. And then there was that experiment some years ago - was it at MIT or some university? - where 1000 G5s were used to create a 'supercomputer'.
With 7 PowerMacs, is there a (fairly easy) way to take advantage of this possibility? I use PhotoShop, a CG program and an NLE, and would certainly benefit from faster rendering times. I'm not an early adaptor by any means, and until a MacPro lands in my lap, I'm content enough with what I've got.
So, even better if I could hitch these up like a team of horses!
thanks,
k

Yes, it was Xgrid...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgrid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpqfDC_4Xos

Cluster Mini Render Farm

I'm terrible at server things, I wanted to start with that and be rather upfront about it. But that's why I'm asking out to you in the community. I'm a video editor and in Final Cut Pro it takes literally forever sometimes for things to render when adding effects. Unfortuantly rather than buying a Mac Pro, I instead bought a MacBook Pro. Which don't get me wrong I love wholeheartedly, except the graphics card inside just is embarrassing, plus with how quickly the processors heat up it's hard for me to work constantly and quickly. So I was curious, I asked out in the general communities last week about putting some minis together and using them as a small "render farm" and what I got back was some more or less maybes... so before I continue on I thought that I should pose the question to those that are basically lord in the mac tech services for help or rather "how to". Because finding out just how much work that would have to go in it would really set the tone of whether or not I should do it.
I was thinking just purchasing two of the Mac Mini Servers (Quad Cores each) and using them.
So finally, is it indeed possible to even use two minis to process the graphical outputs of Final Cut Pro X that I'm running? And if so, just how do I go about doing such a project?
Thanks so much!

I think your best bet is simply to schedule it yourself. Set up a simple automater script that reads from a folder and performs the conversion. Simply drop a bunch of files into the watch folder and let it run. You can experiment with how many concurrent processes you can run on each machine before it bogs down.
Don't expect much out of the G3's.

After Effects CS6 Render Farm

Hi All,
Another Friday, Another test of new AE waters....
I am busy reading up and trying to figure out how to use the three MAC's in the office to work together as a render farm. I have gone through the documentation and created a very simple scenario:
1) Windows XP "server" (it has the shared disk that i use for storage - 2TB spinning disk)
2) Created "Watch Folder" on XP Machine
3) all three MAC's can see and access the shared folder
4) Created a simple project - One 192MB video file (XMP) - applied keylight and matte choker
5) I did a render on the MAC, using only itself and standard setttings to a TGA sequence, to another shared folder on the XP server - this process took 3 minutes and 7 seconds to complete
6) I re-rendered the same project, with no changes on the mac, with the following settings:
and send them all to the watch folder (project saved there, files collected there etc.
7) once the project starts, it takes 20 minutes.
Is there a specific reason why the time would increase so drastically rather than decrease?
The macs all have 1 quad core CPU - 16GB memory and they are connected to a GB switch (all connecting at 1GBps) - If i check the tas manager on the XP pc, network utilization never goes above 25%.
Thanks guys,
Pierre

Hi Pierre,
I believe what you maybe seeing is a limitation on XP's file sharing. For the sake of simplicity network rendering treats every core as a user. So depending on which version of XP you are running it will either allow 5 or 10 users to connect to the computer at a given time. If you have other sharing services enabled (such as printer sharing) any connections to these devices count against this number of users. Given your other thread on where you discuss the rendering nodes, if possible you may want to try using windows 7 (this allows 20 users) or one of the windows server products (max # of users is based on CAL's)
Edited:
A couple of other things came to mind if you are using watch folders.
- If you are running anti-virus software on the server, ensure the watch folder directory and subfolders are excluded from scanning.
- Turn off render multiple frame simultaneously' in the preferences on the render nodes.
Hope it helps
Message was edited by: StevRo

Render farm for DCP creation

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