Setting up a render farm!?

Hi guys, my office is getting busy with their workload so it would be better if we could set up a render farm to shorten their wait on that blue bar!!
The only problem is, is that I don't know anything about setting it up!
What would I need? and how do you achieve this?!
Thanks in advance guys

NO one knows anything about what future releases entail. Those who do know cannot say.
Speed up renders? Install FCP on a machine with fast processors. It will use only one, but the faster, the better.
Shane

Similar Messages

  • 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.

  • 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).

  • Render farm question

    If the company I am working for is doing a lot of videos on a per month basis should we setup a render farm?
    is so should we use window or mac mechines?
    can someone provide information for setting up a render farm? or a link to a good how to?

    It depends on how render-intensive your projects are.
    An octo-core machine with enough RAM will often render in minutes things that used to take hours, or than can still take hours on lesser machines.
    If your Comps turned out to be something that such a multi-core machine would render in (say) an hour, would that be fine? That's the question you need to ask yourself. And to answer that question, you first would have to create a typical Comp for this project and render it.
    Setting up the project and the machines to perform rendering over a network is very easy. See Network rendering with watch folders and render engines in AE Help.
    is so should we use window or mac mechines?
    Use whatever you like better. AE is designed to perform perfectly on either platform. In any case, make sure you take a look at AE's system requirements/recommendations.

  • 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.

  • Is a windows network render farm/slave compatible with an iMac?

    I have an iMac user in my office who would like to set-up a render farm or slave for his iMac. Since Mac products are expensive I am hoping we can build a windows machine to accomplish this. We currently use Adobe CC 2014, so we would need the render farm/slave to work with After Effects and Premier Pro.
    Looking for good affordable solutions that won't be a cross platform nightmare to set-up and configure. Any advise would be much appreciated. Thanks.

    Hi, Indeed. I am selecting the Bootcamp partition, and If I do Format, It informs me that all we be deleted, ok fair enough. then I can click the NEXT button, but I got then a msg stating :
    Setup was u nable to create a new system partion or locate an existing system partition. See the Setup Log Files for more informations.
    I have not more option here, I can delete, then create a new one with same size then format again, but same message at the end. this is my issue.
    A guy done a Youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD7dbSl9-b8
    I am all ok up to 5min 50 on the video. Then My issue is what he has....
    However, when he format the partition he does not have my error msg stating Setup was unable to create. etc...
    This is my issue.

  • 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

  • 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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    am looking to do, I don't believe many people have attempted this on as small of a scale as a single user system.  Also, the amount of routes to go down seems endless, which for me so far has led to many hours of wasted trial and error.  So keep
    in mind that I am not so much looking for a handout on answers but rather a more narrowed path of searching and researching.
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    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.

  • 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.

  • Render Farm - How do nodes Work?

    Hello,
    My name is Anatoly and I've recently set up a rendering farm connected to an I-Mac as a file-server.
    The Problem: Not all nodes come to work together on a project, some arbitrarily choosing to render the assets while others just watching the watch folder idly.
    The Computer Setup: There are six headless nodes (all Mac-Minis). The hardware and OS specifications are below.
    MAC-MINI Farm:
    2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4Gb 1067 Mhz DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA Geforce 320M 256Mb, OSX 10.8
    2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4Gb 1067 Mhz DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA Geforce 320M 256Mb, OSX 10.8
    2.3Ghz Intel i5, 4Gb 1333Mhz DD3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 3000 384Mb, OSX 10.7.5
    2.3Ghz Intel i5, 4Gb 1333Mhz DD3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 3000 384Mb, OSX 10.8.5
    2.3Ghz Intel i5, 4Gb 1333Mhz DD3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 3000 384Mb, OSX 10.7.5
    2.3Ghz Intel i5, 4Gb 1333Mhz DD3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 3000 384Mb, OSX 10.7.5
    I-MAC File Server:
    2.5Ghz Intel i5, 4Gb 1333Mhz DD3 RAM, AMD Radeon HD 6750M 512Mb, OSX 10.7.4
    The Software Setup:
    Each MAC-MINI node has a copy of After Effect CC Render Engine (version 12.0.0.404) running at startup and set to run in Watch Folder mode.
    On the machine that is used to manipulate assets for rendering the following procedure is used:
    Open a project
    Add assets to render queue
    Set Render Settings to Multi-Machine Settings
    Check box in settings to “Skip existing files (allows multi-machine rendering)
    Set Output Module to Multi-Machine Sequence
    Select my desired output settings
    Then I click File – Dependencies – Collect Files
    In Collect Files Setup the following is chosen:
    Collect Source Files: All
    Change Render Output to: “custom name” folder
    Enable Watch Folder render
    Reveal collected project in Finder when finished
    Maximum Number of Machines: 10
    I then click Collect and save my project to a Watch Folder
    From there-onwards, presumably, the Render Farm is now supposed to render out my project, but not all nodes of my 6-node farm work together. More often than not, a single (or two) node(s) render the projects while the others wait idly, watching the Watch Folder.
    Can anyone please advise me of why this happens, and perhaps what step I’m missing if any to get all my nodes to render until the project is done?
    Thank you,
    -Anatoly

    Here's a picture of render items in my queue, follwed by a picture of how many nodes are working on it:

  • 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

  • Creating a render farm

    I need help creating a render farm. I have 5 24" imac, 1 G5 tower and 4 G5 iMac. I still need to network them all togeether but I will when I get a chance. I have created a cluster before but it always came up with an I/O error I think it has to do with the permissions to the outher computer. This is for a school and I do not no if I'm going to make a seprate network in the classroom or connect it to the schools network or maby bouth.

    One thing you'll need to keep in mind is that you'll need a shared storage location, and that location will need to be mounted on each service node.
    Regarding setting up clusters, I posted some links in a different thread that you may find helpful:
    http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8922045#8922045

  • How to make a render farm with FCP X / Compressor??

    Wondering how to setup a min render farm with FCP X on three machines. Played around with setting in Compressor but never see any machine available when I go to render on each machine?

    Ok, so I'm using the wrong terminology.
    I want to have all my machines transcode for me, is this possible, yes or no and how do I set it up. I've buggered around with all the settings in the link above but I'd get anything to show up?
    Also I believe that compressor needs to copy the entire file to be rendered over the network for the other machine to work on it - is this correct ? I'm on wifi guess I could connect machines together via ethernet.
    I'm looking at 4x time to do a simple render on prores proxy material and when I have to do it on a 2 hour wedding video I'll be looking for the nearest bridge to jump off!

  • Is there any point in a G4 render farm?

    Hi all.
    I've been getting quite intrested in the idea of setting up a very small render farm laterly as I have the option of getting some old G4s for free.
    I currently have a 2.0Ghz DP G5 as my main mac running FCP2 and Shake and was already grabbing a G4 466 digital audio to set up as a file/print and back up server running tiger server, a postscript RIP and retrospect. I have the possibility of getting atleast one more G4 466 DA and maybe a couple of G4 400 AGPs with Gigbit ethernet cards. As the main use would be farming out DV to mpg2 compression via compressor and shake renders (though not large shake stuff to begin with as very new to this) is there any point in looking into this or am I going to need to lots of G4s to make a real improvement in render times.
    Also is RAM a major consideration. For example if I got 4 G4s with say 512Mb ram would it be better runing all four or using three but nicking the fours ram to give more ram in the three machine set up?
    Any advice would be appreciated
    Cheers
    Steve

    I vote no. G4 isn't the problem so much as 400mhz is. The ram shouldn't be a problem.
    But you could test if you set up Compressor on one G4. Compress a job. Compress the same job with the same settings on the G5.
    If the G5 is 4 times (or even 3, since time is spent sending the render data over the network between the G4's slow system busses) as fast the single G4, a render farm will not help you.
    Using the G4 and G5 together in the same cluster does not work because Compressor looks at all processors and divides the job into twice as many segments. In this case, the G5 finishes it's two segments years before the G4's and then sits around waiting. You could try splitting the G5 into 4 instances, but then you have 8 slow processors attacking your job. Not very efficient.
    Good luck though. You should test the one G4 just so you know. Report back if you do.

  • AE render farm cross platform

    hi all,
    just wondering i have set up a AE render farm on pc (2014 v13.1.1), i know it can render PC AE renders if a pc sends a job to it but can it render mac render jobs?
    rob

    After Effects project files are cross-platform compatible. Things to watch out for are that file paths are valid, and that fonts and plug-ins are installed and working. You should open the project on a Windows machine to check for any errors, especially with fonts. Some fonts may have different names between platforms.
    When using Collect Files, the source file paths are set relative to the project so this is usually not a problem. But you must make sure that the output file paths are also valid; using the Change Render Output To option in the Collect Files dialog can help with this.
    More detail here:
    After Effects Help | Automated rendering and network rendering

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