Being an amatuer videographer, I have yet to work out the best or even
consistent workflow.

One of the stumbling blocks is always rendering.

I hear talk of render farms and wondered if my small operation can do
something similar.. And wondered how one might set up something like
that (in general)

I have one athlon64 +3400 (2.2ghz) and two 3.2ghz P4s all running
Windows XP pro. And all with most of a full Adobe suite.

How does one `farm out' rendering? In my case the rendering would all
happen from a PremierePro timeline so I guess first off I'd have to
farm out the timeline work? Which already sounds like quite a lot of
confusion.

Farming out the source files for timeline creation as well...still
more confusion.

Lots of passing hefty amounts of data around..

I'm pretty sure I'm missing something really basic. Somekind of
pipeling from a timeline leading to several machines.

<reader@newsguy.com> wrote ...

One simple solution is to just let the heavy-duty rendering
run overnight.

<reader@newsguy.com> wrote in message news:87y7d3wdie.fsf@newsguy.com...

Premiere has no network render capability so that's not going to be
possible.

On Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:59:53 -0600, reader@newsguy.com wrote:

When you're talking about render farms, this typically is for 4k work
(feature-film) and animation. Here they have a couple of 100 Linux based
computers, humming away, and producing the frames.
Personally I think it's a bit over the top for you, and you would be better
of spending the money on a realt-ime card, like one of the Blackmagic's,
Matrox RTX100 or Canopus Edius. That would work out a lot cheaper, and be a
lot less of a hassle to maintain.

But, that is just my opinion :-)

cheers

-martin-
--
Official website "Jonah's Quid" http://www.jonahsquids.co.uk

"Martin Heffels" <goofie@flikken.net> wrote in message
news:jgahj3dhrllvamruer517q2l7tr39kienc@4ax.com...
Well.. Actually render farms can be anymore than one computer.. kinda like a
church, more than two people..

I am doing 1280x720 or 1920x1080 animation and in fact it does require a
render farm. Currently we have around 25 machines with 112 cores running and
sucking power all day long.

So render farms are indeed used all the time by us bottom feeders.

On Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:39:43 -0800, "nappy" <n@n.n> wrote:

True, but I said "typically". You could for instance run Combustion, do
some work on it, and let a slave render the lot. That already forms a small
congregation :-))

Of course you can use them, but I was offering a simpler solution. MHO! ;-)

Is that the Mac-farm with the Quad-cores, you're talking about?

-m-
--
Official website "Jonah's Quid" http://www.jonahsquids.co.uk

"Martin Heffels" <goofie@flikken.net> wrote in message
news:j8bhj3tbb5785ca8ncnthb1fsfksk415uo@4ax.com...

Its all WinXP but there are 22 quad core Q6600s and 3 of the 8 core Intel
Mac Pros. Which are for sale now because two of the little guys render
faster than one of the 8 core machines.

Some programs such as Vegas and Final Cut / Compressor provide built-in
support for a render farm. They find other eligible nodes (eligible both
from a licensing and technical viewpoint) and dole out the work. A number
of published articles have studied the work-load distributions, speed-ups
(if any) and other issues associated with 2 or more rendering nodes.

Recent multicore and multiprocessor desktop / workstation machines also do
some of the same parallel distribution, and the modern rendering engines
take advantage of these opportunities even if only a single workstation is
present.

Most of the set-up work is done within the NLE video software, thus avoiding
much if any sophistication required for the user.

A Google search for "Vegas", "FCP", and "render farm performance" should
bring up some useful data from others who have been doing this for some time
now.

Smarty
<reader@newsguy.com> wrote in message news:87y7d3wdie.fsf@newsguy.com...