Finally got network rendering working...

Sunflux wrote on 10/13/2007, 10:27 PM

So, rather than sit here for two hours while my primary machine churns away at rendering with another system 10 feet away does nothing, I thought I'd try to get that annoyingly tantalizing network rendering feature going. Up until now my attempts to make it work (in V7) have been fruitless. But now that I have V8 I figure I really should knuckle down and find out what's wrong.

To begin I got the host to see the client as "ready" and got so far as both renderers saying "Status: starting", but it would never start. So I decided to hunt down what the problem is.

For one, the renderer uses IPs to configure clients, but for some inane reason wants a FQDN (fully qualified domain name) for the host. So the Host on the stitch server and the Owner on the client was showing as:

mycomputer.myisp.com

(And the client was showing as thatcomputer.myisp.com, but I think that's less important.)

And when I resolved those names I was getting an IP. The problem is, because I use OpenDNS (since my ISP's DNS server is woefully slow) *every* non-existant domain name resolves to THEIR IP for advertising purposes.

And that was the problem: the stitch host could see and send to the client, because it used an IP, but the client couldn't send back to the stich host because it was using a FQDN that was resolving to the wrong IP.

So I started digging around in my router. The first step was to reconfigure it to stop giving machines "myisp.com" as their connection specific DNS suffix. Fortunantly for my router this was easy and I just put in some other domain (one I own but I don't think that matters either). So now the computers thought they were computername.mydomain.com. (external systems could never resolve this but they don't need to.)

Next, had to make each machine resolve that name into the correct local IP, so mycomputer.mydomain.com could become 192.168.1.100 and so forth. I suppose I could have use the Windows "hosts" file on each machine to do this, but instead I just turned on the DNS server in my router, added those two names, and told it to resolve them into the correct IPs.

I then had each machine "repair" its network connection, started up Vegas again and... success! Right now both of my PCs are chugging away rendering for what I hope will be a successful result.

I now feel like I should really get a third PC in the act! :-)

Comments

DataMeister wrote on 10/15/2007, 8:33 AM

I only understood about half of that. How hard would that be to make a visual tutorial on the subject?

I've never gotten the network rendering to run reliably every time I use it. It's like I have to physically go to each machine and manually reconfigure each render software each time I want to use it. It's a pain in the butt really. But, I'm not a network genius so I figured I'm probably doing things the hard way.

daf2050 wrote on 10/15/2007, 8:31 PM

I am also unable to get network rendering to work. I've spent "days" working on it. Vegas 7 with 2 XP pro computers.

I understand what you did but my Linksys router doesn't seem to have an option to do dns resolution. I've added both addresss to each hosts file but that hasn't helped.

I get the message "the requested address is not valid in its context". I can't find any references to this error message anywhere. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

megabit wrote on 12/2/2007, 6:46 AM

I have just set up quite fast Vaio laptop (2x2.4GHz), and I tried to use it as renderer from my main workstation. Using just the existing LAN configuration, I entered the name of the renderer laptop into host name and got the "ready" status. However, when I start rendering, nothing seems to happen between the two, and the error message is displayed:

"An error occured while creating the media file. Error 0x80131600 (message missing"

I guess something is wrong with the File mappings, as I used the "Auo fill" option; can anybody help me out with this?

maynard wrote on 12/5/2007, 2:20 PM

how much of a difference did it make on your render time?

goshep wrote on 12/5/2007, 3:41 PM

IMO, Network Render is Sony's Frankenstein that never really came to life. It was little understood, extremely difficult to get working and for a forum as helpful as this one, there was surprisingly little support (or interest for that matter). I struggled with it until I finally got it working only to learn I couldn't render MPEG with it. The fairly short projects with few effects I was rendering to AVI saw very little if any reduction in render time. Now with Vegas able to handle multi-threading and Quad Cores becoming more affordable, Network Render is obsolete (at least for me). I get faster renders with my Quad than if I networked ALL my old systems from the past five years.

Congratulations on getting the beast to rise from the operating table though......now kill it and get yourself a Quad!