Is it worthwhile networking my old computer?

Al Min wrote on 12/19/2009, 11:08 AM

I'm about to take delivery of my new i7 920 64 bit machine and was wondering if there was any benefit in using my old duo core 3.00ghz machine for network rendering. Its not worth much to sell, so will it help in rendering from the new machine?

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 12/19/2009, 12:41 PM

Multi-core computers have taken away a lot of the attraction from network rendering.

As you know, Vegas has two types of network rendering. The most interesting, but unfortunately the least useful, is distributed rendering. This takes small slices of your project and sends them out to other computers on your network where they are rendered. At the end of all the renders, all the little pieces are sent back to the host computer and stitched together. The problem is, because of licensing issues (at least I think that's the reason), this only works with DV AVI files. Also, the whole stitching approach is not done very smartly, and can often add a large amount of time to the render, thus eliminating some of the gains.

The non-distributed rendering sends the whole project somewhere else to be rendered. While not as useful as the distributed rendering, before multi-core computers it was still useful because you could have another computer render so that your main computer would have all its CPU cycles to apply to fast timeline playback. However, with multi-core, you can set things up so that some of the cores are rendering and the rest are available for another instance of Vegas to do editing.

So, unless your old computer can render as fast as half the cores in your new computer, I'm not sure you gain much by network rendering.

Al Min wrote on 12/19/2009, 2:04 PM

Thanks John. I'll try and sell the old one. Regarding assigning cores for different tasks - do you have a recommendation as to how many for what?

psg wrote on 12/19/2009, 8:10 PM

Another thought is to take your old machine and get a copy of Windows Home server to load on it. Then set up a couple of RAID drives, put it on your network and use it backup and retain your video files.

OdieInAz wrote on 12/20/2009, 5:57 AM

Yet another thought: I use non-distributed rendering to start a background render on the machine I'm using. Then I assign the batch render to "low priority" in the task manager. This way, when not much else is happening on the PC, the background render gets as many CPU cycles as it can, but when I want to surf or something else with "normal" priority, performance is good.

I think I read about this on these forums some years ago.

Chienworks wrote on 12/20/2009, 6:37 AM

Do you need to do a non-distributed render for this? I just start Vegas doing a normal render and set it to low priority to achieve the same result.

Chienworks wrote on 12/20/2009, 6:40 AM

Windows Home Server may impose some annoying restrictions that are unnecessary and undesirable in a simple file sharing network. There's no real need to change the OS at all. Share the drives and allow the contents to be changed by anyone and you now have a file server running, right from the existing OS.