Some of my animation renders have run for 60 or 70 days, 100% cpu, with only the stock cooling system. This is the way computers should run. Those who have overheating problems aren't because they only have the factory cooling system, it's because their cooling system is failing.

70 days? were using a duo cores cpu? how the heck did you have the patient to waited that long? If I ever have a render job telling me 70 days to finish. I would have to shot it down and forget about it. Find a better PC to do the job.

70 days??? 7 days would have me pulling the trigger! 7 hours is enough to give me the heeby jeebys. :-)

7 hours is enough to give me the heeby jeebys

fortunately i sleep about 8hrs a night (well, not counting the to 2>3 loo trips), and first thing on waking make myself coffee so we're looking at min 8hrs

if i discover any problem with an overnight render i'm awake enough not to panic, and sane enough not to put my fist through the screen. however, you wouldn't want to talk to me....

I seem to recall reading that Pixar spends an average of 115 CPU-years rendering a full length motion picture. Fortunately for them they have a render farm of 10's of thousands of PCs.

When i was producing animations with my own software i had a spare workstation set up in the back of my office that just sat there doing it's thing, queueing up frames and animation templates. Every now and then i'd peek at the output directory to see how many frames it had finished. It's not like it really occupied any significant amount of my time.

Chienworks I hope it were image sequences you were rendering for 70 days. A broken render would otherwise really suck.

VMP

A thirty second 3D modelled animation can take days depending on the number of models and the frame rate. And that's using Octane Render which uses the GPU. I'd hate to think how long it would take with just CPU.

Personally I render parts of an animation rather than the whole thing at once. This is often a lot quicker. So if the background stays the same then just render only the moving figures and then composite them. This is not always ideal as it can be difficult to get the lighting consistent but generally this is not noticeable. It depends on the level of realism necessary but, unless the composite is really bad, the human eye is not that discriminating fortunately.

There are many tricks used to speed up renders. Perhaps we should share them? I always render animation to PNG. That way it's possible to stop the render or re-render mistakes. This can create huge files but they are lossless and incredibly versatile. After waiting days for a render the last thing I'm worrying about is conserving a few GB of disk space.

I render CGI animations as PNG sequences as well, they are also ideal as transparency layers.

VMP

My software outputs uncompressed TIFF files, but then i batch convert them over to PNG afterward.

On my system when I begin a render the temperature rises quickly but reaches its peak by about 5 or so minutes. After that it stays there.

By all means install a freeware temperature utility so you can see what's happening.

"Those who have overheating problems aren't because they only have the factory cooling system, it's because their cooling system is failing."

Not in my case (pun not intended).

I am not normally an early adopter, but I did jump in and buy one of those new-fangled dual core processors back in 2005 (I think), a Pentium D 820. I forget the precise details, but I found that the supplied CPU heat sink was inadequate.

The motherboard was mounted in a tower case, so there was plenty of room for air movement. The case currently has extra fans for the hard disks, but I don't remember whether they were fitted at the time. Anyhow, I bought a third-party heat sink (Zalman orange-finned monster) and the problem has never returned. This machine is rather slow by today's standards, but is still used daily by my wife for ordinary internet activities.

Kimberly, I've never had an overheating problem, latest computer is water cooled, the problem with long renders has been simply a Vegas issue.

Chienworks, I can't imagine a 70 day render, if for no other reason that wondering if it was going to crash in the middle somewhere.

When I start a long render that computer is essentially "render only". I keep my eyes on the frame counter, as long as it is counting up I know things are OK.

Bottom line for me is that Vegas 13 so far is rock solid.