Network Rendering doesn't speed anything up??

zstevek wrote on 10/5/2006, 3:46 AM

I just ran a distributed network render last night and it appears that the render time isn't improved at all.

I have a P4 3.0GHz with HT and a P4 2.4GHz networked together, both show 100% CPU processing during the network render session. My faster PC is at step 55 of 65, while my slower is at step 27 of 65, it appears that they are both processing the same steps (one is just faster than the other).

Is this how it is supposed to work?

The time needed to render this project is normally around 9 hours (on one PC), right now I am at 7 1/2 hrs and still going (with network rendering).

Comments

Jonathan Neal wrote on 10/5/2006, 4:35 AM

I'm going to bump this because Network Rendering is one of the less discussed features in Vegas, and I would love to see some attention brought to your matter. I'll be in the position sometime early next year where I may be network rendering many of my projects. Thanks for asking the question, zstevek.

ForumAdmin wrote on 10/5/2006, 8:40 AM

Whether you see improvement in rendering time from a network rendering
depends on several factors, perhaps most important is the nature of
the project you're rendering. Distributed network renders work best
on CPU-bound projects.

For example, the type of project that will benefit the most from
distributed network rendering is one that has lots of computationally
intensive video effects and transitions (like 3D track motion, etc.)
and is rendered to a non-temporal format such as DV or YUV. If, for
example, your project is a long form cuts-only video rendered to
MPEG-2, you probably will not benefit from distributed network
rendering. A good indication of whether your project is CPU-bound
would be the full size preview frame rate at good or best
quality... if you're averaging below 5 fps... distributed network
rendering may be a good choice. Otherwise, the overhead of moving
video data back and forth over the network and the time it takes to
stitch the segments together will probably outweigh the benefit of
added CPU cycles.

Of course, other factors effect distributed network rendering
performance such as the speed of your network and shared disk drive.

Also keep in mind that, when rendering projects in Vegas, a dual-core
CPU will almost always out perform two single-core machines.

zstevek wrote on 10/5/2006, 10:00 AM

ForumAdmin,

My project has 21 tracks with a considerable amount of track motion. This is the most complex project I have ever made, for a 5 minute video it takes over 9hrs to render on a P4 3.0 GHz (with Hyper threading) machine. Based on this I thought network rendering would at least help my render time by 20 - 40 %, but this is not the case.

It appears that both computers are going through the same steps of the rendering process. Shouldn't they be processing different steps and then stitch them together at the end?

Also, my network is fast enough per the minimum requirements (100 MBPS), but I still see very little if any improvement in render times.

I am rendering it to AVI (DV), not MPEG-2.

Stuart Robinson wrote on 10/5/2006, 10:12 AM

Be aware that moving large files across a network can, depending on your network hardware, itself use a lot of CPU resources, resources stolen from the rendering process of Vegas.

Ideally you want a GigaBit network with cards and a switch that all support jumbo frames, then take a look at whether the hardware has a 1500 byte MTU limit, which is fairly common, because that will be demanding on CPU resources. Check for an MTU of 9216 or better (switches such as the Netgear GS105 are a good place to start).