Network Rendering of MPEG2

acappella wrote on 4/29/2004, 12:35 AM

I absolutely love using 4 rendering servers on my dual Xeon box.

But I just started looking at how to set up to render on separate machines, and saw that rendering to MPEG2, AC3, and MP3 aren't supported on the "client only" boxes, and can only be rendered on the machine that has the full Vegas install. Ouch!

Is there any way to (legally) get MPEG2 rendering on "client only" machines, short of buying another full copy of Vegas+DVDA for each machine? If I have to buy another full copy, can I get it for the $199 upgrade price? :-)

Comments

SonyPJM wrote on 4/29/2004, 6:18 AM

For now, there is no way to allow MPEG, MP3, and AC-3 encoding
on render-only installs. You need to purchase a site license or extra
full copies of Vegas (+DVD if you want AC-3).

But if you are editing on your dual Xeon and running all of your
render servers on the same machine, you can still use those encoders
since the license restriction is per machine... not per CPU or per
render server.

plyall wrote on 4/29/2004, 8:24 AM

Wait a minute...

Since almost all DVD creation requires rendering to MPEG-2/AC3, doesn't this make the network rendering useless?

dharric wrote on 4/29/2004, 9:01 AM

Sony should have a separate license price for a network node that allows rendering of all supported formats. They can call it "Vegas Net Node Plus". Say $99 for up to 2 nodes, after proof that the full client has been purchased. Quite honestly its pretty ridiculous that Sony is touting network rendering as a feature of version 5, but making no reasonable way of using it (buying another full copy is not reasonable). Honestly as good as Vegas is, if I had known ahead of time of these network limitations I would have never bought the software. Hope you guys decide something quick.

As a side note. Would running the network engine on the host client that has a hyperthreaded cpu make things any faster? Thanks.

johnmeyer wrote on 4/29/2004, 9:32 AM

SonyPJM posted a way to get MPEG network rendering (well, sort of) in this thread:

How to Network Render MPEG

Now don't jump all over me. What he describes is a way to do the rendering via network computers, but the MPEG encoding still takes place only on your main, central computer.

Technically, if you like to split semantic hairs (and who doesn't?), Sony only promised network rendering, not encoding.

In answer to plyall's question on whether network rendering has value, the answer is yes if you are someone that uses particles, compositing, masks, twenty video tracks, etc. on every project. These effects take huge multiples of real time to render. On the other hand, if you do mostly cuts-only editing, with dissolves and a few titles, etc., then the MPEG encoding time is where you spend your time drumming those fingers. For those of you that fit this category, network rendering won’t help at all. Network encoding, on the other hand, would be very useful.

Back to the network MPEG rendering/encoding. Yesterday I had a 58 minute video where I had to balance the color through the video bus, so every frame had to be rendered. It then needed to be encoded to MPEG2. I used the technique outlined in the above SonyPJM post. Prior to doing it via the network, I had started doing the render, directly to DVD Architect MPEG2, and after about seven minutes, the estimate was holding steady at exactly two hours. I quit and did the network "MPEG render" instead. I only have one render client set up, and it is 1.6 GHz, vs. my main computer 2.8 GHz speed.

It ended up taking two hours and thirty minutes, instead of only two hours -- a bit step backward.

Why? The killer on this, and on any network render, is the stitching time. I have already written to Sony about this. They only allow stitching to take place on a single hard disk, which forces massive simultaneous reads and writes on the same disk. They could get almost a 2x improvement in stitching time if they allowed the segments (the files to be stitched) to reside on one drive, and the final rendered file (the concatenation of the segments) to reside on a second drive. In this scenario, one disk would only be reading, and the other writing. Actually, the time improvement can be even more than 2x because in a straight read or write, the disk throughput can actually begin to approach the theoretical maximum.

acappella wrote on 4/29/2004, 1:36 PM

Ah, thank you for that link. That explains everything. And since I was leaving the default of rendering to AVI in the network rendering, the fact that the remote boxes won't do the MPEG encoding won't change anything from what I've already been doing.

Alas, this also explains why my picture isn't coming out quite as good as I expected. I had used the Frameserver (in Vegas 4) to utilize VirtualDub's chroma smoothing filter, and saved the result as uncompressed RGB (200 gigabytes worth). But the final MPEG seems to have regained some DV chroma artifacts.

Time to try it again, going straight to MPEG. :)

acappella wrote on 4/29/2004, 1:41 PM

Well, crud. The only choice for intermediate files is AVI, and only DV format. <sigh>

SonyPJM wrote on 4/29/2004, 4:08 PM

True, you can only use AVI as an alternate file type but you can
choose any saved AVI template. Of course, you have DV templates that
you can use but you also can create YUV templates or uncompressed
(24-bit) templates or whatever AVI compression format you want.

Downee wrote on 5/23/2004, 10:02 PM

I believe I am benefiting from the distributed rendering option in Vegas 5. My projects are are usually 10 to 20 minutes long and each clip is color corrected and has effects and transitions throughout. My main editing system is 3.2 GHz with 1 Gig ram. Maybe I'm just lucky to have a 3.06 GHz with 1 Gig ram hooked straight up with Gigabit Ethernet. The job stats tab on the render client shows both machines completing segments fairly evenly. Final stitching and encoding to MPEG2 is handled by the 3.2 GHz system, and doesn't take too long. I've only used network render, so I don't even know how it compares to normal render. I'll time my next project with and without, and put the results up here for y'all. And Sony, is there a possibility to include the stitchable Mainconcept MPEG2 render client encoder if/when it becomes available in Vegas 5 as an update? For a reasonable liscencing fee of course.