Network Rendering Temporary Files

JaysonHolovacs wrote on 6/26/2004, 12:17 AM
Is there any way to specify where a render computer puts files for temporary use? I know that I can specify where the temporary files are supposed to go in the render dialog. HOWEVER, apparently the render computer caches video to the local drive. I had a happily running network render going, and about 65% through it just said failed. I check it out and found out its disk drive was full! Later sumbled across a 3gig Avi hiding in the "My Documents" folder. Now, I know I never specified anywhere any local path to store files, so how did it choose that?

The reason this is important to me is that this laptop has a partitioned hard drive and c is pretty small and full. I can't get enough space there(where the My Documents folder is), but there is plenty of space on D, if I could only convince the render service to use that instead. Any ideas?

BTW, Is it true that you cannot use shared folders in the My Documents tree for network rendering(note: now I'm talking about the main editing computer, not the render machine)? No matter what I did with the file paths, I couldn't get it to work. I used the absolute path "C:\Documents and Settings...". It almost seems like Vegas sees the Desktop\My Documents... path and does not equate that to the absolute path, so it cannot properly convert from the local to the network address. But that's just a theory; all I really know is that I never got that to work, and after mapping a C:\Projects folder, everything was fine(except for the aforementioned problem of disk space with the render machine).

Network Rendering Rant:
Sony, this is great that you put this feature in there and did all this work to make it work. Thanks! But can you please, please, PLEASE go the final mile and finish this feature? I'm not asking for anything fancy or big new features, just make what you've got USABLE. For example:

1. Better documentation on how to do this. I'd never have gotten it working without reading stuff elsewhere on the net, and I shouldn't have to learn about your product from someone else.

2. Two Words: ERROR MESSAGES. This is a killer. This feature, which is not trivial to begin with, will just "fail". No indication as to WHY it failed, WHAT went wrong, or HOW to fix it! Give me a little feedback, please! I can learn to troubleshoot problems and take some initiative to solve them on my own, but I can't do it blind.

3. Need a troubleshooting guide and more complete online help.

Many people have asked for automatic this, automatic that, and while I soundly agree with them, I understand that all that stuff takes lots of time and effort. I can wait for Vegas 6.0. But since you don't have that now, then you need to at least provide the tools for us to dig in and handle it manually. All the work you did to create this feature in the first place will be wasted if almost noone uses it because they can't get it to work properly.

Comments

SonyPJM wrote on 6/28/2004, 9:35 AM

If you're using Vegas 5.0b, you can specify an alternate location for
the temporary files in the Network Render dialog which comes up after
the "Render As" dialog. But, for distributed renders, you still must
make sure the temporary files location is shared.

I just tested using a shared drive under "My Documents" for my
temporary files location and it worked just fine for me. Does your
share grant full permission to the user logged in to your renderer?

Errors are typically logged in the render service Log tab. We
typically try to avoid throwing up dialogs when errors occur after a
job is queued so that the service can attempt to move on to the next
job. Keep in mind there's no telling when a job will actually start
since the service may be busy working on jobs when a new one is
queued.

5.0b has updated documentation which is a bit more complete than the
5.0a docs.