Comments

DataMeister wrote on 1/20/2003, 3:28 PM
I think the bandwidth for rendering video compositions is too great for a render farm to work well. Correct me if I'm wrong, someone.

JBJones
mlaney wrote on 1/20/2003, 3:36 PM
Many post houses use render farms. Also, some friends who are Adobe beta testers use a render farm with Premiere and Matrox Digisuite products.

With advent of IEEE 1394b (Firewire 800) devices and boards over Cat5 cables then bandwidth should not be an issue.

I would love to see some engineers jump in on the spec for setting up a farm.

Cheers,
Marion
riredale wrote on 1/20/2003, 4:43 PM
Could you guys clarify things for me? What's a "render farm?" I assume it's a bunch of computers rendering out avi's from veg files, but from the way you are talking it's much more involved than that.
Cooldraft wrote on 1/20/2003, 9:54 PM
Yep, it is that simple.
swarrine wrote on 1/20/2003, 10:20 PM
Render farms are typically used by animators and compositors. It does not come cheap since you need multiple computers and specialized software that does not sell in high volume.

I would rather SoFo to have implemented background rendering. Even if you work on your computer 8 hours a day, typically you would not be using all the processing power available to you. Maybe some smart programmer can figure out how to do this via the new scripting available in V4.

John_Cline wrote on 1/20/2003, 10:54 PM
After Effects and 3D Studio, to name two programs, are very well suited to using multiple machines simultaneously to render projects. However, these programs render out individual frames and place them in a common folder on one drive on the network, these individual frames can then be converted to an .AVI file. Having multiple machines rendering directly to a single .AVI file would be an extremely difficult task to accomplish from a programming standpoint.

That said, background rendering in VV would be a most welcome addition. I use background rendering in Premiere all the time. (Yes, I still use Premiere for some of my more effects-heavy projects due to the great number of plug-ins I have collected for it over the years.)

John
JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/21/2003, 12:49 AM
Actually, rendering farms could be accomplished with Grid computing technologies and the software to do it is free (open source). That happens to be an area that I work in and rendering farms are one of the first things I thought of when I got involved in the Grid.

Using software like the Globus Toolkit, you can discover systems that have excess capacity and submit jobs to them. The current Globus Toolkit only runs on Unix but a future version is targeted for Windows. The other missing piece is having a way to invoke Vegas from the command line and tell it to render part of a project. Perhaps the V4 scripting support will give us this capability.

As for background rendering, why don’t you just kick off a render and open another copy of Vegas and keep going. I’ve had several copies open with rendering going on in each and editing in another without any problems.

~jr
riredale wrote on 1/21/2003, 1:28 AM
I did something similar. Two months ago I had a major deadline and found I could get it all done by opening three instances, setting two to idle priority with "Multitask Monitor" and having them render finished veg files. I could work in the third instance without any hindrance at all. I did find, however, that I had to boost my RAM from 256 to 512MB. Before, with all the disk thrashing my CPU would only show about 60% utilization; with more memory the CPU figure was in the mid-90's.

It would be nice to be able to automate this process.
Cheesehole wrote on 1/21/2003, 9:27 AM
>>> Maybe some smart programmer can figure out how to do this via the new scripting available in V4.

there may be a way to do an AfterFX style render farm if the script could detect the presence of a file in a folder. this works by rendering frames one by one to individual files into a common folder.

you could launch Vegas apps from a bunch of different computers and kick off the render using the script. each render would point to a common folder on the network. the logic is fairly simple:

1 - determine next frame name (ex: frame001.TGA)
2 - check to see if it exists already in the render-to folder
3 - if it doesn't exist yet, then write a place-holder file and then render the frame to the file
OR if it does exist already, go back to 1 and proceed to the next frame

this would be useful for highly effected / composited projects where each frame takes a long time to render. Audio would have to be rendered by a single machine. once the sequence is rendered, it would have to be combined with the audio and rendered to an AVI. Vegas can do that already.

the script that comes with Vegas 4 for rendering sequential stills could be used as a starting point for the render-farm script.