Yes, no problem pinging either way.

Well stupid me... I didn't realize that I had to type in "netoworkrenderservice.rem" after the port number. Once I did that, the renderer became ready. I then checked the rendering computer and see the job is queued, but not running for some reason. I guess that is my next chore.

Apparently there is something wrong on the editing machine. Each time I try to render, I get the following error:

"Server encountered an internal error. For more information, turn on customErrors in the server's .config file."

Any ideas what might be going on? Also, I checked the XP help file for "customErrors", but didn't find anything. Exactly how do I turn this function on?

You're not stupid... it is a pain to enter the entire url. That's why we did the "Basic" view option in the Renderers tab.

Well... I started with the basic view, but kept getting the "unavailable" status. It would seem I'm close to getting this working now if I could just figure out what the "internal server error" is all about. The rendering machine is just sitting there quietly showing the job queued, with 0% completed.

That error message comes from the bowels of .net remoting (the
technology we use to enable network rendering). I was able to
reproduce it by following the steps you've described.

The bad news: it is a bug. sorry.

The good news: I was able to work around the bug by deleting all
renderers, switching to the "Basic" view, and entering the ip address
(not the whole url) of my remote machine.

The good news is that entering the IP address in Basic mode worked (no idea why this didn't work when I tried it before). The bad news is... I now get the following error message:

"Failed to load project '\\XPS_2\d\Vega Proofs\Test1_1.veg'. Some media may not be shared." (XPS_2 is the rendering computer).

I checked and the drive is set to full read / write / modify share. The ".veg" file "test1.veg" used by the editor is in the same directory on the rendering computer; there is however no " test1_1.veg". What generates this file and where does it go?

Make sure the remote machine can get to the shared directory on the
editing machine. In some cases Windows will make you enter your user
name and password first.

Yes, the shared directory on the editing computer is accessable from the rendering computer. My guess is I don't have "file mapping" set correctly. I remember seeing some place that a copy of the.veg file is supposed to be generated on the rendering computer, but apparently this isn't happening. My .veg file is called "test1.veg" and when it fails it says it can't find "test1_1.veg", which I assume is the name it would normally give the copy.

Well I finally got it to work (I had a file mapping error on the editing computer), but it is very slow, using very little processor time on the rendering computer. Computers are connected over a gigabit network, yet the activitiy lights on the LAN switch show very little activity. Rendering computer is a Hyperthreaded P4 at 3.4 GHz, with 2GB memory, bought specifically for video rendering, but during rendering shows 95% idle time. What can I do to speed things up and better utilize the rendering computer?

My 1 minute source file took 25 minutes to render and generated a 2.5GB AVI file. Unfortunately the file is just black video without sound. Any ideas?

I had a huge number of problems getting everything to work, and published my results here:


Network render bugs, suggestions, & solutions

Also:

Network Render Directions

The first link talks about the black render problems. I am surprised that Sony didn't mention it earlier, since they know about it. Read the info in the first link above, but the bottom line is that the VEG file cannot reside in the root directory, and your mappings must therefore be to subdirectories (i.e., folders) rather than the root.

Thank you so much for the information. I've printed both threads and will give it a try after I close this. I could see just by a quick glance that it directly addresses the problems I've been having. I used to use a program called 'Xvid' which also had network rendering. I never had the kind of problems I'm having with Vegas and there was no need to do 'file mapping', no root directory restrictions, etc.

John -
I want to thank you again for the information. I would have never got this thing working without it, and this is after reading the Help file (sort of a joke), the manual, the Knowledge Base, and doing a forum search (no idea why it didn't find your threads). Anyway, I finally am able to do network rendering, but it leaves a lot to be desired. Even though I have a 1000baseT network, it appears it is a limiting factor in rendering speed since the rendering CPU is idling along at about 20% usage factor. Too late now, but I guess on my next project I should put all of my source media directly on the rendering computer and forget about using a file server. I've also found that, leaving the rendered AVI file on the rendering computer, then trying to preview it on DVD Architect running on the editing computer doesn't work. The audio and video is just too choppy. Again, probably a LAN limitation, but when I work the numbers, there should be ample bandwidth. Still haven't figured this out.