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JULY 30, 2002 How To Set Up an After Effects Render Farm
Installing the Render Engine Now you just need to install the After Effects Render Engine on all of the systems on your network. This engine is included in your After Effects installation CD. To install it, run the After Effects installer. But instead of "Easy Install," choose "Custom." When the dialog appears, select "Render Engine" and "Plug-Ins" from the list. Leave the others unchecked. (You won't need help files or Adobe Online support for the network renderers.) If you're on an old version of the Mac OS, you might need to restart the computer following the installation, which means you'll also need to remount the volume containing the Watch folder, as described above. [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
In addition, you will have to install any third-party plugins you're using onto the network render machines. Make certain that your license allows for additional installations or additional render-only installations. You can't use network rendering to render third-party effects unless the plugins are installed on all machines used in the network render. Finally, you'll need to make sure that all of the computers used in the render have different names. It will also help you to assign different names to each hard drive on the network rather than using the default "Macintosh HD." To change the name of your hard drive, click on its name on the Desktop, hit return, and type a new name. To change the name of your computer, open the Sharing System Preference in Mac OS X or the File Sharing Control Panel in Mac OS 9. 
Important tip:The Render Engine is a stripped-down version of After Effects whose sole purpose is to render files across a network. The main After Effects application can also be used in conjunction with the network render engines to include your primary machine in the render. But, as an excellent option, you can also install the Render Engine on your primary system in addition to the regular After Effects application. This Render Engine will take over rendering on your main system and will free up your main application so that you can keep working in it while the separately running Render Engine is doing chugging away. On a dual-processing Mac, this is particularly valuable because After Effects doesn't really take advantage of both processors, so you have plenty of CPU power to spare, despite the fact that you'll have two versions of the same program chugging away on processor-intensive tasks. Prev 1 2 3 4 5 Next Related sites: • Animation Artist • AV Video • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • Film and Video Magazine • Film Imaging • Media Workstation • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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