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JULY 30, 2002 How To Set Up an After Effects Render Farm
What's the benefit? I mentioned above that using the After Effects Render Engine can boost render speeds tremendously. In fact, the Render Engine is so efficient that you will see a performance boost disproportionate to the combined processing power of the machines on your network. [an error occurred while processing this directive] Here's what I mean. For this tutorial, I rendered two complex but fairly short projects in three different ways. First, I rendered them using only my primary dual 1 GHz G4. Then I rendered them using the primary machine plus one networked 400 MHz G4. Then I rendered them with one additional 400 MHz G4, for a total of three machines: a dual 1 GHz G4 and two 400 MHz G4s. The dual 1 GHz machine had 1.5 GB RAM. The first 400 MHz G4 had 960 MB RAM. And the third had 448 MB RAM. They were all networked through a cheap ($75) 10/100Base-T switch, available at your local computer retailer.
You can see from these results that this Render Engine doesn't mess around. At no extra expense to me--in other words, using only equipment I had sitting around--I cut my render time nearly in half. And these are not high-end render stations I'm using here. These are virtually stock, two-year-old G4s giving me this performance boost. At best, all things being equal, these machines combined should have given me nothing more than a 40 percent performance increase, but I guess there's something to be said for the low overhead of the standalone Render Engine. At any rate, for these kinds of gains, you should be willing to dig through your garage for some old, disused computers to add to the network or even head over to the Goodwill and look for some used systems. Couldn't hurt. Potential Stumbling blocks Now, don't expect that you can keep scaling up this render farm infinitely. There are diminishing returns based on the data flow over your network. The optimal number of machines will depend on the speed of your network and, to some extent, your network equipment. For example, I'm using a network switch rather than a simple hub, which helps direct the flow of network traffic better. Also, you might encounter some stumbling blocks in the setup. I addressed one (the initial manual setup), which is not documented anywhere else, as far as I could see. Adobe keeps another list of potential problems at http://www.adobe.com:80/support/techdocs/28372.htm. If you do experience problems, After Effects keeps an HTML-based log of everything that happens during the network render, which is accessible in the Project Folder that's created in the Watch Folder. You can browse projects by the name of the render and the names of the computers involved in the render. That's it. Enjoy your newfound productivity. Contact the author: Dave Nagel is the producer of Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; host of several World Wide User Groups, including Synthetik Studio Artist, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe LiveMotion, Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; and executive producer of the Digital Media Net family of publications. You can reach him at dnagel@digitalmedianet.com. Prev 1 2 3 4 5 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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