Shared rendering? (Mac or PC)
 

I was curious...

In the world of 3D rendering (like Maya, 3D Studio, Lightwave, etc.) rendering takes a LONG time. Because of this the "community" came up with the solution of shared network rendering.

Say you have an application like Maya on a machine, and you need to render an animation sequence. You install what amounts to a client/server-like app on the machines. The "server" end of it sites on the main Maya machine, and the "Client" app sits on other machines. Those machines do not need to have Maya (or whatever 3D app) installed. The rendering client I believe has all that is needed for rendering the files. So you install these on say 4 other machines. Lets assume that they are all equally powered. A render that would have taken 10 hours, now theoretically takes only 2 (rendering across 5 machines). Add a little more for the transferring of files back & forth between the PCs, etc.


Now, video rendering also can take quite some time. I have not read anywhere of a similar "shared/network rendering" app for NLEs.

Does such an app(s) exist? If so, for what platforms, and what NLEs?

Thanks,

Alex F

Vegas / Network Render. Has limitations however. It's probably better to spend your money on a dual core dual Opteron Vegas machine first.

Avid DS Nitris has a background network render feature. Apparently it might be buggy?

Cinelerra / Linux has network render. Open source. Not sure if anyone uses it.

It is not such a priority in video. It only takes me about 1-2 hours to render a SD video with 6k-8.5k variable bit rate for a 1.5hr video. It is about a second per second (all my edits and effects render while I am editing).

Compare that to 16 pass 720p in Animation:Master. It took me about 3 hours to render 21 seconds. That was using 3 instances of the software with each working on a part of the sequence. I only had 15 objects (12 spheres and a Christmas tree stand) with alpha channel.

I have a dual Xeon, so that is why I ran three copies.

As far as I know Vegas network rendering works only for DV.avi

Pity it's not helping for the more power-taking task of MPEG2 (or other format) creation.