advice on PC render farm for RED/After Effects project

[Daniel Crooks]

hi people,

I have a project coming up which is almost entirely After Effects based. I'm putting together a system which includes a small render farm and was hoping for some feedback.

The plan at this stage is to use a new MacPro 2.26 with a heap of RAM and an external Raid (Proavio EB8MS) as the main AFX workstation. This would store all the raw footage and do all the compositing. The final renders would then be farmed out to a small PC render farm - 4x PCs with AFX render nodes - with only the associated footage copied at that point. We were planning to have some kind of NAS over GB ethernet (Synology DS508 ?) to share footage to the farm (and also store final renders before moving back to the MAC for output)

does this sound right ?
are we missing something ?
Is GB ethernet going to kill me ?
is there a better way to share the footage between the 4 PCs ?
is there a better way to move files from the Mac to the NAS ?

any suggestions greatly appreciated

many thanks, Daniel
(and apologies in advance for being somewhat network and PC illiterate)

 

[Thomas Mathai]

Years ago, I worked on a project that had a PC render farm for After Effects while the artists used Macs to work on.

It never worked right. We ended up reconfiguring some of the Macs to do the rendering.

It may be better now, but I would recommmend using a PC for the main AFX station too.

 

[Nigel Stanford]

Not sure if you're heart is set on PCs, but Monkey Extract can now render across multiple machines. So if you were to use Macs, you could use them as a render farm.

Cheers,

 

[Daniel Crooks]

yeah I think the PC - MAC crossover was a little more testing a few years ago but I've done some combined renders on a mac and pc recently that were fine, it wasn't farmed though. still, sage words.

and yes, had contemplated going down the mac mini route but for the same price we can get some fairly grunty PCs by comparison... very tempting.

 

[RonLeibfreid]

I know that the nVidia Tesla stuff is being leveraged by only a few narrowly focused tools at the moment, but this makes me wonder...

Is RED planning to leverage the CUDA architecture? If so, then it would be advantageous to look at some of these offerings:


http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadroplex.html

 

[John Jonathan]

Hey Daniel, My feedback would be that AE is the worst platform for render farm support or rendering across multiple machines. I have used AE on a lot of film projects since 1996, and I still think it is one of the worst applications that exists for compositing.

The Orphanage is the only high end company that successfully made After Effects their dominate in house packager for VFX and Compositing and that was all thanks to Stu Maschwitz and his creative ways to implement AE into a decent workflow. I have such a distaste for AE in a professional production environment I almost can't think if their support of After Effects was their downfall and killed the company.

If you are compositing I say get SHAKE or NUKE running, great render farm support and NUKE has great multi-platform support. If you are just doing Motion Graphics, you don't need a render farm. If you must, must, must use AE in a professional environment get something like GridIron Nucleo. Check Toofarm for latest prices and versions.

 

[Vigen Vartanov]

I have same problem , i can not use my 200 core 25 nodes render farm with my red footage. Mac Workflow with redline is better solution .