Anyone tried this?

I'm thinking of using my home network PCs to work together to network render.

Ben

Animation packages support this just fine but I didn't think Vegas etc would support it.

It would be nice if it did so! Hopefully I'm wrong, but I don't remember seeing anything about it in the docs.

While others get to this, put "Network Render" in the Search facility here on the "Vegas" forum - I came back with 56 hits.

Grazie

Vegas has supported distributed network rendering for a while now (v6?). I tried it a couple of years back but the trade off of caveats and setup time v the performance gain (which - in my case - was minimal) simply wasn't worth the effort. Things may have improved over time, of course, so hopefully someone has more recent experience that is nore positive!

Some things to keep in mind (taken from Help and from past experience):

- All codecs, 3rd party plugins and fonts must be present on every computer used in the render farm. You'll need to check with plugin vendors whether they allow installing on more than one machine.

- There are additional considerations when network rendering nested projects (see Help for details).

- There are restrictions on rendering mpeg2 (these seem to be licencing issues).

- You'll need to keep an eye on free disk space.

- Moving that much video over the LAN will likely affect other network users. No idea about wireless LAN performance but you'd think that would be a choke point.

I would hazard a guess that if you were to set up a *dedicated* network render farm, you would see the benefits. But as an ad hoc thing on a home network, I question its advantages. Again, please remember my experience is quite likely out of date. I would love to read some posts from more recent users of the facility.

Ian has said it all quite well.

Additionally there are some types of projects that benefit and some that do not.

In my case, I found it was absolutely not worth the trouble.

I don't remember what projects benefit and which do not, but it might be longer ones that do versus shorter, not sure. As has been recommended, do a search here and you'll find more info that you need.

Ian has said it all quite well.

Additionally there are some types of projects that benefit and some that do not.

In my case, I found it was absolutely not worth the trouble.

I don't remember what projects benefit and which do not, but it might be longer ones that do versus shorter, not sure. As has been recommended, do a search here and you'll find more info that you need.

if you have a short project that needs to be rendered in 5 different formats, at 2 different resolutions, then network rendering is great. Sned the jobs off to some specific hosts (ie, host 1 gets all the WMV render jobs, host 2 gets all the mov jobs, etc) and let the software queue work for you.

You will need a VERY beefy host for all of this. THe network render service allows you to customize how larg of a chunk the renderers get (in frames). So keep in mind that your host will be constantly gettign and receiving render data from the renderers which means a single SATA disc will be HORRIBLE (I've tried it!). My P4 with a RAID-0 is a better render host (aka the machine storing the video and issueing the orders) than a Core2Duo with twice the CPU speed but a single SATA disc.

Also, I have NEVER been able to get the distributed render service to work. That is where you carve up a render job and send it out in bits and pieces to all the available render hosts. It ALWAYS crashes on me immediately. What I have been able to get to work (though it is about as picky in exact start up sequence as a nuke power plant) is flat dedicated network rendering where you send an entire job to a host.

It will absolutely help to have a GigE 1000Mbps network and dedicated 1000MBit ethernet cards in all your systems. I have watched the system resource monitor liek a hawk and seen that with one render host and one network renderer, the ethernet traffic never peaks over 25% usage of the GigE card, but even that is FASTER than 100Mbps FastEthernet speeds.