Render Issues (well sort of...)

[Christopher Kondys]

Hey Guys,

I have a slight problem. I am currently rendering out a project from AE CS3 on my Macbook Pro. The render has approx 7h20m left but I need to leave to in about 4.5 hours. I will have the ability to set my Mac up at the new location but I need this project to be completed tonight and I won't have enough time if I start the render over at the new location.

My question is should I;

-Pause the render?

-Stop the render with the possibility to continue?

Which one will let me unplug my External HD and shut done AE so I can move my Mac? Has anyone ever done this successfully before?

Any help on this would be fantastic!

Cheers
Chris.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Best thing to do when renders are this big is to render to a sequence of images, typically TIFFS. This has two main advantages: 1) you can interrupt is and restart from where you left off. 2) You can use multiple computers to speed up the process.

You can recreate a QT file from the image sequence by simply re-importing the sequence and adding the soundtrack. This can even be done in QT Pro and the export to a QT file is much quicker.

[Christopher Kondys]

Thanks for the reply Paolo. Next time I am rendering a large file I will give the image sequence a shot. I ended up stopping the render and then starting again as per the Adobe Help menu and it worked out fine. It just created two clips that I exported out of FCP.

NB: Just a thought, but I am guessing the way you would use multiple computers for an image sequence render would be to assign a set batch of frames/images to each machine? Just curious.

Cheers
Chris.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Christopher Kondys

NB: Just a thought, but I am guessing the way you would use multiple computers for an image sequence render would be to assign a set batch of frames/images to each machine? Just curious.

Actually it's pretty simple. You set the render to output the frames to a network shared directory visible by all machines. AE has a flag that instructs the renderer to avoid overwriting existing frames. In this way each machine basically looks at the destination directory, checks what is the next file name available, creates an empty file with that name, for example myclip_0032.tif, and then starts rendering the frame and writing it in the file reserved. This causes multiple machines to work on different frames simultaneously with the result of speeding up the render.

[Christopher Kondys]

Thanks for the advice. I'll give it a shot.

Chris.