AE Netrender

[jonnybefree]

Hi, has anybody experiences with netrendering in AE?

[joconnell]

Yup - its the dumbest method in the world but it is faster. Bear in mind though that if all of the machines are pulling a lot of sequences from a shared server the network traffic will start to reduce the results you get from ae. In otherwards one extra machine will give you around 40% benefit, two extra will give youy 30% each, three machines 25% extra and so on - It is worth it though on big projects.

[panthon]

We are facing similar problems with lots of render nodes loading and saving video files from projects coming from compositing stations when rendering using backburner. I guess the whole process would benefit greatly from a dedicated video server with its own and separate connections. While rendering 3d scenes doesn't use all net bandwidth, rendering 2d compositions does, leaving all the people in the company complaining about slow access to central server during rendering process.
Sometimes it´s better to use 2 or 3 computers instead of 12 or 13, because you will end up slowing the net traffic so much that it seems to come to a halt.

[jonnybefree]

hmm ok, but 50 % sounds not bad. its a strange feeling when you sitting in an room with with more than 20 machines, and only one is rendering for more then 20h.
i've never tried it, but heard that its hard to install. is there a special render node wich i have to install?

edit:
Just found the answer.
but what i've forgot is that you can only render out as a image sequenze over network. not as quicktime or else or?

[joconnell]

No way to do quicktimes - it'd mean that 20 different machines would need control over a single file which wouldnt work. Also if one of the machines fucks up and causes a problem your entire render is wasted - at least with tga files you can delete the bad ones and use the skip existing frames option in after effects to fill in the gaps.