render farm pricing?

[jasonhuang1115]

I am thinking about using one of the render farm services and want to make sure I understand the pricing correctly.
If one frame will take 5 hours to render on my 4-core (8 threads) box (3.2 GHz) and I have 150 frames to render, the budget I am looking at with 0.7 USD per core hour will be as follows:

5*8*150*0.7 = 4200 USD

This is quite expensive to me considering my budget. Am I understanding the pricing correctly?

[Morbid Angel]

Its best to ask the company which you are planning to use, usually they have calculators right on their websites which can rough out the total amount. I never liked these kind of schemes, what you need to account for is, most likely your first render will not render properly on their farm, either missing textures or plugins or whatever else, and you must be clear with them that they don't just blindly render whatever you send them and charge you for it, and that if there are issues with your renders you can work something out, otherwise you may shoot your self in the foot by using the service that does not do some kind of problem checking...

[hellobard]

we`ve been using rebusfarm for our renders and it can be a total mess to work with if something goes wrong.
we had a render fail because of a bug on their end and we still got f`in charged for all the failed renders even after a week of communicating with them about it.
i even helped them implement support for ptex with V-Ray, and that sort of customer service is the thanks you get...

it is very hard to get a good estimate of how much your render will cost, the calculators are usually wrong in my experience...

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I have been using render flow. They are THE CHEAPEST one out there atm.

From their price calculator the animation will cost you = 312 euro for 150 frames at 5h/frame/4core.

http://www.renderflow.com/

[bigbossfr]

XL-Render : because it is not an "automatic" renderFarm. For each project, you have a "human" (a project manager) who render (check, install, etc etc) your project. You can ask to install nightly build, send you 6 frames before to render...

[alexyork]

Render Nation, in the UK, for me. amazing customer support, very quick to help and they will send you a bunch of test frames first of course. good price too. overall I doubt I'll be looking elsewhere for the next big animation job that comes in.

[waaazoo]

I use RanchComputing. As said before, you have to be careful with renderfarming, as if anything is messed up in your setup, frames can be long, or bad, and it's money for nothing.
At RanchComputing, I am quite satisfied, they have a software to pack your project, and so far I had just once a problem (was my fault). On my last project I could render 150/180 frames in Full HD for 40/70 €.
They have also a very good and quick customer support. When you get used to it, it rolls just like a charm...

regards,

Olivier

[jasonhuang1115]

Thank you all guys. I'll start with some of the suggested services here to do test frame rendering. Guess the file path and referencing may act up and trigger some issues down the road and need some testing and communications with the service provider to sort out stuff.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I use Amazon

I pay around.... 0.420$ for 1 hour of 60+gb machine with 16cores/32threads.... so...48000+ghz... which is eee...0.00875 per ghz? U can get it for 0.210$too if u know how to set up linux farm... which puts per ghz core at... 0.004375 or so....

[RobPhoboS]

Good to know all of the options available.
I have only used Rebusfarm about a year ago to get some tests rendered as my laptop was crashing under heat issues (that and it was going to take 2 months solid to render heh).
I did get some issues and non replies to some emails but you just need to ensure all of your textures are named and placed correctly, and just test a couple of random frames (lower res) prior to sending the job over.
Once it's rendering, I was mesmerised how fast the job was done !