Hey Elliot,
I wrote a script a long time ago that should help. The way it works is, in your ae project all assets should be at a network location available to all cpus that will be rendering. set up a render in your que (that also needs to be in a network location, and needs to be image sequence not qt) save the project. open the project on any cpu you want to use as a node and run the script.
here it is
http://www.michaelcardeiro.com/aeScripts/queueRender.jsx
like I said, I wrote it a long time ago and have not used it in a long time, so hopefully it
will work.
Mike Cardeiro
Editor/Animator/Compositor
D4 Creative Group - Philadelphia, PA
215-483-4555
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http://www.michaelcardeiro.com/resume/
http://www.youtube.com/user/mcardeiro
From: Elliot Steele <elliot@ppdm.de>
To: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Sent: Tuesday, October 2, 2012 3:31 PM
Subject: [AE] Network rendering
Network rendering
Evening (or morning for some I guess!) chaps & chapesses,
I’ve got a small render farm which I have been using for 3dsmax (using the standard Backburner) & would like to use the farm to render some quite long renders (10k frames, taking 24hrs on a 12-Core Mac Pro).
The way my 3dsmax renders work is that I set up the render in max, submit the job to Backburner & that’s it. The process takes as long as it takes to save the file & to send it off (not long!).
The individual render nodes open the submitted file & pull any referenced externally referenced scenes (xrefs) or maps from their original locations.
The way I understand the AE way of network rendering is that I must first collect the project & all source files into the “watch” folder & then the render nodes will do their stuff.
If this is correct, why must all the source files be “collected”? Are the render nodes unable for some reason to read them from their original locations?
The problem I have is that for a particular project the source files are in the 10s of GB & copying them every time I want to submit a network job is madness.
Do I understand the process correctly? Is there a way of submitting jobs without collecting all the source files?
Does anyone use an alternative method (maybe using a commercial solution?) to network render in AE?
Many thanks for any thoughts!
Elliot Steele
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