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| We have a decent render farm running Deadline (for everything, Max, Maya, C4D, AE). The guys here have done a few tests with Mac Minis and basically concluded that they work, provided they have enough ram - but that's normal. They didn't run into any specific issues related to Mac Mini. They're planning on building a portable mac-mini Deadline render farm in a flight case. The cost of shipping Mac Pros is prohibitive when you have a lot of them - something like the Helmer render farm but using a flight case and not the IKEA cabinet would be much cheaper to transport than even a few Mac Pros, yet much much more powerful. I was just reading the Ars Technica review of the latest Mac Mini and was disappointed to see they've dropped the option of a discrete graphics card. This means it's not possible to drop in something that would boost Cuda performance, and in the long term this seriously diminishes their appeal as rendering and desktop graphics machines. The new iMacs, for example, have a high-end graphics card option which is quite capable - but the minis are stuck with Intels crappy integrated graphics. Not so much a problem for After Effects prior to CS6, but a big problem for anything 3D and anything that takes advantage of Cuda etc etc. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/11/review-the-mac-mini-takes-the-ivy-bridge-to-fusion-town/ -Chris -----Original Message----- From: Nathan Shipley [mailto:nshipley@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2012 04:53 AM To: 'After Effects Mail List' Subject: Re: [AE] Semi OT: Yet another mac mini render farm thread Hey Tony - Pondering this myself. Just curious if you ever collected any useful answers or found some relevant information about a render farm with the latest Minis. Anything? Thanks! - Nathan On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 2:49 PM, Tony Romain <tonyr-aelist@trancedesigns.com>wrote: > So this has come up in the past, wanted to get opinions from the > technorati out there (I'm looking in your direction Tim Sassoon, I think > you built one a few years back, yes?) > > Have been toying with building a mac mini render farm, mostly for cinema > 4d. With the just released i7 quad core mac minis… thinking it could be a > pretty great option. I know you can probably get more bang for your buck > building a PC based version from scratch. But one of my concerns, being in > a relatively small studio space is power consumption and heat, which I > think makes a mac mini a good option. > > Just not sure how stable they are for sustained multi hour usage on the > processors…. > > > Any thoughts? > > > > -- > *tony romain* *|* *principal/creative director* > > *trance* > *motion graphic animation and design* > 323 651 1114 > www.trancedesigns.com > |
