Re: EPISODE QUESTIONS re. Distributed Rendering

Well let me ask it another way...

Given your setup, if you were to create a QT Reference file, then give that to another Mac also attached to the gigabit network, will it open the file without issue? If so, then that will work as well.

Effectively you're doing the same thing as Xsan, but without the fibre. Fibre is faster as it can go up to 8gb (as opposed to 1gb ethernet) theoretically and doesn't have the IP traffic overhead, so the response time in a FCP timeline is usually faster on fibre.

I'd suggest you download the demo of Episode. Install it on your Macs and see what kind of performance you can get. No amount of consulting is going to equate to a real-world performance test in your environment. And sorry, I don't do consulting :-)

FYI - we have 32 Episode Engines, all running about 4 jobs each. We can convert an hour long 1080p ProRes HQ file into a MPG TS 50mbps in about 7-15 minutes. Smaller files, like MP4 for streaming take about 5 minutes or less.

Robert Longwell