Recommended config for HUGE renders?
by Henry Zektser
on
Jun 21, 2005 at 7:03:11 pm
All,
Im doing renders of 90min+ video clips, mostly keying with Ultimatte. Can anyone recommend the ideal box to have a render like this finish in less than 5 days?
Im having a hard time figuring out where my problems are. Current rendering estimates 55hours for 89 minute clip on a dual Opteron with 2GB, and a Firewire400 drive for storage.
I know I need to go SCSI, do I also need to go RAID5? How much RAM? Any value in going to a quad or is a dual box enough?
Re: Recommended config for HUGE renders? by Alan Bell on Jun 21, 2005 at 8:46:08 pm
My recomendation is to render them out as image sequences then import them into quicktime pro or whatever video wrapper you like. By rendering image sequences you can use multiple computers via backburner to get your work done in a fraction of the time.
I hope this helps.
Alan Bell
Alan Bell
---------------
Discreet Combustion Co-Host
LA Combustion Users Group Co-Host
Re: Recommended config for HUGE renders? by Alan Bell on Jun 21, 2005 at 8:46:19 pm
My recomendation is to render them out as image sequences then import them into quicktime pro or whatever video wrapper you like. By rendering image sequences you can use multiple computers via backburner to get your work done in a fraction of the time.
I hope this helps.
Alan Bell
Alan Bell
---------------
Discreet Combustion Co-Host
LA Combustion Users Group Co-Host
Re: Recommended config for HUGE renders? by Henry Zektser on Jun 21, 2005 at 8:50:49 pm
Backburner is flaming out on me (sorry, bad pun). I guess it doesn't like ultimatte. What winds up happening is the server boxes, even though they have ultimatte and combustion run perfectly, give me;
ERR: Unknown error loading application.
Go figure. And AdvantEdge is being useless with support, so i figured Id just buy myself a big hulking beast that can render quickly.
Re: Recommended config for HUGE renders? by Dean DeCarlo on Jun 22, 2005 at 8:50:07 pm
Just to state the obvious: Those errors on my network usually indicate that some file or other is inaccessable. Make sure all the machines see the same drives and/or folders. Happens to me all the time when I load stuff from a local drive rather than using it's equivalent network name. Unfortunately, backburner doesn't give any info on what it's choking on. SURE WOULD BE NICE IF DISCREET CHANGED THAT! Too subtle?
Re: Recommended config for HUGE renders? by Aamir on Jun 22, 2005 at 5:53:18 am
just out of curiosity, does having a SCSI or a raid setup help in rendering at all, as you would think that the render processing is all done by CPUs.
Also, where can you get quad proc boxes, and moreover can combustion take advantage of more than two CPUs? Lastly, I wanted to ask you if you find AMD based system better then Intel based box for running combustion.
Sorry to ask you these questions instead of answering yours, as I am about to invest in a box only to run combustion and am a little confused between AMD and Intel.
Re: Recommended config for HUGE renders? by Henry Zektser on Jun 22, 2005 at 12:05:21 pm
SCSI RAID helps in what Im doing, as my main render box is also the fileserver for a bunch of backburner nodes which write their output over 1000baseT ethernet to the box with SCSI RAID.
Quad proc. boxes are really server boxen, but pricewatch.com lists tons of motherboards that will do quad xeon. I may just do a pair of dual-core opterons. I dont know if combustion recognizes more than 2 CPUs, I would think it does, but thats why I posted this in the first place.
CPU-wise, Im not big on intel, so I use AMD, but I dont think it matters much unless youre buying dual core or have the budget for Xeons.
