Mac Mini as a render node.
by Marcus Herrick
on
Aug 26, 2009 at 10:32:41 pm
Has anyone had experience in running Color 1.5 on a MacMini, Macbook or any of the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M machines?
I plan on breaking grading projects into chunks and using VNC to render each completed chunk on the Macmini over the network while I continue grading on my mac pro. It seems solid in theory, I'm just concerned about reality....
Re: Mac Mini as a render node. by Noah Kadner on Aug 26, 2009 at 11:22:48 pm
How would you break it into chunks? Color is not really set up for distributed rendering. Also I'd think you find the render speeds on those slower processors coupled with all the back and forth network traffic would be far slower than having a single fast Mac Pro desktop machine.
Not too mention you'd need a separate license for each machine. If you ran two copies of the same license of Color on the same network, one would quit for example...
Re: Mac Mini as a render node. by nick hasson on Aug 27, 2009 at 2:56:53 am
Also you would need to render on the same video card as you graded with to get the same color. I have two mac pros and until they had the same video card, the renders looked different. you can break the project up into chucks, but you must do this in final cut, before getting into color.
Re: Mac Mini as a render node. by Peter Wollsey on Aug 27, 2009 at 5:38:07 pm
I use a mac pro with the same video card as a render station also. Media is shared over an optical fibre based SAN network.
In theory you might get your setup to work, but the whole system might get so slow it could be unworkable.
I would consider using a cloned external firewire or even usb2 drive instead of sharing over your network for the media.
You will have to do test renders to see how different things look between a render on your mac pro and a render on the mac mini.
If there is a meaningful difference you might be able to work out some sort of offset grade that you apply to the primary out room before sending to render to 'adjust' things back to how they should look.
These are definitely workarounds - the correct way to do it is to use another mac pro with the same video card to render.
Re: Mac Mini as a render node. by Marcus Herrick on Aug 31, 2009 at 7:47:09 am
Thanks for the heads up about the different graphics cards.
Breaking a TV show up is easy, when you use each segment between ad breaks as a separate project. Also Feature Films can be broken into reels. I've done it at the ABC using 2 Mac pros connected across a san.
Cheers,
Marcus
Marcus Herrick
Freelance Editor
FCP advanced instructor.
