Nucleo on multi machine render?
by jimmy brunger
on
Apr 13, 2008 at 2:19:52 pm
Is it possible in theory to utilize Nucleo Fast Render on a multi-machine render set up? What I mean is - we have several quad and octocore Macs all setup on a network all with a licence of Nucleo and when we do a big render we usually open the project on all machines and set them all to render a TGA sequence to the same folder skipping existing frames. This works great without Nucleo, but should it in theory work with ALL machines doing a similar setup with fast render turned on? I know you can't use render nodes and watch folders with Nucleo, but wondered if this workflow was possible?
I know I should just try it, but I just wanted to check it wasn't going to mess up projects before we do and waste a night's rendering!
Thanks,
Jim.
AE7 Pro - Nucleo - Mocha v1.0.1 - PS CS3 - FCP 5
MacPro Quad 3GHz / ATI 1900XT / 8GB RAM / OSX 10.4.9
30" ACD / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / XServe RAID
---------------------------------
Production Studio CS2 - Combustion 3 - Mocha v1.0.1
Win XP Pro 32 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5s / Sony BVM-20G1E / 2 x Dell 2007FP / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB/80GB/600GB RAID-0
Re: Nucleo on multi machine render? by Conrad Olson on Apr 14, 2008 at 6:35:25 pm
I've used Nucleo Pro on several machines to render multi-machine sequences and it works a treat. I've had 3 quad-cores rendering 12 frames at a time.
We have recently got 3 new octo-core Macs and I had 24 frames at a time then. I did get a few quite a few bad frames though. Random layers appeared to be missing on random frames but were there in the next frame. I'm not sure if this was because the discs I was reading from and writing to weren't fast enough (everything going to and from a RAID 0 inside one of the Macs) or if it has something to do with the multi-processing bug I've read about on the forums today.
Either way it was still worth rendering it all, then just going through manually and deleting the bad frames and then setting off one machine to fill in the gaps.
Re: Nucleo on multi machine render? by jimmy brunger on Apr 15, 2008 at 12:34:42 am
Thanks for your reply Conrad..sounds a bit of an @rse-ache manually deleting dodgy frames, but I guess we go through final renders frame by frame anyway to check. Will read up on this bug...hmm..I'm guessing all those simultaneous frame read/writes from one local drive can't be too healthy no! Ours would be from a networked XServe, so maybe better?..we'll see I guess.
Would be good to get 20 cores chugging away at once though...from the 4 that were being used before anyway!
AE7 Pro - Nucleo - Mocha v1.0.1 - PS CS3 - FCP 5
MacPro Quad 3GHz / ATI 1900XT / 8GB RAM / OSX 10.4.9
30" ACD / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / XServe RAID
---------------------------------
Production Studio CS2 - Combustion 3 - Mocha v1.0.1
Win XP Pro 32 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5s / Sony BVM-20G1E / 2 x Dell 2007FP / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB/80GB/600GB RAID-0
Re: Nucleo on multi machine render? by Conrad Olson on Apr 15, 2008 at 8:29:49 am
Yeah, I don't think our setup is optimal. When I did it a few months ago all the machines were working from a server rather than a local machine and I didn't get any bad frames. That was using Windows based AE7 though and I've read about these bad frames issues with CS3 (which I'm using now) so I don't know if my problem is related to AE or the disc access.
Our sequence isn't very long so it only takes 5 mins to find the bad frames. I found that the quick preview feature in Leopard makes it pretty easy to skip through the frames.
