Render farm vs Individual hi-spec PC's

[titan007]

Budget (including currency): $30,000.00 CAD

Country: Canada

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Multi-Cam 4k Video Editing in a studio

Other details Current setup - XL60 storinator to 3 mac pros (2012,13,19) over 10GbE, trying to up the graphics performance for future and existing machines over a network. 

 

Looking for help on deciding between adding a new beefy editing station vs adding a basic machine with a rendering server which all 4 computers will be able to utilize. Looking to evaluate this decision while being mindful of future scaling of editing stations. 

 

two scenarios can be unfolded

1. A new PC with 3090 and add more beefy machines as we go, in turn retiring the macs in the process

2. Invest in a high end render farm and keep the PC's low spec, and continue the use of current mac pros and add basic pc's

 

Ideally would like to keep the render server up to $20k willing to go up to $30k if it can put future scalability at an ease

 

Thank you for all your tech help, first post here so excuse me for screwing up the format or missing information/jargon

[Electronics Wizardy]

What programs are you using? from what Ive seen, most video editing programs don't cluster well, so you have to do something hacky like have them render out a different part of the video and stitch it back tother.

 

Do you need to have macs? If so, Id probably wait for the arm mac pros to come out, should be faster than almost all pcs too.

 

Id probably just get faster workstations for each user, will also speed up editing performance too, but depends on how much time you spend rendering vs editing.

[titan007]

Hey 

 

Thank you for your feedback. Using Lightroom, photoshop premiere, resolve, final cut. Pushing out about 10000 photos and 14 hours/week of video content rendered in 1080p from 4k. 

 

It's a lot of footage, weekly output of 150GB of edited footage from over 3 TB of  raw data. I hope this puts things at scale for you.

 

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