Diy video rendering farm

[FaZeFuhrer]

I have quite a few identical quad core i5 desktop's and i was wondering if i could network them together to offload video rendering. if there wasnt a way to make it work like that, could i make one virtualized windows pc that would have all of the cores because they are i5 vpro's

 

i really have no idea where to start and i found linus' video to be no help.

[vK 3 1 RON]

Good Luck, Have Fun, I can't help you with this. Someone probably can

[ALwin]

I have quite a few identical quad core i5 desktop's and i was wondering if i could network them together to offload video rendering. if there wasnt a way to make it work like that, could i make one virtualized windows pc that would have all of the cores because they are i5 vpro's

 

i really have no idea where to start and i found linus' video to be no help.

 

You can, but it depends on the video editing software and additionally you may need to buy a separate rendering program that works across multiple computers on a network.  e.g. Premiere Pro doesn't use/support render farms natively.

 

The  simplest thing I can suggest is install Adobe Media Encoder or whatever software you want to use for rendering video editing projects on each machine.  Use your main workstation for editing and once it's done send it to one of the networked machines for rendering.

 

I've only setup render farms for 3Ds Max, never for video editing before.

[vanished]

There is no way afaik to magically combine all of the PCs into one, where windows sees it as one PC with 48 cores (for example).  What you can do, particularly with regard to rendering software, is have an instance running on each machine.  The software will break up the task and send pieces to each machine, but there is not way to just magically combine all of the CPUs.  This is because (among other reasons) the fastest interconnect you could reasonably get without spending more on fancy nics, etc. is 1 gbit ethernet, which is a far cry from the on motherboard bandwidth between the CPU and RAM, and other CPUs (if it was a dual socket board).

[Enderman]

not really afaik

using multiple PCs is possible with stuff like folding, but rendering a single video file would be extremely difficult to coordinate though multiple different systems

 

i would suggest you sell everything except one, and use the money to upgrade to a better CPU

[ALwin]

I suggest you Google some info and read discussions like these

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/943554?start=0&tstart=0

[EposVox]

This used to kinda be a thing, but isn't really anymore. Render farming is good for 3D work for animations and games, but you'd actually be rendering slower over a farm than on one machine nowadays. It would literally be a giant waste of time, power, and heat.

 

(Edit: Reasons; I know someone will ask)

Video renders are not that long of a process, compared to how they were 8 years ago, or how big-level 3D work is. 30 mins-hour at most on low-end machines isn't bad.

However, when you introduce so much delay on the process - splitting up the work, transferring all that data (it's a lot) over what is probably a low-speed network to another machine to render a small part, transfer it alll back and then try to put it together - your main machine render would have been done way sooner.

 

It's not efficient.

[FaZeFuhrer]

Thanks for the help. one of you mentioned splitting the work across multiple machines with one instance of adobe media encoder on each machine. how would i split this up. i also would have other uses for this including raytracing in solidworks and inventor.