4K Video Rendering from Ae Farm (Mac / PC)

[cr3x]

I own a small production company in Australia and we have a unique project for a fitness app filming exercises on a Green screen with equipment in the hundreds of clip shooting 4k RAW and ending up with compressed H.264 and H.265 Apple Watch, Iphone and Apple TV files turned around in 2 weeks.  We have solved every issue except render times and a few months ago installed 2 Synology enterprise 10Gbe NAS units so the VFX artists can work on a centralised file, grading is in Resolve, Keying and effects in Ae with Red Giant, Neat Video + Reel Motion plugins across most clips.  Originally I had 8 Mac Computers setup as slaves in a render farm running Squidnet and 4 x 12 Core Mac Pros maxed out as workstations but after weeks and weeks of downtime trying to get this to work I had to kill the render farm and export through media encoder manually to every machine which worked but labour intensive and not a scalable solution.  In the middle of all this my VFX guys have been at me for months to try a Treadripper and I know nothing of PC's and have never used them for the last 15years but with the farm down I got one as a last resort to test, (from memory so excuse the exact terms) I had a Threadripper 16 core using the ROG extreme board with 10Gbe built in, Samsung 1tb 960 PRO M.2 SSD Boot disk and 1TB backup HDD, 64gb Gskill ram, GTX 11gb GPU and I was blown away, this cost me 1/3 of the price of the Mac Pro and was about 4-6 times faster rendering out on its own.  

 

So now im eating my words and trying with the little knowledge I have for someone to help spec out a build we can do to scrap the render farm and build a single dedicated Rendering workhorse.  So whats possible and what is the best machine I could build not to edit on but purely so the VFX guys can output their clips when done from Ae to Media Encoder outputting files as fast as possible?  Im happy to spend some good money on this if its the right solution but im growing at the moment and funds are not unlimited and like most small business tight with growing pains.  I need to prove to the client I can solve their issues with quick turn around times and happy to invest in a solution.  Im also happy to entertain some good second hand parts if anyone has some available and it doesn't need to look good just operate as an ultimate workhorse.  

 

Thanks in advance any help would be greatly appreciated 

[sazrocks]

First, that threadripper system is as fast as threadripper gets.

Now, if you are still wanting a single system, Intel has their Xeon lineup and AMD has their EPYC lineup. Generally, EPYC has a much better value than Xeon.

If you end up with EPYC, you can go all the way up to 32 cores per processor, and you can stick two of them in a single motherboard (the 7551 and 7601 (the models with a P dont support dual CPU motherboards).

Now I am no means an expert when it comes to server stuff, but hopefully these tips can point you in the right direction.

[GDRRiley]

Epyc may be the answer with up to dual 32 cores 2tb of ram and as many PCIe lanes as you could really use. 

Supermicro's A+ Server 4023S-TRT with dual 32 cores 256GB of ram, 2 1TB SSDs for scratch disk. Would be about 17K You should add GPUs.

[cr3x]

do you think getting a couple of these would be a good option to start? - https://www.newegg.com/global/au/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113470

 

and do you think this is a good option in comparison to a render farm which seems to be so far pretty complicated solution and easy to mess-up at any time where as a single machine I can deal with?

[scottyseng]

If you want to use two of these in a single motherboard, you need the Epyc CPUs that don't end in P. In this case, the 7551.

[cr3x]

right so two of these - https://www.newegg.com/global/au/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16819113469

 

would that be a good point to start with?

[scottyseng]

Yep, that's a solid starting point. Just make sure to pile on the RAM for these CPUs (and in the correct order) because each CPU has 8 memory channels.

 

I don't know much about Ae rendering sadly. I'm mostly on the vray / 3D modeling side of things.

[cr3x]

and would this be a much faster unit than using say 2x intel i9-7980XE units?  we are using Media Encoder out of Ae not sure if thats any more help.  

[cr3x]

Hi Corey. Editing on Premiere and After Effects is a combination of GPU and CPU acceleration. However, rendering/exporting in Media Encoder is mainly CPU powered. That being said, Adobe is constantly updating and changing the way the rendering works. Recently, they started with multi-core rendering. However, it doesn't take advantage of more than 8-12 processor cores currently. In the future, they might update it allowing it to use more cores. If you're consider only rendering with Media Encoder, a system with a high clock speed 12-core processor is the main criteria. For example, a single processor 12-core 3.0GHz, or dual 6-core 3.4GHz. You can also go with a dual 8-core 3.2GHz, so you have 16-cores just to be on the safe side. 
 

Here is a configuration that is strictly CPU based. It has a small flash storage drive for the operating system and some applications and a base model graphics card.

• Dual 6-Core 3.4GHz Intel Xeon Broadwell E5-2643 v4 [12-cores / 24-threads]
• 64GB (4x 16GB) of 2400MHz DDR4 ECC Registered RAM
• 256GB NVMe Flash Storage
• Slim DVD Burner
• NVIDIA Quadro P600 2GB
• Windows 10 Professional 64-bit

 

Upgrade to Dual 8-Core 3.2GHz Intel Xeon Broadwell E5-2667 v4 [16-cores / 32-threads] +$1000 
 

By upgrading a GTX Titan Xp 12GB graphics card, you can make it an edit workstation as well.

[cr3x]

I got reply from a company that builds professional machines but it doesn’t make sense why the threadripper is so much faster than my 12core Mac pros.

[brob]

12 minutes ago, cr3x said:

I got reply from a company that builds professional machines but it doesn’t make sense why the threadripper is so much faster than my 12core Mac pros.

Many things affect throughput. In addition to core counts, speeds, and simultaneous threading, one has to take into account memory channel counts, speed and timings along with storage speed and channels.

[cr3x]

im just really struggling with this as I keep getting conflicting report on whats needed, im hoping to find someone who has experience with this and what the best way to spend 20-30kAU on a system.  The problem for me is like with any small business this is a lot of money for me and I need to maximise its use.  My IT company here have spoken with Abobe professional division here in Australia and they are recommending a 44core HP Z8 then others like obove are suggesting a completely different solution and then my original guys set me up with a render farm which I have installed but not having an IT background or anyone I can call in at 2am when it stops is causing me to rethink the new solution.  If anyone has anyone in the industry can point me in the right direction im also happy to pay for real world advise even if they don't build the system but could send me a list of what I need to build. 

[brob]

Contact HP, http://www8.hp.com/au/en/campaigns/workstations/adobe.html. Make sure they understand your particular needs in detail. Give serious consideration to their proposal, including any support contract. You may be able to rent the equipment for a month or so to satisfy yourself that the equipment will meet your performance requirements.

 

One is always going to be able to find less expensive and/or higher performance hardware. But it seems to me that what is needed is a solution backed up with good hardware and software support. 

[cr3x]

Thanks I’ll check that out and just found this old video anyone seen an update to this? https://youtu.be/9mlloZT5ZyY

[brob]

Optimal hardware is very much going to depend on the exact workflow. Codecs will affect performance differently as may software versions.