installing After Effects CC render engines with Adobe Creative Cloud

Hi Todd, perhaps you can help me a bit.

I have 3 Computers.

My Workstation: Windows 10 Pro - Wired - Adobe Creative Cloud Activated

Macbook Pro: MacOS - Wireless - Adobe Creative Cloud Activated

Render Station: Windows 10 Pro - Wireless

File Server: NAS - Wired / Wireless

Note: Because my setup has a mix of wireless and wired connections, I figured setting up as a render farm isn't going to be very good, since it would nuke my connections, and from what I read the ideal setup would have been a separate gigabit network dedicated to this outside my internet connection.

So I figured the next best thing, is to setup a watch folder system using my file server, that I can be working on my workstation and or macbook, and drop the render composition to the watch folder on my File Server, and my Render Station would begin rendering it.

Goals:

As soon as a render composition is sent/saved to the Watch Folder, the Rendering Station would begin rendering, in AE, Premiere Pro / Adobe Media Composer?

Questions:

The reason I pose this question here, is I want to confirm if I installed AE correctly. I had to login to my creative cloud account, I installed AE, Premiere Pro, and Adobe Media Composer, then I signed out, and put the text file as in your post for AE. AE seems to launch in render mode. I then listed the watch folder in AE. So it seems this isn't using my activation? I did it correctly? I just thought it was odd I had to login first to CC.

Is there a similar step or way to do this with Premiere Pro? I don't need to be able to edit in the Render Station, but I would like to launch the app, and basically drop the composition there, and it does its thing, while I can keep working.

The end goal, is not to stop work, so my macbook and workstation are not rendering, but worst case scenario, if need be, I need the ability to put all 3 to render at the same time. The Macbook and Workstation will use the activation licenses, and the Render Station just rendering mode.

Am I going about this correctly? and lastly is this replicable with Adobe Premiere Pro and how should I do it, is it via Premiere Pro Application itself or Adobe Media Composer? Or both?

Thanks alot!

Hi Todd!

I'm experiencing this problem: I have 7 machines currently working as render engines, with After Effects and Adobe Media Encoder installed and ae_render_only_node.txt put in the right places (they render .aep projects)

All seems to work, but periodically AME stops working, on ALL the 7 machines: the render becomes very slow (10 times slower than normal) and after re-open AME, it gives me an AMT Subsystem Error, saying "Thank you for using Adobe Media Encoder. The grace period has expired. In order to continue using Media Encoder, please purchase a Creative Cloud subscription."

The only workaround is to uninstall and reinstall AME: after reinstalling, it works again for another period of time.

Is there a way to avoid this problem?

Thanks for your support!

Matteo

Todd,

Trying to install the render engine for CC 2014. I have followed the instructions, but no matter where I place the ae_render_only_node.txt file, when I launch either AE or the render engine shortlink, I get a prompt to login to CC. Once I've logged in, I get the expected render engine interface, but then haven't I used up an activation slot?

(As an aside, is there a point to the CC 2015 render engine until Watch Folder functionality is restored?)

edit: Win 7

thanks!

Drew

Hey Todd,

I am currently trying to install After Effects render engines to our render farm. However, even after following all the steps in your article (thanks for that by the way) it doesn't seem to work. We have Creative Cloud for Teams which is where I got the CCP. I've created the package and deployed the msi through GPO to specific machines. The only thing that I can see that may cause this problem is that I don't have Creative Cloud installed on any of the machines I want After Effects on. Could you help me figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I have also added the blank text file as instructed under the user profile on each machine (they are the same user profile). When I made the package where the source destination has to go I put it under that user profile. It did give a warning that if this source is not available over the network then it may not work, so do I have to put the source on my network for each computer to have access to it? And if so, where does the blank text file come into play?

Thanks for any help you can give me.