Simple Render Farm in a MacOS environment Network question

Question

Hey All- I'm looking to speed up some renders on a huge project that just fell in my lap, with COVID and wfh, I'm suddenly dreading rendering out an hour-long animation someone else built that needs tweaking. Looking to build a farm with my desktop and laptop, as a temporary solution just to try to push this out as quickly as possible for versioning. My questions are:

1. Both machines currently run fully licensed versions of AE. Do I need to install just the render farm portion of the program on one machine?

2. I've read best practices where I'm to copy to project file to all computers, and then leave the media on a shared drive. Would the farm not work if the media is housed locally on each computer?

3. I ask because my newer MBP does not have an ethernet port, and while I have a TB3 hub that has a 10Gbit ethernet port, I have read that 100GBit networking is ideal. If the two computers have to share a drive for media, can I set up a LAN with the Ethernet connection, or would it be better to just turn on file sharing between devices and access everything via wifi?

Thanks!

ToolfarmJP · Answer

Q1.You just install After Effects in your render farm. You need to install the plug-ins if you use them. Some plug-ins requests the paid license. Q2.As long as your shared folder can be mounted on the render farm each, the rendering should work. Please check your permission of the folder. Q3.Ethernet connection is more stable. The switching hud controls the speed of the connection. You can mix the speed.

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