distributed rendering with Premiere

Partial answer...

I have an VM of Win10 running on a 12 core dual Xeon server.  That Win10 VM has Media encoder on it.

I have media encoder pointed to a "Watch Folder" (ME, Window, enable Watch Folders, point it to a particular folder on your network), and a sub folder has all the files used for the edit.

I have PP save the project to the main watch folder (defined above...the files to be rendered are in a sub folder)...it is important that PP knows that folder has the files...my first attempt involved moving all the files there, starting PP, searching for that folder, and PP was happy after that,

When you save the .prproj to the 'watch folder' if Media Encoder is running on the remote server, it will immediately start rendering. 

I am using win10home as the VM and it is limited to a single cpu...so I have the VM act like a single CPU 24 core processor and win10 happily gobbles up all that cpu time...

I went from 2.5ish hours to render to 50min for the exact same project.

So I said it was a partial answer...I have another server...there is a cluster capability...I don't know if I can cluster the servers and allow the VM to access all that computing power...another way to word this is, within the VM of the win10 install with media encoder, it does not care what machine hosts it...I just don't know if I can further cluster the servers.

BTW using Proxmox on a Dell R610 server.

Suggestion,

Why don't you...

01) Create a new AE project - only for render farm purposes -
02) Import your Premiere Pro Project though Dynamic Link as - one layer -

03) Make your MultiMachine rendering on several computers.

Hope this helps,

Peace,

Amr

I hope in Premiere Pro some development exploration can be done to see if this can be something to add to a future version of it or AME.  I am working with people that are basically crippled waiting on renders.  A three minute PP piece with one 4k element (comped in AE) in it taking six hours to render is really draining.  I'm not going to go into the project guts here, but if you want more people to take on PP for work, finding a way to offload rendering would be a huge feature.  Our AE workflow is great, but then combining that within PP and you slow to a crawl when you have to do final renders...  We have ten machines ready for AE rendering that sit idle when rendering PP.

Having AME render engines would be an interesting idea too.

The Adobe Media Encoder engine (used by Premiere Pro but not by After Effects) has no facility to support DR, and technically it's much harder than it sounds.

AE renders all your footage frame-by-frame, then combines them into a video as a second step. It's why you can pause and resume renders, and why Ae can't create things like MP4 files internally. AME does frame-by-frame rendering sometimes (e.g. if you're exporting a DPX sequence) but most of the time it's building keyframed files with bit rate limits, that require the encoder to know about frames before and after the current time indicator. If each frame were coming from a different computer that would become all but impossible.

I don't think so ... though shooternz‌ or Dave Merchant‌ might have a more definitive answer ...

Neil