Build your own render farm for After Effects \ Premiere Pro

[JuniorRamos29]

Hi everyone。

I've been searching and found this very explanatory guide (as well the possibilities of each type of work for render farm) about the technical stuff, and i recommend for whom want to know more about it.

But I'd like to have some personal thoughts or experiences from people that has built and is using its own render farm for Afiter Effects / Premiere. 

Thanks in advance.

[Nancy OShea]

[Moderator moved from Using the Community (forums) to After Effects.]

[Rick Gerard]

I have not built a render farm recently. Had one about 6 years ago and it helped a bit but it was only used on about a quarter of my projects. If I carefully looked at the true operating cost of the system it probably just barely broke even. 

For my complex AE projects, I use Render Garden, and render times on my iMac Pro are cut drastically. Probably one comp is very complex in 10 takes more than a minute a frame to render. When I start passing 3 minutes a frame I redesign the comp. With RG one frame a minute drops to about 10 or 12 seconds a frame. Most of my projects will render at the rate of 2 or 3 frames per second so they are kicked out very quickly. I own several BG rendering solutions and RG is by far the best for my workflow.  I get no benefit for endorsing Render Garden, it just works for me.

Using almost any of the BG rendering solutions I can still work in AE or Premiere Pro with no noticeable slow down in the UI. Most of my projects take longer to complete than it takes to render them. Any VFX that I create in AE that will not render several frames per second are rendered to a production format and replaced in PPro so I'm not spending much time in Premiere Pro waiting for renders or previews. When a scene is done I usually send it to the Cue and render it while I'm working on the next scene. When all of the scenes (sequences) are rendered I'll replace them in my final movie sequence in Premiere Pro and render that. Those renders happen very quickly. 

Your mileage may vary. If you are constantly waiting for renders even if you use a BG rendering system then a render farm probably makes sense. It just does not for me. 

[JuniorRamos29]

Hi, Rick. 

Much appreciated your comment and for clarifying it with examples of your workflow. This is very helpful to take into account while choosing to use a solution like multithreading or render farm.  But multithreading requires a good amount of ram, and it's not what I have at the moment. 

Still regarding your experience with your own render farm, could you tell me about the maintenance and management of plugins, licenses, etc., and any other stuff that's important to have in mind when someone is willing to have its own render farm?

Thanks.

[Rick Gerard]

Plug-in licenses are usable in your render farm and AE's render engine can be installed on as many machines as you have. You just need to make sure everything is properly installed and all of the installations are on the same version and build.

That's all there is to it.