Multimachine render farm setup

Hi everyone,

I've build a after effect render farm, 10 PC (i7 8700k 16GB of Ram, GTX1050, 256SSD...) all my network is using 1GB Ethernet protocol, and I have a NAS server with all the media/assets inside.

The after effect masters are iMacs.

Quick test are impressive, for example: rendering the same project in on iMac needs 1h35min. With the render farm, 8min. Other test using C4D project into after effect composition, same thing, at least 15 times faster. But...

I have two major issues:

Issue 1:

The first one is rendering PNG files, it writes me the following warning messages:

"Module externe AEGP Support PNGIO audio: Création d'E/S impossible pour les fichiers PNG. (5027 § 12) "

(French install)

It doesn't happened when rendering in jpg or psd files. And one by one the machines stops rendering after showing this warning message. At the end, one machine remains and render until the end.

No sound is used. And I apply After multi machines settings.

Issue 2:

Actually, I don't know if it's an issue. Here my case:

I want to render without collecting the whole medias or assets. How should setup this?

This is very important to me. The time needed for collecting files is huge (3h or 4h depending of the project)

Is there anyway to render the project without collecting files?

Thanks for help