I own a small production company in Australia and we have a unique project for a fitness app filming exercises on a Green screen with equipment in the hundreds of clip shooting 4k RAW and ending up with compressed H.264 and H.265 Apple Watch, Iphone and Apple TV files turned around in 2 weeks. We have solved every issue except render times and a few months ago installed 2 Synology enterprise 10Gbe NAS units so the VFX artists can work on a centralised file, grading is in Resolve, Keying and effects in Ae with Red Giant, Neat Video + Reel Motion plugins across most clips. Originally I had 8 Mac Computers setup as slaves in a render farm running Squidnet and 4 x 12 Core Mac Pros maxed out as workstations but after weeks and weeks of downtime trying to get this to work I had to kill the render farm and export through media encoder manually to every machine which worked but labour intensive and not a scalable solution. In the middle of all this my VFX guys have been at me for months to try a Treadripper and I know nothing of PC's and have never used them for the last 15years but with the farm down I got one as a last resort to test, (from memory so excuse the exact terms) I had a Threadripper 16 core using the ROG extreme board with 10Gbe built in, Samsung 1tb 960 PRO M.2 SSD Boot disk and 1TB backup HDD, 64gb Gskill ram, GTX 11gb GPU and I was blown away, this cost me 1/3 of the price of the Mac Pro and was about 4-6 times faster rendering out on its own.
So now im eating my words and trying with the little knowledge I have for someone to help spec out a build we can do to scrap the render farm and build a single dedicated Rendering workhorse. So whats possible and what is the best machine I could build not to edit on but purely so the VFX guys can output their clips when done from Ae to Media Encoder outputting files as fast as possible? Im happy to spend some good money on this if its the right solution but im growing at the moment and funds are not unlimited and like most small business tight with growing pains. I need to prove to the client I can solve their issues with quick turn around times and happy to invest in a solution. Im also happy to entertain some good second hand parts if anyone has some available and it doesn't need to look good just operate as an ultimate workhorse.
I currently have licenses for 13 computers all running the full Adobe suite and all the plugins but im worried without a dedicated IT team the render farm might be too complicated. What I would like to consider is 1 large rendering machine or is there a way to build 4-5 threadripper machines like I have now and something to link them into a single Media Encoder cue? At the moment im staying up all night adding all the files manually to all 13 machines and its a mess and not a scalable solution. If there is anyone who can help me I would be forever grateful.
AdChoices