I haven't had many blog posts up in a while, because school has started and I'm bogged down with homework from my math teacher (all of my other subjects are fine on homework, but math.... grr...). Anyway, this blog post is about my new render farm. What is a render farm you ask?
A render farm, also known as "networked rendering", is when two or more computers work together to render, or create, the same video file. My render farm is for Adobe After Effects.
I first got the idea for a render farm when I was talking with two of my cousins and I said something about the old computers I had lying around. They jokingly said, "You should make a render farm!". I laughed and forgot about it. The other day I was bored so I decided to start trying to make a render farm. I set up one of the computers in my room on the network and loaded up After Effects Render Engine on it (free). Then, I tried to create a shared folder on my main computer but it didn't work at all. So I changed the watch folder to a folder on my NAS and it worked.
The problem now is that the NAS is slow and it slows down the hole render process. Unless I can get it to work using a computer for sharing instead of the NAS, the render farm is useless to me because it doesn't improve the render speeds. Anyone have any tips on file sharing on Windows XP?
Labels: after effects, network, network rendering, render farm, rendering
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