What is a Render Farm?
Render Farm is a term to describe a network of computers built for parallel
or distributed processing. There are different industries that benefit from
this style of processing and it really shines for producing digital video
which can be especially taxing on today's workstations. In layman terms,
a network built with high throughput and muscle can divide a video render
job into smaller pieces.
How does a Render Farm work?
The following is an example of how a Render Farm minimizes production
time. Example: 10 minutes of video contains 18,000 individual frames at
30 frames per second. That is to say, 30fps x 60 seconds per minute x
10 minutes = 18,000 frames. If each frame required 10 minutes to render
(to be created), one computer might require (18,000 frames x 10min) 180,000
minutes, or 50 hours for completion. By using a render farm consisting
of 50 nodes, you can trim your render time to 1 hour to complete the same
project without tying up your own workstation at all.
Why can't we show a simple price for rendering?
We charge for your render project based on actual cpu time in hours. This
can be very difficult to predict as some parts of a project may be more
cpu intensive than others. We can look at your project and give you a
quote.
Please note that a quote may not be entirely accurate as
we create a quote by opening your project on a single workstation (equal
in power to the render nodes) and do a low resolution render of frame
intervals - this allows us to quickly and mathematically approximate a
final cost. The nature of your design may render this quoting process
inexact.
Image Output Options
- PNG
- JPG
- BMP
- TGA, Pre-multiplied or separate Alpha's
- More available.
AVI/MOV Output Options
- Avid Codec
- Matrox DV/DVCAM/LE/LX Codec
- MPEG 1, MPEG 2, MPEG 4
- Other (Please Specify)
If you choose not to use the images sequences, they can be compiled to
just about any video file format.
Note - If you are using a animation with a separate or pre-multiplied
Alpha channel, two video files will be provided, the animation and the
matte.
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