Does anyone know of ANY problems with using Network rendering? We will be using Vue 5 infinite on 1 Mac in a working office of 8 PC's which we intend to use in the process of rendering. Can anyone tell me if Network Rendering can cause: slowdown, damage etc. to the computers? We need to know if there are ANY risks involved as our office will be working from 9-5 every day and cannot afford to be effected by issues such as slowdown. Our own IT Team are unsure as to whether risks are involved or not, so any help/ advice would be much appreciated.

Damage, no, no damage, but slowdown, yes, of course, every cpu will be working on a frame, so of course, it will be cpu intensive, depending on your render settings. But rendercows work in the background, they are in low priority ( well, this is Windows, I don't know about macs) in the task manager. The computer running the network rendering manager ( called Hypervue manager) will not be available for other tasks, and it has to be the most powerful machine in the network. managing the cows ( cows are rendering nodes),  is the most cpu intensive task.

My apologies - I meant to include that we would only be doing this overnight. When we stop the process in the morning, are there any known 'side effects' that will affect the day-to-day running of our office PCs?

Also - if you wanted to render a 5 minute animation, say, over 1 week, but only at night - can you stop the rendering where its got to in the morning, and then resume it at night, each night?

Nope, you can't resume network rendering. You can save the rendered frames, but you can't restart at frame #..., it will start all over again.

The Infinite maual says that when saving the rendered frames, some frames may be missing if you have very slow machines in the network.

The only alternative I see here, is to divide your animation in smaller animations that you can render overnight.

Not a very nice workaround. I hope Vue6 will be better at this.

PS: no side effects in the morning, not like cheap beer!

Can you not choose to render frame 1 to frame 300, then another time frame 300 to frame 700 etc etc.?

What is a 'very slow machine'?  We have 3 yr old HP office standard PCs mostly with celeron processors - would they be considered 'slow' - or are we talking Windows 95?

We have 5 x celerons, 1 x celeron laptop, 2 x pentium 4, 1 x Pentium 4HT, 1 x G5 MAC (which would be the main computer with Vue software ) - we have other PCs networked around the building, but not in our office.

Is this going to be an effective render farm?

I would say celeron is slow, but 10 machines is pretty good for a renderfarm. Please note you will need to buy additional licences to use 10 machines. Infinite comes with 5 render nodes.

I don't think you can choose which frames to render, but I'm not an animation specialist, so ask Fred ( louguet) in your other thread.

Grayhem,

see my post in your other thread.

yes you can choose which specific frames to render.

the drawback is that hypervue render farm requires someone to be logged onto the computer and NOT LOCKED in order to use it to render.  THEY MUST NOT LOG OFF before the render is finished, or all images made on that machine will be lost.  Vue, eventhough you choose to render to .jpg, does some post-processing to the images to convert them to .jpg and saves this to the very end, so if you log off, it will lose those images. 

if anyone knows how to recover them I'm all ears!

Yes, you can 'abort' the render mid-render as it were, and it will ask you if you want to keep the images rendered so far, choose 'yes' and it will do the final processing of them and make them into .jpgs or whatever format you chose.  I don't think this works if you try to render directly to .avi.  not a recommended route to go.