This is concerning outsourcing rendering. I'm sorry if this isn't in the correct forum. If not, could it be moved to the proper one.

Have you considered outsourcing your renderings or have you actually done it? If so, what company did you use?
What made you choose that company?
How was the experience?
Would you use their services again?
What are the main things I should look for in an outsourced render farm? What would I expect to be the most important thing? i.e. RAM, Processor type (is dual core good), price, speed, or anything else?
What are the render farms you recommend?

I really appreciate your answers. I'm working on something and won't have the rendering power I need to get it done at a reasonable time so outsourcing seems to be the only option. Please let me know who you'd recommend and why and what I should look for when choosing the render farm.

Thank you,
CootDog

Fly High
Live Large
Dream BIG!

I've considered it, but two issues always get in the way:

1. Copyright. If you're using poser models in your renders, you cannot send copies of your poser models to third parties, even just to render for you.

2. Price. For the price, you can usually build your own render farm. Obviously this depends on the scope and budget of your production, and your computer knowledge, but I always build my own render farms.

I can't believe no one else has responded to this. Isn't anyone working on, or has worked on something that needed a render farm or could have used one?

Right now, for me, I don't know if I should build one or use someone else's.  I would really appreciate your thoughts and comments on the thought of NOT building your own and using someone elses render farm.

I know of some places, but what has been your experience or what have you done in the past?

I have my own. It's now very old. I use 10 e-hp's that are mini PC's that use laptop boards. The cost of using an out source render farm as hobby use doesn't make sense.

Dale

Yeah, Dale makes a good point. For hobbyuse, unless you're going to render out some ungodly number of frames, doesn't really make sense. For the price of the having about two minutes worth of animation rendered you could easiky get a decent render node or two.

I think you need too really look at the whole situation, both short term and long term. Start with, "what's your current need?" Are you rendering out a small short animation, or are you looking at something like 10 of 15 minutes long? How often are you going to be rendering stuff out, is this a once a year thing, or will you be rendering more freuquently? If your need is one project that happens to be pretty long, and extremely processer intensive, then maybe outsourcing it would be the best bet. But if you're looking at a two minute short with render times up around 10-15 minutes per frame, you can easily do that in house on a couple PC's. If you're gonna be rendering a lot of stuff and often, then you can easily justify a farm. I'd imagine if you were resourceful you could put together a decent little 4 or 5 machine for $2500. Just barebones systems obviously, but you really only need a processer and ram, don't have to worry about a videocard or anything, so they can be built fairly cheaply.

Your best bet might be to take your current project to some of the render farms and price them out to see what its gonna run to have them rendered, then compare that to what you could do in terms of creating your own farm. Obviously if you're going to be rendering out an animation that's 15 minutes long and the render time per frame is about 10 minutes you're talking like 187 days of rendering on one PC, and even if you had a small 5 machine farm, you're looking at a month of rendering. You also need to look at tho, "can you wait that month?" Is there a rush to get your stuff rendered out right away or can you ultimately wait a little bit longer? The last thing I'd take into account would be if you're gonna turn a profit off the animation or not. If you're gonna turn enough of a profit that having it rendered for you, doesn't really hurt, then perhaps that's the way to go, but if you need to make changes on something, and render it over, you gotta pay twice.

I'd personally look into building my own farm very hard before I'd go jumping off to outsource it. I've priced stuff at a couple of the outsourcing places before, and its not cheap, and given that I'm almost always rendering something, the farm would prove a lot better investment for me. Anyway, just some food for thought, maybe get you thinking, or from a new angle.

This is for 10 to 12 episodes which will be normally around 10 minutes in length.

So we're talking more than 15,000 frames.

Average frame  render time is 25 to 35 minutes.

However there is a sequence of about 3000 frames which take a few hours to render, each.

We're talking 360,000 hours for the regular frames and 540,000 hours for the big sequence. That's 900,000 hours of rendering for one episode.

I don't have the time to sit and wait for the rendering to be done.. I have to be able to keep working.

This is why I need outsourcing.  This is why I've asked for outsourcing opinions and experience. Who is best and why and what's your experience.

I been working on compositing. Currently I'm using Bryce for sky's. Vue 5I for plants. Carrara 5 pro for particle effects and Poser for characters. Basically I'm taking the best form each program and putting them together. Because I'm reusing almost everything but Poser, I have gotten the rendering times down to about 45 seconds per frame. The only catch is the program that I'm using is unstable after 100 frames.If i can get this to work I will only need two fast computers.

Dale

ok, and how does that help me?

Ask yourself do you really need shows? If you can live with out them then you render the background as one plate. This will cut down a lot of your rendering times. Unless you like to have camera pans in every shot.

Another way to cut rendering times is with alpha planes. Most everyone knows how to use them but are you pushing the use to the max?

25 to 30 minutes? Personally way to long. Can lose one or two lights? Can you lower your rendering specifications?  Think! If you can get to 2 to 3 minutes. A ten computer rendering farm will cut it down to a month. 25 would make it less than 15 days. For the money that it will cost to render on out sourced farm you could have your own.

Most people and company's use out sourcing to meet deadlines not as their main rendering farm.

Dale

ok, gotcha.

When we started on this project there were many ways we could have attacked it. After weighing everything we decided to complete as much of the film in MAX as we could. Then add some VFX and some other things afterwards. There's a specific look we are going for and with the textures, lighting, and specific settings in MAX, we've found it. We're going for quiality imagery. Yes, there will be compositing of course but everything still needs to be rendered in MAX.

Like I've said before, we're looking for outsourcing. We've weighed the pro's and cons. Outsourcing is the way to go. We're too busy to sit there and build computers, hook them all up and get them all to work, and fix any problems.  We need to send a scene to a place and continue working on the next, and so on and so forth. We need to keep working and someplace will be doing the rendering. That's the model for this project.

Have you ever considered Nvidia solution? I mean Gelato and GeForce ( or better Quadro GPU ).

They look promising.

Hope this could help

Fulvio

No,  again, I'm looking for outsourcing the rendering to some place like Respower or Rendercore  or a private farm.