Network rendering with After Effects

written on Thursday, 11th September, 2008

How to use the outdated methods of Adobe.

I am still sitting here with Daniel and David in this small hotel room in Frankfurt. We have completed an animation for the facade and now we want to render the animation.

Because of the resolution of the facade we animate with a resolution of 7000x1120pixels. And that is a lot of data! After Effects has the option to render only every 20th pixel, but unfortunately this doesn't always work with the used effects. Some effect are relative to the comp size and when you render only every 20th pixel the effects thinks the comp is much smaller and so the effect is different to the big comp size which produces unusable images for us.

So this forces us to render the full frame, every of the 7000x1200pixels. To speed things we now render with two computers, one MacPro and one MacBookPro.

To achieve this you can use the hidden app aerender in the After Effect directory. Here you can finde it:

/Applications/Adobe After Effects CS3/aerender

Aerender is a command line tool to start and control After Effects rendering jobs. You can access everything of your project and set everything up. I actually do not know all the commands and much about using the terminal or other crazy stuff David uses, but I managed to start the rendering :-) . Here is what I did:

1. I have an animation completed and set it up in the render queue as I need it. Check the Skip existing frames box, when multiple machines render the same image sequence.
2. Now, don't hit the render button! Just save the project and quit After Effects. It's easies if you only have one pending job in your render queue.
3. Open the terminal and type:
   cd /Applications/Adobe\ After\ Effects\ CS3/
4. Then type:
   ./aerender /yourharddrive/projectfolder/project.aep

This renders everything in the render queue as you set it up in the steps before. You can open a second terminal and run the commands again an now you have two instances. When doing this you have to render image sequences, otherwise it won't work. In my case this doubles rendering speed! If you have several computers in your network you can do the same on them.
But for this you have to be sure After Effects has the same file paths on every machine. In this case it is useful to have all your data on a network storage, so you have the same mount point on every machine.

Here you can find Adobe documentation of aerender.