Setting up watch-folder rendering

When you have multiple render engines on multiple systems monitoring a watch folder, they cooperate to achieve optimal efficiency. If your queued rendering items are set to Skip Existing Files (a Render Settings option), the render engines all work on a single render item at once. If this option is not selected, each render engine handles a render item itself.

Note: You cannot use multiple machines to render a single movie file. However, you can use multiple machines to render a sequence of individual still-image files.

To set up a watch-folder rendering process:

1. Install the After Effects render engine on as many machines as you want to involve in network rendering.

Note: If rendering time is unusually slow, you may be rendering to too many machines, and the network overhead required to track rendering progress among all machines is out of proportion to the time spent actually rendering frames. The optimal number depends on many variables related to the network configuration and the machines on it; experiment to determine the optimal number for your network.

2. Create a watch folder on a system that's accessible to all of the After Effects render engines on your network. In this case, create a folder called AE Watch Folder.
3. In each render engine, choose File > Watch Folder, and select the watch folder that you've created.
4. Create your projects and compositions, and set them up in the Render Queue with the render settings and output modules you want to use.
5. Choose File > Collect Files to copy completed projects (which are set up to use the Render Queue) to your specified watch folder.
6. Monitor the progress of the render engines by using a Web browser to navigate to HTML pages saved in the watch folder. After Effects generates these pages automatically when the rendering begins. Click the Reload button in your Web browser to see the updated status. If errors occur, these HTML pages will describe the errors.