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Rendering using a watch folder (PB only)
The Production Bundle version provides a Watch Folder feature that speeds up the rendering process on a network. If you have a full licensed copy of the Production Bundle, you can set it up to work with render-only versions of After Effects. Your license entitles you to install as many copies of the render engine as you want on your network, as long as one copy of the Production Bundle is installed on that network.
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 will 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:
- Install the After Effects render engine on as many machines as you want to involve in network rendering.
- Create a watch folder on a system that's accessible to all of the After Effects render engines on your network. For example, create a folder called AE Watch Folder.
- In each render engine, choose File > Watch Folder, and select the watch folder that you've created.
- Create your projects and compositions, and set them up in the Render Queue with the render settings and output modules you want to use. For multiple-machine rendering, After Effects includes a "Multi-machine" sample template that you can use as a starting point.
- Choose File > Collect Files to copy completed projects (which are set up to use the Render Queue) to your specified watch folder. You must perform the collect-files process using the full licensed copy of the Production Bundle. In the Collect Files dialog box, be sure to select the Enable Watch Folder Render option. In addition, you may want to select the Change Render Output To option, so that the output directories for each project are stored in the watch folder. All of the render engines need access to these output directories to complete their rendering tasks. Once you choose Collect Files, After Effects copies the project or composition and all source files to the watch folder. For more information on the Collect Files options, see Collecting files in one location.
- 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.
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.
Note: All Windows machines monitoring the watched folder as a mapped network drive must map that drive using the same drive letter. If this is a problem, make sure that the machine creating or collecting the project does not access the volume being watched as a mapped drive letter. For example, connect to the volume as \\network\watch instead of X:\watch.
Once the collected files appear in the watch folder, all monitoring render engines start rendering automatically. If you prefer, you can use the Collect Files command to store compositions and their source footage to a specified location and then initiate the watch-folder rendering process later. Doing so renders the projects in alphabetical order, rather than in the order in which they were saved to the location.
After Effects renders the item to the specified destination folder, and if necessary, to the overflow volumes you have specified in the Output preferences. When After Effects finishes rendering all of the queued items in a given project, it closes that project without saving it and then scans the watch folder for new projects to render. Because it doesn't save the project, After Effects ignores the Import into Project When Done option if that's set in the Render Queue Settings.
When rendering across a network that includes volumes using different network or operating systems, such as Windows, Mac OS, Novell, and Unix, make sure that you specify output files using a file-naming convention that's compatible with all rendering or destination volumes.
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