Can anyone give me some input regarding using Deadline with Google drive?
We need to do some work with a client that seems to want to micro manage and wants us to use his Google drive account to render to.
Does that even make sense? Any possible issues you can imagine in setting up network rendering with this?
I’m not familiar with network rendering, but there’s another guy on staff that can probably handle it if it’s technical.
In the mean time I need to figure out if it’s even feasible before we can move forward with the budgeting, etc.
So the set-up would basically be all machines sharing all assets(the repository?) on the clients Google drive.
We’re running windows 7…
probably 4-12 machines to start.
Maya, Nuke, Vue.
If anyone here could highlight any potential pitfalls or suggestions/tips, that would be truly helpful!
Has anyone here done this before?
Thanks in advance. Cheers.
Google Drive appears to be a synchronization system much like DropBox. If I understand correctly, it sounds like your client wants to see the rendering output as it is generated. So in theory it’s just a matter of setting up Google Drive on your file server and then pointing all of your renders to output to folders inside the Google Drive folder. Google Drive will handle synchronization and your client will see the files more or less as fast as your internet connection permits.
Potential issues. Well, not many from a technical perspective other than potentially bogging down your internet connection. From a pipeline perspective, obviously you would want to have a good naming convention so that the client can understand what they are looking at, and so that it’s clear in conversations.
That said, I’ve worked with several studios, and none that I know of would ever consider working in this way. All work would have to have at least one level of internal review before becoming visible to the client. Clients often don’t interpret intermediate results correctly, and sharing results prematurely can erode confidence and damage the relationship. If I were doing this, I’d set up a fast-review pipeline with a parallel folder structure. The files would first render to the folder structure outside Google Drive. Then upon review, acceptable files would be moved or copied to the Google Drive folder structure for synchronization to the client.
thanks for your reply.
so what your saying is that the file server should be the only directory synced with google drive which makes sense, however, not all of our workers are are on the local network and in fact some are in other countries, unlike our render network.
i guess it makes sense to just have those people syncing their own drives.
this should probably go in a separate thread but i am hoping there was some way they’d also have a way to launch a render remotely. would this have to be set up with something like a vpn or something like logmein hamachi? does deadline have this functionality?
is there a way to configure deadline so that remote workers can launch renders on a totally different local network / renderfarm or do they have to connected directly to a machine on the local network?
Please pardon my lack of technical expertise, i’ve been asked to research this as our team is very busy.
Jgm,
With regard to remote artists, the first concern is always security. One way to go is to have the remote artists connect to a VPN that gives them secure access to the network. Configured properly, this would also make the repository and database visible so that they can submit jobs to the queue and see progress with Monitor.
Another challenge with remote artists is asset management. Obviously each artist would need to transfer any source assets back to the main office so that they are present for the render job. Similarly, each artist would want to get back the results for review. For example, you could use a dependent Draft job to make a compressed movie or .jpgs so that it’s not necessary to transfer back the raw render. If there is a strict directory structure for both the office file server and the artist’s remote workstations, then something like robocopy could be used to synchronize the assets. There are many different ways to manage the assets, each with its own trade-offs, so it’s probably worth exploring some alternatives to see which is the best fit for your company.