I’ve talked to a couple of friends who use AE and nobody seems to have an answer because it seems like most AE users don’t do network rendering.
Coming from Softimage, I’m used to the idea of a shared folder where all your plugins go. But AE doesn’t seem to have this.
So how do you guys deal with plugins when using Deadline to manage network AE renders? I can’t imagine everyone is manually loading plugins on each machine. So what’s the solution?
Sorry if this has been answered before. I normally work in 3D but for whatever reason have been getting tons of AE work lately.
Thanks,
Paul
Alas, I believe most AE users have no option here, but to install all 3rd party plugins on each machine that will be AE net rendering. There are reports of users trying to create an alias to a network location, but it causes excessive plugin loading slowdown, and potentially, node-locked licensing issues where multiple machines step on each other’s license requests or conflict. Network rendering in After Effects definitely feels like an ‘after thought’ when the application was first designed. Pretty sure networ loading AE plugins on Windows will break very quickly. Perhaps you will have slightly more luck in an OS X only environment, but as far as I can tell, it’s also not an officially supported configuration by Adobe either, so your be driving down a dead-end here for support. Finally, just to make it worse, some of the newer AE plugins have a GPU accelerated component to them these days, which most definitely is going to want to be local, I bet, especially on Windows OS.
I’m on Windows here.
You’re 100% right about that - everything related to network rendering seems like an afterthought.
I wasn’t even able to figure out a way to generate a list of all 3rd party plugins being used by a comp.
GPU shouldn’t be an issue, though, right? I render with Redshift all the time using Deadline & never have any GPU problems. What’d be ideal is if Deadline’s AE integration could somehow make an inventory of all plugins used & then copy them to all slaves. Even if the slaves would fail due to licensing, there would be logs, etc., to sort all that out. Right now it’s all Adobe magic behind the scenes.
-Paul
Windows Farm and Network here.
We have a repository of plugins, presets and formats on the server and a Group policy Object creates a Link in the Plugins, presets and Formats folder to this network location.
Upon load After Effects follows this link to the network plugins location.
This has been working fine for over a year now and doesn’t necessarily slowdown AE load.
Obviously make sure your network location is on a fast raid with good connection.
@Ricardo
Interesting…I’m really pleased that this is actually possible for users! Do you have any licensing issues with 3rd party plugins? Are you using any Red Giant plugins? And if so, do you use their floating license system to resolve the obvious nodal lock license issues? I assume none of your submitting machines are on OSX and you are not ever using a mixed environment of Win/OSX to render with AE?
@Paul
The issue specifically with Magic Bullet Looks is it will not revert to using the CPU when network rendering on a headless machine, so you need to make sure AE comps using this AE effect/plugin are processed on GPU based machines only. A long time ago, I believe this was the case, then this plugin started using the GPU instead of pure CPU. There might be other AE plugins which also display this behaviour these days. Not sure. There are some handy 3rd party tools to probe an AE project file for all existing plugins used by the comp: aescripts.com/pt_effectsearch/
Typically, all AE plugins are installed to a system protected directory, so automatic installation by Deadline Slave without admin/root access will be difficult. It would be nice, if AE actually reported reliably issues such as missing plugin licensing, etc. However, typically it just reports a -negative number instead. This website has typically always been very useful for troubleshooting AE rendering, but seems offline now?:
myleniumerrors.com/