Rendering Over A Network; Network Rendering With Watch Folders (Pro Only); Network Considerations - Adobe AFTER EFFECTS 7.0 Manual

Rendering over a network

Network rendering with watch folders (Pro only)

The Adobe After Effects Professional Watch Folder feature speeds up the rendering process on a network. If you have
a full licensed copy of After Effects Professional, 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
licensed copy of After Effects Professional is installed on that network.
You cannot use a watch folder and multiple render engines to render a single movie file. However, you can use
multiple render engines to render a sequence of individual still-image files.
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—no render engine renders any frame another render engine has
already worked on. If this option is not selected, each render engine handles a render item itself.
A
Computer with full version of After Effects Professional (A) saves a project and all source files to a folder (B) on a server. Computers with the
render engine installed (C) open the project and render a still-frame sequence to a designated output folder (D) on the server.

Network considerations

When working with multiple render engines on multiple systems, keep the following guidelines in mind:
•
Each Windows computer monitoring the watch folder as a mapped network drive must map that drive using the
same drive letter. If this is a problem, make sure that the computer 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.
•
Each Macintosh computer monitoring the watch folder must have a unique name.
•
Do not use the same computer to serve a watch folder and to run After Effects in Watch Folder mode. Use a
dedicated server that's accessible to all render engines to serve your watch folder.
•
Make sure that all servers and clients (computers monitoring the watch folder) have hard disks with unique names.
•
Do not render to or initiate Watch Folder mode on the root of a volume or a shared folder that appears as the root
when viewed from another computer. Specify a subfolder instead. Also, avoid using high-ASCII or other extended
characters and slashes in file names. For multiple-computer rendering, After Effects includes a "Multi-machine"
sample template that you can use as a starting point.
B
D
C
ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS 7.0
627
User Guide