Subtitles of the Movie

So where do all these slaves and cameras live if not in the Main EI Folder? Well, that's a good question and it will depend on how you like to work. In my studio we tend to get some very large textures and for every slaved camera, it has to receive the exact same files. If your animations have large files and they can be heavy geometry or textures, then it will take time to send the same set of data to each camera. The more slave cameras you have, the more time it can take. The best way to avoid file transfer bottleneck is to have copies of the Electric Image Folder on separate hard drives. Let's go back to the Desktop and as you can see, I have several drives open, each with a copy of the Electric Image Folder. I'm only using the original Animator application so I don't really need these copies of Animator but it's just easier to repeatedly drag the whole EI Folder onto separate hard drives. We won't be using those copies of Animator obviously. That way I know all the plugins and materials will be available to their respective cameras. What differentiates these copies to Renderama are the slaves. Each slave has its own name. Actually, each slave has its own IP Address. Let's click on one of these Renderama slaves. It's very simple. Just the status box. The IP or Internet Protocol number for this computer is displayed here. Now, you can have many computers on your local network and each will have a different IP Address, which is the number before the colon. So this computer has an IP Address of 192.168.0.10. Most Macs have their IPs dynamically assigned but you can set your own number through the System Preferences of your computer. Let me launch another slave. The only option for a Renderama slave that you have to set is the Port Number, which is the number after the colon. It can be any four-digit number you like. Just make sure that it's different from slave to slave like this. This slave is 1313, this slave is 1515, et cetera and when we look at Renderama, we see that the list of slaves are indicated on the right. Let's go back and change the Port Number on this slave. Say 5555. The slave will quit and you need to re-launch it. This will make the slave known to the network. The next step is to add in to the Slaves List in Renderama. Just click Add and type the entire IP and Port Number like this and now another slave is rendering the animation. So in the middle of a Network Render, I can add additional slaves. Cool. Now, you probably have noticed that many of my IPs have the same address. That's because I have a computer with multiple processors. I can assign as many slaves as I have processors on this single machine if I want. This machine has eight procs so I could have eight copies of EI on eight hard drives with eight slaves and eight cameras rendering. I also have another computer on my network with its own slaves, two of which are shown here. I can enable those slaves by clicking next to their names if I want. At the top is the local camera. This is the camera app that sits inside the same folder as Renderama in Animator. I can enable that as well or leave it off so I can keep working in Animator and render some snapshots. The Network Render will continue rendering in the background, like this. I'll just add a sphere and render a snapshot. So the local camera rendered apart from the slave cameras. Let's look at our chart one more time. What's really great about Renderama and Network Rendering is the failsafe. If you have a slave that dies, let's say one of your network computers crashes, that doesn't mean the rendering stops. As long as you have slaves to pick up the slack, they will. So let's say this slave dies. I'll just draw a red X through it and it was rendering Frame 5. Then one of the other slaves will pick up that dropped frame and render it and I'll just draw a 5. Great stuff. So if you have a network of multiple computers or even a single computer with multiple processors, then you should really take advantage of network Rendering with Renderama. For every slave you add, you can see a 100 percent increase in the speed of your rendering. Electric Image's cameras are already fast. Using multiple cameras with Renderama is blazing.