I got so fed up the long render times on some effect-intense videos (an 8 min video to DVD took 1hr40 on my dual-core machine) that I decided I would try Network rendering.

I installed Vegas on another PC I had lying round (2.2ghz laptop) and hooked it into the network. I put them onto the same workgroup and set up some shared folders and the relavent mappings, and on the host computer put in the name of the other computer in the "renderers" tab (and the status reported it to be ready).

I then tried a render, which appeared in the network render clients of both computers (which was good because it shows the computers were talking to each other), but on the laptop it failed due to some file-location error.

I think it failed because I had set up the file-mappings a bit wrong, but when I tried it again the task wouldn't appear on the laptop. I've fiddled for ages and tried countless numbers of things, but I still can't get it to work.

So the clients obviously can see each other because they can see each other's status, but whenever I start a render it only starts on the host PC, it doesn't appear on the laptop client (although it can see the status of the host PC as "working").

I can't see what I've done differently from the time it attempted to share it between the two computers, and now that its only rendering on the one PC.


Experts, please help!

I have never tried this as it is often reported to be a pain to set up.

For a time I kept meaning to try it with my newest and 2 older pcs, then i realised the gains may not be worth the hassle, for me anyway.

My newest dual core pc renders up to 4 times faster than my XP3000, so adding it create a render farm would only make a small difference to the speed, and porobably make my work flow very fiddly.

Imho if you find rendering a pain then it is usually best to get more cores - vegas will fully use up to 4 I believe.

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It is a damn pain. It would be so much easier if they had a seperate server and client service, and the host played boss. At the moment its like, "oh this PC I can see is rendering a project, should I join in or just annoy my user?"

More cores it is then, but in the short term I need these done by Friday! Looks like it will just have to run overnight.

Something I have always wanted to try by never had a spare machine to try it, but I hear or read somewhere that it would not be any good for MPEG only AVI and as all my stuf these days is MPEG for DVDs have never persued.

From what I understand you have two options...

1. Have the network nodes render in avi and then the stitch computer encodes to the final format (i.e. MPEG) after its stiched the segments (not very good because of network speeds and sending uncompressed avi)
2. Have the network nodes render in the final format (i.e. MPEG), but then from what I understand the stitch computer then re-encodes the whole video again once its sticked together (not very good for quality)