Render Farm Menu and Parameter Description
Below we describe the Performance tab for configuring a render farm
(figure 7.11).
Figure 7.11:
Settings: Preferences: Performance tab, menu
to set up your Render Farm
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- Project SMP cpus
- although this field is not Render Farm
specific, it is useful for CINELERRA-GG to have the CPU count and for
using multiple threads.
- Use render farm
- check this to turn on the render farm option.
Once checked ALL rendering will be done via the farm including the
usual Render (Shift-R). You may want to turn if off for
small jobs.
- Nodes listbox
- displays all the nodes on the render farm and
shows which ones are currently enabled. The Nodes listbox has 4
columns – On, Hostname, Port, Framerate – which show the current
values. An X in the On designates that that host
is currently enabled; Hostname shows the name of the host;
Port shows the port number that host uses; and
Framerate will either be zero initially or the current
framerate value.
- Hostname
- this field is used to edit the hostname of an
existing node or enter a new node.
- Port
- keyin the port number of an existing or new node here.
You can also type in a range of port numbers using a hyphen, for
example
10650 - 10799 when you need to add many.
- Apply Changes
- this will allow you to edit an existing node
and to then commit the changes to hostname and port. The changes
will not be committed if you do not click the OK button.
- Add Nodes
- Create a new node with the hostname and port
settings.
- Sort nodes
- sorts the nodes list based on the hostname.
- Delete Nodes
- deletes whatever node is highlighted in the
nodes list. You can highlight several at once to have them all
deleted.
- Client Watchdog Timeout
- a default value of 15 seconds is
used here and the tumbler increments by 15 seconds. A value of
0 (zero) disables the watchdog so that if you have a slow client,
it will not kill the render job while waiting for that client to
respond.
- Total jobs to create
- determines the number of jobs to
dispatch to the render farm. Total jobs is used to divide a render
job into that specified number of tasks. Each background job is
assigned a timeline segment to process. The render farm software
tries to process all of the rendering in parallel so that several
computers can be used to render the results.
To start, if you have computers of similar speed, a good number
for Total jobs to create is the number of computers
multiplied by 3. You will want to adjust this according to the
capabilities of your computers and after viewing the framerates.
Multiply them by 1 to have one job dispatched for every node. If
you have 10 client nodes and one master node, specify 33 to have
a well balanced render farm.
- (overridden if new file at each label is checked)
- instead of
the number of jobs being set to Total jobs to create, there
will be a job created for each labeled section. If in the render
menu, the option Create new file at each label is selected
when no labels exist, only one job will be created. It may be quite
advantageous to set labels at certain points in the video to ensure
that a key portion of the video will not be split into two different
jobs.
- Reset rates
- sets the framerate for all the nodes to 0.
Frame rates are used to scale job sizes based on CPU speed of the
node. Frame rates are calculated only when render farm is enabled.
Framerates can really affect how the Render Farm works. The first
time you use the render farm all of the rates are displayed as 0
in the Settings
→ Preferences, Performance tab
in the Nodes box. As rendering occurs, all of the nodes send back
framerate values to the master node and the preferences page is
updated with these values. A rate accumulates based on speed. Once
all nodes have a rate of non-zero, the program gives out less work
to lower rated nodes in an effort to make the total time for the
render to be almost constant. Initially, when the framerate scaling
values are zero, the program just uses package length – render size
divided by the number of packages to portion out the work (if not
labels). If something goes wrong or the rates become suspect, then
all of the rest of the work will be dumped into the last job. When
this happens, you really should reset rates for the next
render farm session to restart with a good balance.
{path_to_cinelerra}/cin -h # displays some of the options.
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https://www.cinelerra-gg.org
