Hi all,

Does anyone know if I am able to setup say 5 G5 powermac's to help with Video render (Final Cut/After Effects and so on)

I've only had my Mac for almost 2 weeks and I am loving it and thinking of switching ALL my work machines for G5's, if they could do this I'd be over the moon

Any help would be awesome.

And how come SoftImage| 3D is NOT for Mac ?? Lucky for me LightWave 3D is B)


Steve

Apple has a program called Xgrid that handles distributed computing. The best part is that it is built into Mac OS X (although you might want to get a copy of Mac OS X Server).

http://www.apple.com/au/macosx/features/xgrid/

http://www.apple.com/au/server/macos...res/xgrid.html

what do you want to do? I have 2 180gb mirrored hdds in a g4, just using the disk utility that comes with osx O (utilities/disk utility)
your g5 probably has sata installed so it should be straightforward. but you need to understand that your raid array can't be your startup disc, ie you need to have 3 discs (1 for startup, 2 for raid). I dont know how many discs your sata can support, but if its only 2 you may need a sata card (but unless you plan to boot off it is does not need to be bootable in osx). Then get 2 identical discs for the raid, configure them using disc utility and that should be it.

sao

Xgrid sounds like what I am after Thanks I'll check it out.

Sao, I want to use the processing power across 5 or so Macs.

Steve

I have been playing with xgrid, and I THINK you may need osx server 10.4 to make it work (but I could be wrong).

sao

Hey Steve,

I know what you mean about Softimage|XSI not being available for OSX, I was looking at moving my work across to XSI. Havent used Lightwave too much, but I hear good things about it.

However I stuck with Cinema 4D and glad I did, such an awesome 3D program. Let me know what you end up doing with your Render Farm as I'd be interested to know how it works out.

Cheers.

Grant

Hi Grant,

I've never seen Cinema 4D I must check it out as I know alot of people using it, but I've been using Light Wave for almost 10 years now :blink:

We have a old version of SoftImage on our old O2 & Octane SGI boxes (real old)

I'm dead keen on a render farm/cluster and if it works on how I want it to I'll be VERY happy.

I have a few Xeon's doing the video encoding for us (Canopus ProCoder Station)

Keep you upto date

Steve

if you have the finances to buy G5s for rendering, then maybe get a couple of XServe Cluster nodes.
they dont have optical drives, a small HD and are built for your very purpose in mind. plus they are only 1U high, so youd need about 15 to match the height of a G5 :P

W2ttsy

But are they really worth the extra cost ?? As I could use the powermac's during the day and let them render/encode overnight (that's the plan so far)

Xserve 2.0Ghz $4999
Powermac 2.0Ghz $3000

What extra do I get for the $2K ??

Steve

Compressor will work across a distributed network, and OS X Server is not required to use it.

Final Cut Pro comes with all you need

Yes, but I also want to render LightWave and other things too (Photoshop and so on)

Steve

You don't need Xgrid, and apps can only use it if they are coded for it ( which lightwave isn't to my knowledge ) you can set lightwave up with networked render nodes using lightwave screamerNet ( it's comes with lightwave - I did it a while ago, just playing around ) it's a bit more fiddly to set up with OSX, but works well enough, you can use other rendering engines if you want to.

You could also look at pooch. http://daugerresearch.com/pooch/download.shtml

Maybe you could get some Core Duo Mac Minis for your cluster instead... a lot cheaper, smaller, and they're fairly powerful.