Archive for the ‘TDDUP-Production Log’ Category
This last stretch is a doozy, but I will be done soon! I swear! I’ll keep telling myself that until its over with. Late last week, I took a trip down to LA for a couple of meetings. While there, I stopped by RenderRocket’s Sherman Oaks office and they loaded up most of the rendered frames onto my external HD. Unfortunately, it was getting late at night and since I was leaving that evening, and they had other things to do themselves, we had to call it quits. The result? I had most of the frames placed on the hard drive, however, 14 shots will have to be downloaded.
RenderRocket automatically .zip’s and .rar’s every render job so that you can download them in nice compressed packages. I’m poking through the FTP site and notice that the files range in size from 650megs to 6.5 gigs each. That is a lot of downloading. My internet connection is capable of more than 7 Mbits/Sec, however, I’m currently averaging a pace of 2.1. That is a little disappointing. Hopefully that is only a temporary speed and things will pick up.
On top of the downloading, I still have a little bit of rendering to do here. Just some odds and ends as I find things that were missed. After the rest of these renders are done, I’ll begin to comp the remaining shots. This will hopefully be a no-brainer. The comps have already been completed and I just need to do a final check and set each one off to do its business. There are about 56 shots to comp. Oh boy, now that I type that out, that looks like a lot! It should go smoothly. At least I hope.
And when all of that is done? Then I need to assemble all of the shots, re-size it to video res, slap the audio on top and send them to festivals to try and get accepted.
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Only one shot left to render! I’m so close, I can just taste it. The only other thing left to do is to run a bunch of comp scripts. Then, I’ll compile all the shots together and have myself a finished short! I’m readying myself for something going wrong. Hopefully nothing will, but there is a strong possibility that there will be something that needs to be re-rendered at the last second. Let’s hope that it is kept to a minimum.
After some adjustments to a few shot files, I can now render them remotely over at RenderRocket. These were the infamous fur shots that would probably cause problems if rendered outside of my local setup. I broke out some additional layers so that they could be rendered remotely without the fur actually in the file. All is going nicely so far. With 90 or so processors currently chewing away at those shots, they’ll be done in no time.
There are still a few items I need to do locally. However, the burden is less with the layer fiddling and I hope to be completely done with this stage sometime next week. If all goes as planned, I’ll then make my way down to LA with a hard drive and snag those image files.
I’d imagine there will be a few things missing or need a second pass after I begin to run the comp scripts for the shots. Luckily, I can download over the net to save myself another trip or the need to ship a hard drive back and forth if that indeed happens.
After the release of a few more processors, the remote rendering could actually be finished. Well, actually, all of the files I had que’d up have been executed. It’s just a matter if I have anything else I can send through the Render Rocket system. Sometime in the next week or two, I’ll need to go pay them a visit or ship a hard drive to collect those image files. I have the option to download them, but that would be a huge amount of data to send over the internet (1920×820 by 16bit). An external hard drive transfer makes much more sense.
All in all, I pushed 40 something shots through their computers. It finished up really quickly. Gotta love that. I’m still rendering here on my setup and could be for quite a while longer. There are some files that would of been difficult or not possible to render remotely because of their reliance on Maya fur.
Tomorrow, I’ll look through the remaining 6 shots that need to be rendered and see if I can slice them up in a way that at least some of the non-fur portions can be done at RR. That would alleviate some of the pressure here and speed things along. We’ll see.
There is still quite a bit of rendering to do and since I can only go so fast — it is a waiting game. My local machines are moving 24 hours a day. The processors I currently have available at RenderRocket (currently able to use 12 procs, hopefully more on the way) are still chugging away around the clock too.
My job has been simply to watch renders and make sure things are going as smoothly as possible. Keeping track of all the shots/layers is a little complicated. As noted in previous posts (on the old PLOG, link on right side), I have some software I wrote that keeps track of everything for me. If you are interested in seeing where I am as of this morning, you can click the link below for a frame grab of the latest output.
Outside of this, I’ve started working on another project when I’m not busy babysitting the renders. I mentioned it briefly a couple of weeks ago. I’ll post more about it as I get further along.
