Hey all, new to the forums here but have found heaps of great info on many various topics. Although finding heaps of great info, nothing that quite relates to what i am needing, so if someone could please shed some light or help me in any way that would be great. Ok so ill get to it, I work for a large multimedia company that produces alot of online content. We get all our media in VOB format and from there encode them using Cleaner XL into 3 different bit rate WMV's, an MPG version, an MP4 version, and some Flash as well all with the need of a watermark input. We have found Cleaner XL to work ok for out environment but find it crashes our Dual Core PC's and isn't as fast and or stable as we want, apart from the lacking feature we are wanting now... which is server side distribution of content. Basicly what i want to set up is a location where i have all the vob files, from there an application queues these files up on various Encoding Pc's *14 so far* to encode, monitoring the status, load balancing and job notification. As well as having the application to be the only intervention needed to get the encoding pc's encoding. A few more other things here and there needed but thats basically it. I have been given a bit of a budget for this task so if i need to purchase some licensed software that shouldn't be an issue. If anyone knows a way to do this either via windows or linux that would be extremely helpful. I have read up on Clustering computers and Grid functions and so forth, but nothing that relates to the output of all the formats we need, or simple software that can accomplish this. If anyone is also even working on something similar or programming something that can accomplish this task in any which way please feel free to contact me, as we might be able to come to an arrangement somewhere. My company process's hundreds of media files every month and this will continue to happen and grow, so nailing this in the head would be much appreciated. BTW, Cleaner XL's network monitoring tool BackBurner only seems to allow the monitoring of what the pcs are doing, nothing else... There seems to be a large amount of info on network / grid / rendering farm for rendering in Maya and 3d Apps but i need it for encoding to Video files... Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance Lewis
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Just thought i would provide an update for anyone who might of related to my issue. I got some great info from some people recommending software and so forth, and i thank you all very much for that. However i figured the best way was to use the software i already had, which was Cleaner XL. So i found a great network manager called Deadline, im sure many of you have heard of it. Well this worked wonders, i could queue up files from ANY computer and have it added to the render farm, It reports any errors, complete power management for if a computer goes offline it can reboot it and keep it going on its encoding path. Just worked fantastically. Ok so naturally i had a few things i wanted adjusted. The brilliant thing about this software is they allow you to script in your own scripts and plugins, alter theres and change it to how you need it to work for you. Anyway, i got in contact with their support and asked for a few specific features to improve their Cleaner XL plugin, which they very happily did for me. Such things like add every movie in folder as a separate job, specify to the slave computers to transfer file to their local, encode locally and then transfer back onto the network while removing the files from the slave machine, there fore keeping it clean and always productive. Their support was great and i always had a next day response to any queries or issues i was having, all of which got fixed promptly. Deadline always has plugins to set up a render farm for almost all of Autodesks software, and many other 3d apps as well so if you are after setting up a render farm or encoding farm, this is a much more affordable program with some truly great and power features. heres a link to their website.. should give you some more info about it but i thought i would share as i am so overly impressed by this software. http://www.franticfilms.com/software/products/deadline/overview/ Cheers guys.. if you have any questions about how i set my Cleaner XL farm up feel free to ask...
