Sony Vegas Clustering capability ?

[whiskey29]

I heard somewhere that Sony Vegas can do clustering (rendering farm).
Any body has info on this ?
If it does capable of clustering, how is it doing ?
Faster or not too much improvement ?

Coz I know that video clustering gonna take alot of network bandwith just to share the source video to compile.

Thanks in advance

[guns1inger]

It doesn't cluster in the computer sense of failover and shared computing resources, but it does have the capability to netrender to a render farm. The video is divided into segments, and different segments are sent to different computers for rendering. There are certain caveats on using network rendering - all machines in the network have to be cofigured with the same plugins and codecs, it works best with non-temporal codec such as DV or uncompressed video, and isn't very good with mpeg or Divx/Xvid type output - and under the right circumstances can save render time. Given the overheads and caveats, this reallt suits a large farm - 100+ machines, and is of limited use if only a few machines (2 - 3 or so) are involved. This is because the overheads outway the benefits in this case.

Network bandwidth is one issue, storage space is another. You need a lot more disk space on the main machine, as the first stage is to break down the video into individual segments on the master computer, send these across the network to the slave computers, then bring these pieces back from the slaves once processed, to finally be re-assembled on the master. Therefore the master requires 2- 3 times the amount of disk space required if it was running standalone. If you use a temporal compression codec for output then the slaves will produce uncompressed or non-temproally compressed output for the master, who will do the final encode. This emans there is nothing to be gained in a situation where the bulk of the work is mpeg encoding.

If you have Vegas it is all covered in the help files.