User Guide

CHAPTER 12

378

Rendering a Movie

4 To add your own information to the report that will be generated, click Comments,

type your notes, and click OK. The comments appear at the end of the report.

5 Click OK. Name the folder and specify a location for your collected ﬁles.

Once you start the ﬁle collection, After Effects creates the folder and copies the speciﬁed

ﬁles to it. The folder hierarchy is the same as the hierarchy of folders and footage in your

project. The new folder includes a (Footage) folder and may include an output folder (if

you selected Change Render Output To).

The names of these folders appear in parentheses to signal any attending render engines

not to search these folders for projects (PB only).

Rendering using a watch folder (PB only)

The Production Bundle version provides a Watch Folder feature that speeds up the

rendering process on a network. If you have a full licensed copy of the Production Bundle,

you can set it up to work with render-only versions of After Effects. Your license entitles

you to install as many copies of the render engine as you want on your network, as long as

one copy of the Production Bundle is installed on that network.

When you have multiple render engines on multiple systems monitoring a watch folder, they

cooperate to achieve optimal efﬁciency. If your queued rendering items are set to Skip

Existing Files (a Render Settings option), the render engines will all work on a single render

item at once. If this option is not selected, each render engine handles a render item itself.

Note: You cannot use multiple machines to render a single movie ﬁle. However, you can use

multiple machines to render a sequence of individual still-image ﬁles.

To set up a watch-folder rendering process:

1 Install the After Effects render engine on as many machines as you want to involve in

network rendering.

Note: If rendering time is unusually slow, you may be rendering to too many machines, and

the network overhead required to track rendering progress among all machines is out of

proportion to the time spent actually rendering frames. The optimal number depends on

many variables related to the network conﬁguration and the machines on it; experiment to

determine the optimal number for your network.

UG.book Page 378 Wednesday, February 21, 2001 12:05 PM