Render Farm Rentals - Quantity Matters

Having been in the computer rental business for 20 years I am always excited when we add a new computer rental product or service to our product mix. Several years back the new service was renting what we call a “Render Farm”. A Render Farm Rental is nothing more than a collection of computer systems that are put to the task of encoding a work of animation or other computer generated video.

However as most of us are not working in Hollywood or with one of the large animation studios our most common exposure to this type of activity might be found not in the encoding but rather the decoding of a piece of video. For example our web marketing firm, Xponex, just this morning had some one stop in from the local fire department. The fireman left them a video on a DVD and Xponex will be decoding it and then converting it to a form that will more easily play over the internet. This process, even for this short video, will take the standard desktop pc over an hour to complete.

Now imagine a project 1000 times larger that needs to be completed before the latest and greatest computer generated full length film hits the theatres. This is of course where a Render Farm Rental comes back in the picture. Animation Studios take advantage of our Render Farm Rentals to add additional systems to their inventory to complete large projects in a timely manner.

Our rentals of computer systems for use in rendering projects have ranged from 5 to 50 units. From experience customers most often use a quality workstation or file server with a single or dual processor with a few gigs of RAM and a modest hard drive. Why such a simple configuration for such a complex project you might ask. That question is easily answered by looking at the way the render project will actually take place. Imagine a 1000GB video file that must be processed. If one system were to be the only system involved that project could take 1000 hours. However if 10 systems, even of a modest configuration, were devoted to the same project the processing time could be cut ten fold. The Render Farm then could complete the project in 100 hours or approx 4 days as compared to the 40 some days for the single system.

So if you are tasked with investigation a Render Farm rental we hope you will keep our service in mind and we hope you remember that this is one situation where there is strength in numbers.