By Brian Turner Ottosen -
Hi all
We have a client in Brazil who is asking for advice on how to
increase their render capacity for a 3D TV Series.
Project specs:
13 episodes of 25 minutes at 25 fps
3,185 shots
487,500 frames
1920x1080
Maya
Mental ray
I believe they already have a handful of render nodes on random
computers but what is break even for when it is affordable to create
your own farm? My feeling is that 8 months of work is far to little
to really do this in house. Maybe if they could keep 200 render
nodes busy for the next 2 years we are talking. Any thoughts?
Does anyone have inputs on how to compare the true cost off cloud
render services with in house rendering?
Here is what I have done so far:
First I have made some very rough estimates
The client reports that all layers and versions can rendered in 20
minutes per frame.
For 20 minutes of rendering per node per frame we need 162,500
rendering hours
In 240 production days this should be solvable by 28 render nodes
disregarding the problems in keeping them busy at all times.
I am currently testing RenderRocket because they were among the top
links on Google.
www.renderrocket.com
RenderRocket are pricing like this:
------------------------------------
Pre-paid credits give you up to a 30% discount by purchasing a block
of time up-front. Our standard rate is USD $0.70 per processor
(core) per hour. With pre-paid packages, you can get that rate down
to USD $0.50 per core per hour.
Bonus feature: All our pre-paid packages give you the discount rate
for 30 days after their purchase. This means that if you buy a $995
package and exceed the 1600 credits, any additional render time you
use will be charged at the same discounted rate (10% off in this
case).
------------------------------------
I assume our client ran his test on quad core machines so what they
really need are 162,500 x 4 ~ 650,000 rendering hours
With the above listed pricing that would be $325,000. I expect a
company selling in packages of $995 can make a much cheaper offer
than just 10% of but still it gives us a ballpark figure.
On Zync
www.zyncrender.com
they would be able to get 12 x 60 cores in 28 days for $6,900. In 8
months that would be
~1,000,000 rendering hours for $55,200.
Does anyone have a rule of thumb for calculating the true cost of 28
inhouse render nodes in 8 months?
I have now tried to test render on RenderRocket and I can see that
it introduces other problems when jobs are submitted via such a web
interface. It would be to slow to submit 6000-8000 jobs. They would
need a better integration. Do you know of any service with an API
for scripting from the studio? Is there a render manager which can
automatically handle submission of jobs to a cloud rendering
service?
Still waiting for my 5 test frames from RenderRocket to finish.
I am looking forward to any feedback.
Brian.
:-)
Brian
Turner Ottosen
Managing
Director
HoBSoft
Chemin du Mâcheret 31
1093 La Conversion
Switzerland
Phone: +41 793 319 569
Skype: brianottosen
Email: brian@hobsoft.net
Web: www.hobsoft.net