Smedge vs Deadline? | ||||||
| posted by Peter Devlin on Oct. 30, 2015, 11:45 a.m. (1 day ago) | ||||||
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| Thread Tags: discuss-at-studiosysadmins | ||||||
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On the subject of Smedge vs Deadline? We switched away from Smedge (150 to 200 seats installation) to Deadline. Smedge was great for a long time as it was one of the first render manager toolsets to support Houdini. We made it the heart of our render process but we became frustrated with stability issues (users leaving the Smedge GUI open would cause the server to crash), slow bugfixes (no bugfixes), granularity of rendering pools, scalability, inability to switch project environments on the fly, troublesome upgrades and the inability to gather stats on rendering performance. The final straw was the Smedge roadmap circa 2013 which pretty much ignored what we needed by way of stability fixes and logging,ignored everything we (as a professional studio) had already implemented to support Smedge,instead proposing the implementation of a completely new multi-master approach to "improve" stability. At that point "the devil you know" lost all credibility. Whilst Robin seems like a nice guy and is approachable it became obvious to us that Smedge just wasn't cutting it and didn't have sufficient resource behind it. Deadline was, for us, a godsend. It is a great tool; robust, richly-featured, very reliable. Our financial investment in new Deadline software has been repaid many times over by more predictable farm performance, better reportage, ability to switch versions easily for upgrades, increased reliability and decreased reliance on manual render farm management. Our render farm is now a business resource rather than a problematic man hours sink. Deadline is solidly road tested before release, something that was not the case with Smedge and it scales.. Thinkbox have a skilled and very active dev team supporting the product and a significant installed user base including studios an order of magnitude larger than us. Disclaimer: We have recently been collaborating with Thinkbox on the development of Deadline 7.x and 8.x as part of a multi-partner initiative in the UK. We have engaged directly with the developers to have features implemented in the core product offering. That just would not have been possible with Smedge. In short? Deadline is worth every penny. Thanks, Peter Devlin IT Manager Tel+44 (0)141
572 2802
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