CompuServe Thread

I do a fair amount of long distance rendering for others here on the forum with my small network system. While it would appear that "the computers do all the work" to the average computer illiterate on the street, the hard facts are it takes special knowledge of the process, 3DS networking operations, animation rendering idiosyncrancies, and UPS power systems, not to mention the video side of things. People with budgets to farm out rendering are usually demanding on video quality and up against a deadline. If you think running a render farm of 6-10 machines is just a simple matter of throwing a big switch at 5 PM when the boss goes home, plugging in a DAT tape with the project files from the client, then you go home… return the next day to a completed video of the animation you obviously have no concept of this business. And 100 machines??? Well this is just fantasyland stuff. Others have announced this same proprosal as yours ever since the network rendering of r3 came on the scene but to my knowledge none have ever successfully got these super farms operational to a full service business. The reality of the situation is they soon realized that running a sideline business like this is #1. not profitable; 2. difficult to make the boss understand why they were so tired the next day after fighting problems on the rendering job all night; 3. The first job they were sent was a total nightmare of screwups requiring a lot of fixing prior to rendering; 4. They had to go out and purchase 80% of the budget of IPAS routines to complete the job. 5. The boss found out about it and wanted some of the gross money; too much so that it reduced the wage to do this to 5 cents per hour if that. What is realistic is if you have a moderate sized network say 10-15 machines and already have a fair investment in IPAS routines, broadcast Video equipment and have the engineering know how to pull it off you can start your own business as a video post operation with animation services. Then to fill the void between major animation projects, take on selected jobs for this output service. You only use this service offering as a profit center that otherwise fills hours on the expensive equipment you already purchased. Again this equipment must include video output to broadcast because it's been my experience that the only jobs that get farmed out are video output combined with rendering. ie these jobs are either just video output or a combo of the two. Every potential client I spoke with almost always wants to do his own rendering. Also realistic is that other's jobs will always require your full attention during the rendering process and they all have crazy deadlines. Just forget about sleeping on the job and leaving the computers to do all the work. That kind of thinking is usually the figment of the Harvard Business School professors not successful entrepreneurs.

Robert, I would really like to have a shot at selling your company (130) P100 systems. We specialize in high-end custom systems. Matt Armstrong TRG / DFW Multimedia

Yes there is a demand for this. I would need to be sure that you could work with deadlines, etc. but this would be attractive to me on some jobs