Let Fusion Cook - Use All Computers Together!
if you own the Vint resolve Studio you also own a license to Fusion Studio it's an entirely underused amazing Standalone version of fusion and one of those reasons is because Fusion Studio includes unlimited render nodes so you can use your whole network to render something out and it's working on that last one that's on the iMac and Ding fries are done the shot is completed so today I'd like to come alongside and show you how I set up a free free-ish render farm at my home office that combines an old 2015 iMac along with three Apple silicon computers to render VFX shots faster I'm going to demo with just an off-the-shelf Blackmagic Cloud pod using just a Samsung SSD as my shared network storage we're keeping it simple I'm going to use a project you can download from the Black Magic website and to finish it off I'll also show you the Blackmagic proxy to Cloud work flow in case you have remote editors that need to rough in your shots there are five things that you need to be aware about if you want to use the free render Farm method I'm showing today the first is a paid version of either resolve Studio or Fusion studio and like I said if you have resolve Studio you can download Fusion Studio put it on the same machine it will take that same license you don't have to pay for anything extra second thing is you need multiple computers on the same network so ideally they're going to be wired in with ethernet to your network switch um it can can work over Wi-Fi it's just ethernet's going to be much faster more stable the third thing is going to be shared storage so like I said I'm going to be using the cloud pod today but you can also use the Mac has a sharing setting that you can share out volumes and folders on that as well I've got tutorials on that or ideally you probably use something bigger like a sonology Nas is what my preference is but you can do this on any kind of network storage as long as you can see the same folders on every machine the fourth thing you're going to need is the Standalone Fusion Studio installer and you'll notice once you download it and open it up there's actually two installer files in there one is for Fusion Studio which is the application that's like the fusion page and resolve and then the other one is going to be the fusion render node and then the fifth thing I got to let you know is you need to be open to working with image sequence files exrs DPX that sort of thing instead of your traditional quick times that you might be used to rendering out now the reason why is because the way Network renders ing works is each computer gets assigned a specific frame to render out so like my M2 Max um might be rendering out frame one the M4 mini back there might be rendering out frame two the laptop frame three and so on go to blackmagicdesign dcom support and then once you're on this page I like to just scroll down here to where it says denture resolve INF Fusion software click that button and once you click it it highlights blue but you'll SC scroll down here and you'll see this will pull the latest versions of all these which is generally what you want to be working with it shows resolve first and then they compile the resolve or sorry the fusion studio version uh right below here as well so you're going to click and download it for your operating system I'm just going to show on Mac today that's cuz that's what I know I'm going to hop over to my M4 mini computer uh I like to use jump desktop to get there and this is what the installer is going to look like if you double click the dis image this is what I'm talking about you're going to have a fusion Studio installer and then you also have the fusion render node so the idea here is my M4 mini is going to get the render node installed and then my main M2 Max machine is going to get the main Fusion Studio because that's my main computer that's the one I'm working with right now so I'm going to double click the render node to show you how this one gets installed it's just like any other install there's nothing really special click open and it's going to say do you want to allow network access or access to a Network volume absolutely and the first time you actually run this you're going to get a permissions thing on the Mac to make sure you can allow it you're only have to do this the first time that you you render a render over the network so we're going to just say click to continue agree agree of course and then into our super secret password for the computer as the admin and once this is done this is going to give you a a little tiny application that runs in the background on the computer just so that Fusion Studio when it looks for computers on the network it can use that CPU for rendering certain frames all right so that is installed I am going to you can see we got this background items added and we can check these in this area here and I I even add this here to my open a login uh screen here as well so I find this to be nice so that it's always just it's up and running nice and Silent in the background along with all my other crap that I have to have going on so I'm going to go ahead and close this out we can Mount the the dis image of the installer there and we don't see it up here in the the menu bar yet because it's not actually running quite yet I'm going to open up the fusion render node by just command space bar is how I like to do that and you'll see we've got this little uh render status and uh it's is allowing Network renders so that's the main thing you need to say allow Network renders and then we also need to make sure we Mount the volume on all the network render machines that is uh has access to the the saver location that we're going to be setting up as well as the read location of the project file I keep those basically in the same job folder so I'm going to be using this Cloud pod folder right here I've got a bmd spaceship project already set up inside this VFX folder and I ran a bunch of test renders to see how fast I could get this going and inside here you'll see there's a a spaceship version one two comp files those are the ones we are going to download from the website which I'll show you where you get that from next so so back over on the website to get the project files that we're going to work with you want to go to Blackmagic design.com and then products Fusion so don't go to the dent resolve Fusion this is how you'll be able to find this cool old spaceship project file we're going to work with scroll down and you'll see after what's new in Fusion there's a section says download demonstration project files this is where you'll download the comp file with all the stuff that needs to be used to build this essentially what it's going to be is this cool little spaceship over here um that's flying through space like some sort of Star Wars deal and it has uh what does it have in it it has geometry and everything that needs to skin that thing if you look in the assets folder there's an obj file and some jpegs with UVS that are getting placed on top of it in interest of saving a little of time I'm going to assume you can install Runner nodes on all the other computers you have available this one here is a 2015 iMac it's my son's it's got the render node open and R you know with this Fusion render node running I've got the same thing on this M1 Max the main thing to know is you need the render node just turned on and running and say allow Network renders and then also make sure the volume the Network volume is mounted on those as well let's get back over to um Fusion Studio on my main machine I'll show you how to render this out make use of it all so this is the comp file this is the spaceship comp that they give you on their page is their sort of demo and down in the lower right at the very bottom you'll find a saver note and so what a saver node is this one that has DPX at the end what a saver node is is essentially you're render you're basically your media out when you're in resolve proper resolve Studio it's like in resolve it's just rendering back to the timeline but in Fusion Studio you actually have to bake this out to some you know an image sequence file essentially what we're going to be doing here the cool thing about Fusion studio is when you render stuff out in the file name you can use this little shorthand over here that where it says comp with a colon to render relative to where the comp file is stored and so what that means in proper terms there is in finder you see I have this folder here that has shots in it there's the comp file I've got the one that's called version 02 loaded right now if I want to rent this out I can use that comp shorthand to say oh I want to render this into that same folder that the comp file is you know where the script is located where all the the project information is but actually there's even more you can do with that with just a little bit of extra knowledge that I want to show you and that's cuz I want to render out to this renders folder that's outside of the uh that's outside of the shots folder outside of the location of the comp directory and that's just use using a couple periods so when you set your renders up they're separate from the shots and I think that's a really good way to work so we're looking over here file name and I'm going to turn off this Spotlight thing because it's kind of annoying me but what we're looking at is you could just say browse and point this to a specific location on your hard drive you could chuse desktop and then just make it into a folder and it writes all the files out but instead what I like to do is say comp right here you see CMP with a colon and then on a MACC we use forward slashes I think on Windows you use uh back slashes for some reason but the idea here is actually let me Zoom this in I have two periods there the first period the first dot there is saying I want to write this to the location of where it's at currently but if you put a second one it's taking up a directory so it's taking up a folder uh level so if we look back over here at the finder if I had just the dot it would be looking directly into this shots folder but the second dot over here is saying I want to look one folder that's higher up and in our case here it would be this 6 VFX folder or directory so if I double click there then it's saying okay do your magic so a forward slash here is going to say renders which is going to create a folder that's called renders and that's this create folder during render is going to help us out a lot too so you see it's going to automatically create this folder watch I'll go ahead and let's go ahead and trash that right now and I'll show you how this works I have a lot of renders that I had practiced on earlier to see how fast uh I could get this thing going which I'll tell you at the end of the video whether I use one computer Two Three or all four that I have available now one thing I will say about when you render image sequences is because it is actually creating so many different files um sometimes when you're uploading and downloading to cloud service I've noticed it can take a little bit longer cuz it has to manage each frame separately but at the same time we can write these out really fast because we can use different frames being assigned to different computers now that that's cleaned out we just have shots here nothing's been rendered go back over to our file name I've got comp colon slash dot dot SL renders which is a folder it's going to create on render and then I'm going to create a folder here called spaceship version 30 actually let's just version this up because I already did that earlier version 31 is going to be a folder because that one is actually sitting inside of two forward slashes there as well and then I will come over here again if I get control of my mouse again I come over here again and I want to make sure that my actual sequence file is matching the folder file so this is version 31 for the folder and then this one here is going to be the name of the image sequences so the image files that it's going to make out or it's going to render out and then I do want to put a underscore at the end so that gives me just a little separator before it renders out all the frame numbers as this happens so how do we send this to out to network computers to render well in Fusion Studio go up here to file render manager command m is your shortcut to get there and then once you open this up this is what's going to actually assign frames to different computers this is like your traffic cop and on the right side over here you've got the ability to scan the network for render nodes like Fusion render nodes right I'm going to right click over here and say scan for render nodes and it's going through and it has scan for render nodes now there it has found five render nodes in my system but I actually only have four computers and the reason why is this one right here the CVT M2 Max studio that's the computer I'm working on within Fusion Studio but it's also the local host and sometimes I've noticed that it's not the best idea to double assign a computer so I'm just going to delete this um M2 Max studio from the list here so that each computer is kind of getting equal work I guess is what how I would say it now that that is all set up those are all idle and ready to to to go to work so I can close this out again the command to open this and close it will be command M so command M opens and closes so you can see what the render manager is doing and to render the shot out Fusion is Fusion Studio has a render button right down here so instead of render All Savers which is what you have to do in uh in resolve studio if you're rendering a sequence out just click this render button down here and when this opens up check the box that says use Network it's not going to be checked the first time you do this uh so but the other thing you'll want to pay attention to here that's important is your configurations for final or preview is another one that's built in preview is going to be your proxy that's going to get this cooking much faster for the tutorial so I'm going to click preview but final would just be everything you know full-blown and then over here we've got Network groups to render with you can get really uh granular with this but we're going to leave this with render node set to all we'll say start render and it's saying there's nothing else ahead of this in the render queue of course not it is a home studio I'll click okay and I'll open up that render manager again now with command M and we'll see these computers are all going to work with each computer is getting assigned a different frame here and it's just cranking through these you can see it's got 325 frames remaining and as I say that it's already done 10 frames down the list here you'll see this this the different computers that are getting assigned to them and and when they're completed as well it's super cool and this is included for free you can add this to as many computers as you want with that one single license of fusion or resolve studio if you look at those other computers like let's look at the M1 Max you can see on the render node itself and go to render status it actually tells you oh this one right here is currently rendering frame 112 if I go over here to the M4 mini I go to render status you can see this one right now is working on frame 154 157 and this is one of the reasons I really think these M4 minis are so cool because the processors are so fast and the cost per computer is not bad at all that machine that I'm running right now this M4 mini is a Baseline and is less than like $600 and it's working on frames right now for my Fusion Studio project you can even render entire sequences from another machine using the um remote rendering features that are in resolve that I talk about in the tutorial link above okay this is the iMac and let's see if this one's getting frames and working hard yep that one's working on frame 241 at the moment let's go back and look at Fusion you can see this is the render manager Cube just being a traffic cop and this Frame to this machine this Frame to this machine so I'll show you in the finder what's happening over here so it has created that render folder that was based off of the saver so the saver created the renders folder relative to the location of the comp file and it if I open up the spaceship file here is our long list of images that the image sequence is rendering out starting with frame one and it just keeps growing and growing and growing so you'll see there goes my file side SI going up and up and up so while this is rendering out I want to explain to you how much faster this actually is to get this shot rendered out when I use all my computers versus just the one so using all computers I was generally able to render this sequence on preview in about 2 minutes and 31 seconds now I've got OBS running right now and some other stuff so that's why it was a little bit slower with three computers I was able to do it in 2 minutes and 51 seconds with two computers it was 3 minutes and 48 seconds and then just using my one single M2 Max computer without using the others it was 557 so 557 for the one computer or 231 we're talking like twice as fast more than twice as fast to make use of all these different CPUs that maybe you have available and maybe this will allow you to render that shot with motion blur that you didn't think you could right before that client presentation to create a new comp in Fusion super easy command n new comp it's ready to go how do we get Jor and how do we make this timeline ruler down here the exact duration let me grab a clip any old clip will work actually why don't I [Music] grab a um a clip of me talking to the camera so this one right here is 1559 frames long I've got a lot on there I'm going to disable that but my timeline down here is not $559 all you have have to do is hold down shift and drag this to the toolbar and look at that that's my Fusion Studio trick for anytime you work on a new clip hold shift drag the loader node down to the toolbar and now you've trim that that so that the comp is the duration of the footage that you're working with now let's take a quick look at how you load the image sequence into resolve and then create proxies that can be synced over Blackmagic Cloud well the way I like to do this is the cloud tab in adventure resolve 19 create a new project within a cloud project library and when you do that you get this window here that asks for some information I'm going to call this one Cloud uh Fusion demo and then it's going to have a location here that you need to choose I have this set to an external hard drive another Samsung drive but essentially what this is asking is when other people upload files it needs to download that file to your machine where is it going to store that so that's what that's asking right there multiple users of course we want multiple users the thing to know about this here is if you ever need to delete the project you need to change it back to single user before you can actually delete the project and you actually have to delete the project before you can delete it from their website uh that's another thing that you have to know um but again this is actually really simple for synchronized storage of Blackmagic Cloud we're going to sync proxies only and I'm going to say don't allow camera access this would be if you had a pixus or a Blackmagic phone app app that's loading files into your project live that's for another day I'm going to hit create and it's going to create a new project file in the cloud and before I even bring anything into here I do want to point you down here in the lower right this little Cloud button this brings us to all our settings if you hit the gear Cog it jumps straight to the project settings for this which is going to tell me a few things one it's going to tell me are we going to be syncing proxies or proxies and Originals the other thing it's going to do is uh do we want this to happen automatically I do want this to happen automatically so that I don't have to think about it the less I have to think about is nice and then you can also choose the the codak for what's being used I've done lots of tests on this I really like the h.265 for any sort of cloud sharing projects they're small and they look nice so this folder here contains all the DPX sequence of files it's 2.51 GB to load
this into resolve you can see it's a b bunch of DPX files I just load it by just dragging the folder into there that's it just drag the folder you'll automatically load this into there and as it's going into here it's going to automatically try to generate a proxy file for it so we can see right now it's generating a new proxy because I had just run a test on this before with an old proxy uh it's just finished creating it and we don't really see a change over here yet but it has synced with the cloud the reason we don't see a change to the file is because it's not using it yet so to actually use the proxy in the project you just click this button at the top of the the timeline viewer and change this to say prefer proxies and once you do that you get this handy dandy purple pxy badge on it that lets you know that you're actually using and looking at the proxy file instead and then when you want to go online it and go to finish it later on just change this again to uh prefer camera Originals or disable proxies and if you have it attached you'll see the the final render file right there but anybody anywhere in the world now can open this up and take a look at that proxy file so if I look in here you can see this is 3 megabytes versus the whole shot was what did I say it was uh 2.51 gigaby so this is going to save you a lot on cloud storage so you can see this is a great workflow if you want to use the most power that you have locally and still be able to upload a tiny proxy to anybody else anywhere in the world hey my name is Chadwick I'm a dent resolve master trainer based here in New York but I'd love to teach you wherever you're at and because there's so much more to learn I'll see you in the next video
2025-01-16 15:49
