We need it yesterday. We always need it yesterday. A common theme in post production is that high-end creative must be produced on a tight deadline. Few things are more frustrating than waiting on an After Effects render while the clock is ticking loudly in the background. Like many post-production facilities, DotLot generally has a limited amount of time to deliver beautiful videos augmented with amazing graphics. Even though our computers are fairly powerful, we use of dozens of video layers and plugins at once, which taxes our poor little 8-core processors to the edge of their capabilities. By putting our heads together with our amazing IT tech Aziz, we were able to construct a solid render farm at a fraction of the cost of most high-end professional solutions.

For the uninitiated, a render farm is a group of networked computers that help to speed up render time by sharing the workload. For instance, a 30-second commercial has 900 frames. If each frame takes 2 minutes to render, then a single computer would require 1800 minutes, or 30 hours to complete the job. With multiple computers working together, each one can tackle a single frame at a time and then take the next frame in queue when it is done. If you have a five-node farm, that very same render would be completed in one-fifth of the time, or just 6 hours. In a world of looming deadlines, this makes a huge difference.

Our render farm journey started at Ikea. Sort of. A while back, Aziz sent me a link to a blog post about a guy who had built a multi-core Linux cluster using DIY parts and an Ikea Helmer cabinet. (To be fair, Obscured Clarity actually credits this guy for coming up with the original idea.) Prior to seeing this post, we had assembled a five-node render farm using old workstations that were left behind when systems were upgraded. It was a decent solution, but having five big Dell towers in a small edit bay made a lot of noise and heat and wasn’t very practical. This Helmer idea seemed to be a great alternative - we could build cheap, bare-bones systems; connect to them through our network; and they would take up less space than a single tower. Good deal!

Our plan was to split up the work - Aziz would set up the computers while I modded the case. His first task was to order all the parts for the computers. Since this project was somewhat experimental, we decided to start small with three render nodes, figuring we would add more later. Here was our buy list from NewEgg.

We originally ordered 3.5″ drives - DON’T DO THIS!  The Helmer is only big enough to fit 2.5″ laptop drives. We returned the 3.5″ drives and ordered up some spiffy Western Digital Scorpio Black 160GB 2.5″ hard drives.

With all the parts in hand, Aziz set out to build the master drive, from which we would clone all the others. He installed Windows XP and the After Effects render module and then added all of our plugins and fonts. (We primarily use Red Giant’s Trapcode Suite and Knoll Light Factory.)

While he worked on that, my first task was to head out to Ikea to buy the Helmer. It’s available in a few colors (silver, white and red) but since we were building a render farm I decided it would be appropriate to go with the barn-red version.

Like most Ikea stuff, the basic build was pretty easy. The hardest part was cutting holes in the back of each drawer for the PSU and cooling fan.

Word to the wise - if you’re using a Dremel, be sure to use an appropriate routing bit for metal. I burned through a few wood routing bits before I finally realized that there was a bit made specifically for metal routing.

Once the rear panels are cut and the screw holes are drilled, you can mount your PSU and fan.

All that’s left to do after that is to slit the label holder on the front panel of the drawer so that you can fold it back to allow for a little extra airflow over the CPU.

The next step was to build the three systems into their drawers. Aziz used Clonezilla to make identical copies of the master drive.

In order to avoid issues with the bottom of the motherboards touching the metal surface of the shelf, we cut insulating sheets out of the tops of the motherboard boxes. High tech, I know!

With a handful of zip ties we were able to get the cables under control without having to cut any of the extra ones away.

We added a switch so that we could connect all of the systems to our network.

And our Pièce de résistance is our patent-pending screwdriver power switch. We had planned to order some lighted power switches that we were going to add to the front of each drawer, but there was a problem with the order and we needed to build the farm, so we went super low-tech and decided to forego any physical switch at all. We literally said “screw it” and picked up a nearby phillips head driver instead.

In this shot you can see the CPU fan is finally up and running…

We assigned each of the three render nodes a unique, static IP, and using the Windows Remote Desktop Connection feature, we were able to connect to each one from our primary edit system.

It worked like a charm!

Now all of our renders are three times as fast as they used to be. In the near future, we plan to expand our farm to a full six systems. Eventually, we might even add additional Helmers to make our rendering lives even better.

–Mike