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Quick and Easy Render Farm Setup – The Buddy System Way

These steps are for quickly setting up render farm with the least amount of additional system work, but it is non-optimal. It is useful in situations where a few people all show up with their laptops to work together on the same video/audio file and you don’t want to bother setting up NFS for a shared disk.

1. Make sure the CINELERRA-GG program is installed on all of the computers and the network between the main computer and the client computers is working. Use the same version if possible.
2. Load your video file on the master node and use File → Save as...to save it to /tmp.
3. Move that same file with the same name to /tmp on all of the client computers via rsh or sneaker net – the ONLY reason you are doing this is to avoid having to set up NFS or Samba on the buddy client laptops that show up!
4. Edit your video/audio file to get it the way you want it and add the plugins, such as a Title, etc.
5. Check for a set of unused ports in /etc/services file, if username is root usually 401 - 425 are available; if non-root, then 10650 - 10799.
6. On the master computer, in Settings → Preferences, Performance tab:
   - check the box Use render farm
   - keyin localhost for the hostname or an ip address of the buddy client node
   - keyin the desired port number for each client; and use Add Node for each host
   - set total jobs to the number of client computers +1 multiplied by 3 (or proportion to client speeds)
   - check OK
7. On each buddy client, create a job for each port:

       /{cinelerra_pathname}/cin -d port#

8. On the master, bring up the render menu and name the output files, for example /tmp/myoutput.webm.
9. The client nodes output results will be on their local /tmp filesystems so you will have to again use rsh/ftp or usb sneaker net to move them over to the main computer. File names will be the render job output file name with port number tacked on (e.g. /tmp/hb.webm001...webm005).
10. Load the files by concatenate to existing track on the master node or use RenderMux shell script.