Rendering from Lustre

To set up background rendering for Lustre, create a Backburner network with render nodes consisting of Linux workstations running the Backburner Server and Burn for Lustre.

Lustre can work with streaming media-such as Red (.r3d) files-in two ways:

• Lustre can read through Wiretap Gateway, which decodes the media on-the-fly, immediately returning images matching the selected debayering quality in Image > Transcode > Format.
• High-resolution background transcoding of streaming media can be done on the MIO Adapter via Backburner. The MIO Adapter reads from storage directly and writes its results to Wiretap Gateway.

During background rendering, a shot on the timeline is rendered by a background rendering network. This is different from Shot Reactor, which renders shots on a shot-by-shot basis, as they are colour- graded, to improve playback performance.

Asynchronous background processing of Lustre render jobs is done with Burn for Lustre. This frees Lustre stations for interactive colour grading, while background rendering is sped up by splitting the task amongst multiple hosts.

Lustre rendering jobs are submitted for background rendering through the Render > Burn menu.

General workflow for setting up background rendering:

• Share the storage for read/write access from background render nodes.
• Install on the Lustre station or on a machine in the network. When jobs are submitted from Lustre to Backburner Manager, Backburner Manager breaks each submitted job into tasks and distributes the tasks to the rendering servers on the network.
• Setup Backburner Monitor which displays job progress.
• For Backburner Manager to receive render jobs, set up the Lustre application to connect to the system on which Backburner Manager is running. To configure new projects to use background rendering, set the IP address of the Backburner Manager workstation in init.config. Locate the Burn keyword. In the HostName line, set the string parameter to the hostname or IP address of the system where Backburner Manager is installed. For example: <HostName string=”172.19.23.161” /> Quotation marks are obligatory. Save and close the configuration file.
• Set up render nodes. They run Burn, which does render jobs. There can be up to eight render nodes on the background rendering network.
• Specify the background rendering path in Lustre.
• Set up the shared storage mount point. This is the mount point on each Linux server that allows Burn for Lustre to transfer rendered frames/files to the Lustre storage system. Render nodes can access media through NFS mount points.