Can I use a Linux Render Farm with a MAC Workstation running Adobe Premiere?

Question

I am building a render farm running linux and I would like to be able to send my adobe projects to it for rendering from a mac workstation. I see that it's doable with a windows workstation(Build linux render farm in order to render adobe premiere projects). Is there anyway to send it from a mac or am I going to have to get a whole new windows workstation(not in my budget!!)?

Answer 1

There are two steps, broadly speaking, to rendering a project in a NLE such as Premiere.

First step is for the NLE to generate the uncompressed final composite image for each output frame. This is undertaken/managed by the rendering engine of the NLE. And the second is to encode these generated images using a codec into the final video output file.

For the first step to be parallelized or offloaded to other processors, the app has to support such a facility, in the form of piecemeal division of rendering tasks to compatible renderers installed on the slave machines and final assembly of their results. I haven't seen anything to indicate that Premiere does so, even across a Windows/OSX farm.

For the 2nd step to be parallelized, the encoder has to support such a facility. The post you link to has an answer which suggests that frameserving from Premiere to ffmpeg can accomplish this. Except that the solution doesn't demonstrate any parallelization. It simply uses ffmpeg on the source machine to relay frames to a single ffmpeg instance running on a linux machine for encoding. The point of a render farm is to split and distribute the processing load across multiple machines for quicker output. That solution, in all likehihood, simply adds latency for no useful reason.