Use Dropbox to Remotely Monitor After Effects Renders
Monday, December 7, 2009 at 9:36PM 
Ever since I’ve had a computer, I’ve had long render times. Whether it was ray-traced checkerboard spheres on my Amiga 1000 or The Last Birthday Card on my blue G3 tower, I’ve always managed to find ways to keep my computer busy while I’m off pursuing other hobbies, such as sleeping, long walks on the beach, or (most likely) staring at the screen chanting “faster, faster!”
On those rare occasions that I decide to leave the computer alone with its thoughts, I sometimes wish I had a way to check in on the render progress from afar. Adobe After Effects ships with a handy script called “Render and Email” that can send you a simple email to announce the completion of a render. If you have push email on your phone, or know how to send emails that arrive as text messages (here’s how), this can be a suave way to leave your render cooking with the confidence that you’ll know precisely when to return from your three martini lunch.
But that’s not quite the same as an actual visual confirmation of a successful render. In a world of iPhones, augmented reality, and non-fat yogurt that actually tastes good, we deserve more.
I recently figured out a couple of nifty ways to get remote, visual updates on my epic After Effects renders, thanks to the insanely useful and free service known as Dropbox, AKA What Apple’s iDisk Should Have Been. Dropbox is a directory on your hard drive that is constantly syncing in the background to a remote server. You can share subfolders with specific people or groups of people (whether they be on Mac, Windows, or Linux), and these folders truly are shared in the sense that anyone to whom you grant access can add, remove, or edit files therein. I use it to collaborate with other writers, with my post-production crews, and even to remotely add photos to the screen saver loop on my parent’s iMac.
Did I mention that all of this is free, for up to 2GB of storage?
Dropbox also offers a free iPhone app [iTunes link] that allows browsing your Dropbox folders and limited file viewing. Two of the file types that can be viewed on the iPhone screen are JPEG and Quicktime.
You can set up After Effects to render to your Dropbox, and view the results on your iPhone.
Of course, it’s not exactly that simple. There’s a limit to the size of file that can be viewed on the iPhone, and you wouldn’t want to be pulling 2K DPX files across AT&T’s network even if you could do something with them once you got them. So there are a couple of things you can do to streamline the process. Unfortunately it’s a bit of work to set up.
The simplest thing to do is to configure your Render Queue item to have two Output Modules: the one you were planning on rendering anyway, and a second one set up as a JPEG sequence with the “Stretch” option enabled to scale the images down to an iPhone-friendly size. It’s this second Output Module that you’ll render to your Dropbox folder. Every time a frame completes, an iPhone-optimized JPEG of it will be automatically uploaded to your secure Dropbox storage.
The result is that every time you open the Dropbox app on your iPhone, you not only see how many frames have been rendered, but you can visually flip through the frames themselves. Sweet!
Of course, what you can’t do is view the animation at speed, so that’s where the second option comes into play. You can create a third Output Module that writes out a small (not more than 480 pixels wide or 360 pixels tall) H.264 Quicktime movie.
Now you can both check your frames as they finish, and watch the end result at speed.
If you configure that Render and Email script and use it to launch your render, you’ll also have a push notification that the render is complete.
It’s not quite the same thing as full administering your render from your phone, but it’s still pretty cool.
Stu
Dropbox also has a general mobile-optimized site for users of other web-enabled phones: http://m.dropbox.com.
Reader Comments (28)
Or you can use logmein.com's $30 iPhone app and view and control you machine from ur iPhone touch screen.
Good idea. Very good monitoring solution
If you want to speed your render time you can use os X terminal to launch multiple render
-"If you want to speed your render time you can use os X terminal to launch multiple render"
Interesting! Could anyone tell us more about this?
basically this is the command line. With apple Qmaster you can use the terminal to use AE, Shake, Maya, ... project.
I use it every day to render maya CG. You don't need to have maya launch, so it save so RAM. it's also much faster to make changes. For example you can launch a script on your CG file before you render it. You can also render multiple project at the same time, or divide your AE project in few part to speed the render if you have lot of core in your mac.
/Applications/Adobe\ After\ Effects\ CS4/aerender -project /Users/"your user name"/Desktop/projet.aep -comp "toto_comp" -RStemplate "Multi-Machine Settings" -OMtemplate "Multi-Machine Sequence" -s 0 -e 100 -i 1 -output /Users/"your user name"/Desktop
Yes Stu, Dropbox is frikkin awesome! It took me months to convince myself but I finally went for the 50-gig option with unlimited roll-back.
Now all my project files go through Dropbox - so there's no need to even Increment and Save any more. I want to see what a file looked like 6 months ago? Boom (as Mr Jobs would say) - it's in the history. Very handy.
Thanks for the tip, I registered and scored some extra quota thanks to your invite, nice nice. ;)
I also found Dropbox quite useful for remotely monitoring the output of an DSLR Timelapse we shot a while back. Just had the camera shooting tethered to the Dropbox folder, & we could slowly monitor the progress off-site as the photos rolled in.
Of course this only works if your camera is situated indoors and has an internet connection. But a handy thing to keep in mind nonetheless.
Dropbox ftw.
I saw someone mention X Render, but there is also BG Render which is a free script that allows multiple for background renders.
http://aescripts.com/bg-renderer/
THANKS FOR THE TIP, 5tu!
This is incredible. What I good Idea! Thanks.
LOL, Stu, you are going to get a ton of dropbox bonus space on this one. :D Genius.
Good point — for every person you refer, you get an extra 250MB, but they say it caps at 3GB. Also, the person you refer gets an extra 250GB as well, so everyone signing up via my link gets a little holiday bonus storage.
fyi, the images in your posts aren't showing in Google Reader.
Hm, they are for me. Please no anonymous comments.
http://prolost.com/comment-policy/
Stu, glad to hear that you are a former Amigan.
Adding output modules doesn't mean additional render passes, I assume. Otherwise, you're just increasing render time. I assume it writes to all the different files at the same time.
Great tip! I use Dropbox for many other things, but this is a fantastic one, didn't realize they had put out an iPhone app.
Good lookin out!
...Another easy / cheap option Readpixel's Remote Tap ($5) app if you've got an Iphone. Its not true VNC as its piggybacks the macs screensharing function, but it essentially the same, and gives you full remote access and control of your workstation via your phones screen.
I've been using this to re-queue and AE renders and make minor tweaks to settings for about 8 months - and its a life saver.
Of the Iphone VNC type apps that I've used its easily the best, both in terms of its UI and the fact that it seems to still be fairly useable over a 3G network... Particularly useful for getting into your mac from location shoots and sending yourself that vital file. Not that any of us ever need to do that right?!...
Could you go into a little more detail about the "Render and Email" script. I have tried this numerous times and all I get is a mail failed.
I am using gmail. Using these settings:
SMTP Settings - smtp.gmail.com
Reply to Address - me@gmail.com
Login ID - me@gmail.com
Password - mypassword
Recipients Address - me@gmail.com
This keeps telling me mail failed. Can anyone help? I am using the built in script of render and email. It renders then gives me the mail failed. After Effects CS-3
You know the old saying: "A watched frame never renders"
I jury-rigged systems just like this at both Pixar and Square. Loved them, though they annoyed the heck out of managers who thought that waiting for a render while reading comic books at my desk is "working" while waiting for a render while at home doing laundry is "not working." :)
Thanks for posting, Stu. Signed up, did the 5 steps. We both get additional 250mb! Will help out with online collaborations.
Another great tip, Stu.
Needed this the other day, now I don't have to keep emailing myself stuff!
Ra-ey
Hi Stu,
I've also been using Dropbox in addition to Sugarsync and Box.net for the same thing...
However, I've found it easier to use Jaadu VNC on my iPhone to remotely connect to my machines and see the progress of renders in real-time on both Macs and PC's through a virtual desktop. It works pretty fast over 3G and even over the Edge network... I can also remotely control the machines to restart failed renders or kick off new ones. Watching rendered movies remotely is painful however; slow frame rates, jerky motion and no sound...
If I really want to preview the clips while I'm away, I render out an iPhone compatible version and then using Jaadu, simply email it to myself and watch it locally on the iPhone.
hrmm and i would just press CAPS LOCK and wait, now i can press CAPS LOCK and get some sun
Hi Stu,
None of your images ever show up in my google reader either, I always have to click through to your site, would be cool if it got sorted out, but I often feel like this kind of problem that google should really provide a resource on, which they usually don't. :( Any way, love the site, and this idea is very cool, i'm going to set it up now, I've already been loving the drop box for months its very cool.
Can you render quicktime movies to dropbox or just image sequences?
Curious if dropbox would start uploading with new frame of quicktime movie written, creating 600 different versions of the same quicktime file on the dropbox server...
Rendering Quicktime movies works fine.
I've also tried the render and email script and my email provider has a port 26 which cannot be enabled in the script. So it doesn't work and I can't seem to change the settings.
Any way to reset the script?
check this tutorial about RENDER & EMAIL from Ko Maruyama
http://homepage.mac.com/komaruyama/Tutorials/AE/AE_javamail/AE_mail.html