OK, let’s dive into some details.
After you sign up for an account, you’ll be given a small agent installation utility. This agent will download and install on Windows, or will download and need to be moved to your Applications folder on a Mac. Once running, the application will display a systray/dock/finder icon that contains a few simple menu items when clicked. The menu item you’ll use most is “Submit Job”, which will open a small window asking you a few details about your render job.
After answering those few questions, your scene file folder will be compressed while you watch. After the compression mechanism completes, the compressed folder will be replicated to our render farm directly from your machine over an AES 256bit encrypted tunnel. Once the file is received by our farm and the checksum is verified to ensure we have a bit-for-bit accurate copy of the data, the temporary compressed folder is removed from your machine.
As if that wasn’t magic enough, received job files are decompressed and immediately submitted to our farm based on your chosen Power level. The 256bit encrypted tunnel between your computer and our farm is maintained in an open state so that frames can be delivered to you immediately as they are finished. When those frames are rendered, the farm scans them to make sure they are not entirely black (which commonly indicates some sort of rendering error), compresses them, and immediately transfers them back to your computer over the encrypted tunnel.
Once on your machine, they are decompressed (which validates the checksum), and moved in their native form to the directory you chose to deliver frames when you submitted the job. When the frame is validated as written successfully on your machine, we purge the temporary copy on our systems. When all of the frames from your scene have been confirmed rendered and delivered, we immediately purge your scene file and any external resources from our systems.
In short, our entire signal chain is fully automated, encrypted, compressed, and programmatically monitored to insure the highest levels of performance, security, privacy, and accuracy of any render farm in existence today.
